Jason Pearce

Isn’t it rare to see both ends of a rainbow? If so, I’ve been rather lucky of late, for I’ve seen two rainbows in the past two weeks. I was able to easily see the beginning and end of each.

I saw the first one while wake boarding in the rain over the Fourth of July weekend. I saw the other on my way home from work today. Yep, I actually left the office before dusk today. Strange, but true. Maybe I’d see more rainbows if I left early more often.

I bought some furniture today. It’s true, I’ve been sleeping with my mattress on the floor for the past few months. Not that I haven’t had the resources, I just hadn’t had the motivation. Well, the folks just sent me a check with a note that simply said “furniture.” I got the hint.

I pretty much bought an entire bedroom set from Ikea for less than $700 (not counting shipping). I can’t believe how inexpensive their stuff is. And most of it is good quality. I just wish I could buy all of their stuff online. I’d guess that only a quarter of the things they have pictured online. The rest, they say, can only be purchased from one of their stores. To me, that means a trip to Chicago.

Thanks, folks, for the encouragement. Next, I need to find a coffee table that I like.

Lately, I’ve had an unusual attraction to birds. Rather, they’ve had an unusual attraction to me.

In the past two weeks, five birds have miscalculated their flight patterns and have flown directly into either my office window or one of the windows in my home. A I write this, there is a robin perched just outside of my window, watching me. If I were a betting man, I’d wager that he’d fly into my window before I’m done writing this post.

I have learned two things regarding all of this.

One: I am much jumpier than I ever thought I was. I like to think I’m laid back, but when a bird comes crashing into your window, you can’t help but to jump. It startles me every time. Of course, I’m sure the bird is the one who is startled the most. Imagine flying along and suddenly finding a solid pane of air (e.g. glass).

Two: For all five instances, the bird hit with such force that it literally knocked the crap out of it. If you have ever wondered how bird crap gets on your vertically-standing windows, it’s because one flew into it. I’d like to think they crap-on-impact on purpose as a way of letting other birds know that glass is nearby (e.g. if a bird sees suspended bird crap it means fly far away from here.)

On one occasion, the one that made me jump the highest of them all, the bird hit my window with such force that I thought it died on impact. It lay motionless for about 30 seconds on the ground before it finally moved to sit up.

It then sat for at least five minutes, just trying to catch its breath. Then my neighbor’s cat appeared, in full stalking fashion. I thought to myself, “It’s just not this bird’s lucky day.” The bird saw the cat. The cat saw the bird. But nothing happened. They just stared at each other.

Eventually, the cat walked away — to my surprise. The bird, still recovering from its collision, finally got the break he needed. Five minutes later, he managed to fly away.

Maybe it’s birds who have nine lives and not the other way around.

Lambda Chi Alpha’s conference, called General Assembly, is to be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, July 29-31 - just three weeks away! My goal is to build a demo of our new site, with two or more CSS designs. I have a lot of work ahead of me.

Since the entire site is going to use a single XHTML template with PHP includes for various blocks of content, I only have to build one full set of content. But I will have to use the exact same foundation of code to support multiple CSS designs. I’m kind of setting up a CSS Zen Garden of my own. This is going to test my skills.

In coming up with some fluid CSS design ideas I noticed a few nice trends in browser statistics.

Mozilla is gaining ground over Internet Explorer

The use of IE5 is declining at a fast pace, reaching 8.1% in July. This is great news since it has buggy CSS support. IE6 is also loosing ground, but at a slow pace. So where is everyone going? The answer is Mozilla/Firefox, which has rapidly climbed to 12.2%.

Screen Size

The current trend is that more and more computers are using a screen size of 1024×768 pixels. Sadly, nearly 40% are still stuck at 800×600.

Color Depth

The current trend is that more and more computers use 24 or 32 bits hardware to display 16,777,216 different colors. Thirty percent have only 65,536 colors. The good news is fewer than four percent are viewing the web from a 256 color (8-bit) computer system, which means I’m not going to bind myself to the browser-safe color palette of 216 colors.

I’ve spent the past two weekends learning how to wakeboard with my friend Rob Zajdel and his brother Mike. It only took me three tries to learn how to get up. Now, I can do surface 180s and some minor jumps. Though I have jumped across the wake, I haven’t been able to land it.

It’s a fun sport. I like it a lot more than water skiing. I look forward to spending a few more weekends out on Rob’s boat. I also enjoy watching his brother Mike wakeboard. He picks up things really quickly. He has no problem jumping across the wake and is trying to incorporate a 180 into it. This weekend, he figured out how to do a surface 360. Pretty cool.

I hope everyone had a great Fourth. It’s been several years since I spent the Fourth in the United States. Last year I went to Montreal and the summer before I was in Guyana. Where’s my patriotism?