Luminaries
Twilight last night, I was walking home, and noticed the street lamp comparing itself to the moon. I hurried home to get out my camera and tripod. Had to get a snap. Using spot metering, I took this shot just a s plane zipped through the frame.

The curved shadow in the lower right part of the image is a building we call ‘the haunted house.’ I'm sure it was beautiful once, but it has remained empty for years. The architecture is a bit gothic, lending itself even more to the haunted notion. The building has been weather beaten, and at times the small area book-ended by front steps was piled high with garbage. Rat poison was put out, and signs saying ‘Evidence of Mold’ were posted on the front doors. Boards blocking the windows have weathered, nearly fallen out, and been replaced. More than once, it seemed squatters had pried their way in.

But, in the last couple of months, it appears that significant work has been done on the interior. By this time next year, the building may be surprisingly transformed. Like the nearby SRO building that was cleaned-up and reopened about two years ago, the haunted house will no longer seem haunted. Many passersby will not remember or not know the character it has now.

:::

As a finalist in the Show Us the Light contest, I got space to post a web portfolio. I've put up 21 images for your perusal.

:::

What Goes Into a Name?
For about a month I've been experiencing a coordinated marketing blitz from Victoria's Secret. They've just released a new bra called IPEX, and they want everybody to know about it. No, they want everybody to buy it. I saw the first TV commercial for it, the same day I got a catalog in the mail with IPEX on the cover. The latest VS bill came, and IPEX is on the top of the stationery.

I thought the name was a bit odd when I first heard it. Coldly industrial, and even a bit automotive sounding for a boudoir prop. Their marketing material gives a hint about why they might have gone that way: it's all about the technology of the cup...

But as I think about it more, there may be other ideas at play. Product names are picked because of what they conjure. IPEX sounds like apex - the pinnacle, the peak, the top. Mountains have an apex. Hmmm... so do breasts. Humorously, IPEX is only one letter different from ibex – a mountain goat. There we go with the mountain metaphor again.

Apple has been hugely successful with iMac and iPod, and anything Apple has a hit with, other manufacturers try to glom onto. We have a Bondi Blue 900MHz cordless phone on our kitchen wall, thanks to Apple's big score with the original iMac. Yes, it's a great time to release a product named I-anything. Notice, too, how IPEX and iPod are strangely alliterative.

Weight lifters know that bench presses can help build the pectoralis major muscles, or ‘pecs’ for short. Once again, back to mammarism. PECS -> PEX: It's like all those ads that use a ‘z’ in words that are really spelled with an ‘s’... Now, to make the name Apple-icious: I-PEX ... i-PEX ... iPex ... iPEX ... IPEX.

Yeah! That's the ticket! Definitely not yo' mama's Cross Your Heart bra...

:::

Catching up With the Times
I browse a lot of web sites, and a couple of weeks ago, it occurred to me that I was seeing a lot of pages with scrolling areas. Some were text only, but a number of them had text and images. Viewing the source, I saw that in cases where text-only (with no hyperlinks) was required, a simple textarea sufficed, but many of these pages were using iframes instead of old-school framesets.

My first encounters with <iframe> was in the IE 5.x days, when it was a Microsoft-only tag, and the browser wars were still being waged. They were cool then, if you had a captive audience like an intranet. I wrote it off as nonstandard. Still, it was a good idea, and a hell of a lot more straightforward to code than some of the crazy nested framesets you'd otherwise need to do something similar.

Seeing the tag working in Safari, I did some digging, and found that while I was asleep, this good idea had been adopted by pretty much all of the browser makers. A sign of true ascendancy, even W3C included it in the HTML 4 and XHTML 1.0 (transitional) specs. They can be used in XHTML 1.1, but it gets a bit more tricky.

I don't plan to be writing in XHTML strict any time soon, and so I just did my first HTML 4.01 Transitional page with an iframe. It works very nicely; almost too simple to set up. I expect them to come in very handy in the future.