Speed Control

I noticed something on my vehicle’s steering wheel today: the speed control button has braille dots on it! Actually, the braille alphabet has six raised dots arranged in two lateral rows, each having three dots, so there’s one extra dot here.

I’m really impressed that Ford would be considerate enough to provide guidance for our blind drivers. It’s probably hard enough as it is for them to keep the vehicle between the lines, much less stay within the speed limit.

It gives new meaning to the term Paratransit Vehicle!

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Categorized as The Bus

Mellow Yellow

I was going through an old backup drive and found this photo of Brian and Andrea from a July 2010 camping trip we all made up to Yellowstone.

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Categorized as Family

Rough Life

There’s a blizzard going down outside at the moment but Piper’s not bothered one bit.

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Categorized as Piper

Freds

I just captured this image of Fred’s Mountain with Grand Targhee off to the left and ski-lifts without snow, using a terrain mapper from Mapbox.

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Categorized as The Valley

GLHip

Here’s my latest app: GLHip (pronounced glip). Check it out if you like…

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Categorized as Site Stuff

Code Design

I wrote my first computer program in a data processing class at Merritt College in Oakland, CA, taught by Mr. Wilson Price, in 1969. It was in Fortran and I was hooked.

Over the years I’ve learned many more computer languages, some of which I made a great living with, and there always seemed to come a point in the process where I ended up developing techniques that made the language logical and simple.

That’s happened recently in my long web coding learning process involving HTML, CSS, Javascript, JQuery and PHP, and it’s very cool so I thought I would share it here.

The normal way to approach an interactive app is to define elements in HTML, give them a name in the form of an ID, define the visual properties of each ID using CSS and then determine what actions to take with each using Javascript and JQuery.

I won’t dwell on my old way of doing this here, instead I’d like to show you how I do it now, so let’s dive right in!

First we define the elements in the HTML page:

div class="tool" data-switch="g" data-title="GeoSearch On/Off">GeoSearch
div class="tool" data-switch="s" data-title="Satellite View">Satellite
div class="tool" data-switch="m" data-title="Google Map">Google Map
div class="tool" data-switch="w" data-title="Current Weather">Weather

The tool class provides a means to handle each one using JQuery and the data-switch and data-title are HTML5 attributes that you can access with javascript, like this:

$('.tool').on("mouseenter", function() {
  tooltip.html( $(this).data('title') ) // Set tooltip content
  tooltip.show(); // Activate tooltip
  // Whatever else you need on mouseenter...
}).on("mousemove", function(e) {
  tooltip.css({ // Handle tooltip position as the user moves his mouse
   top: e.pageY - top: e.pageY - Math.round((th2.height()/2)+5),
   left: e.pageX - (container.width()-274)
  });
}).on("mouseout", function(){
  tooltip.hide();
}).on("click", function() {
  tooltip.hide();
  switch( $(this).data('switch') ) {
   case "g":
   ... Geosearch on/off code here
   break;
   case "s":
   ... Satellite view code here
   break;
   case "m":
   ... Google map code here
  break;
  case "w":
  ... Current weather code here
  break;
  default:
  }
});

This is my new code magic and I plan on using it from now on. Obviously the tooltip needs CSS styling and other stuff but hopefully you can get how it works.

btw… My new app that puts it all to work is called GLHip.

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Categorized as Site Stuff

Dicey

The roads have been pretty dicey lately. I ran into this obstacle today on my way to a clients house and just blasted on through it. Nothing beats great snow tires, a 450 engine, and a driver with balls of steel!

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Categorized as The Bus

Snow Meets

I know when Winter peaks around here, it’s when the deck snow meets the roof snow. When that moment arrives I like to strip naked and thrash around between the two and see if I can loosen up the roof snow so it comes crashing down. Steph thinks it’s funny as hell when all she can see is one arm sticking out and I can hear her laughing all the way to the garage as she goes for a shovel. Hey, it’s life in the Rockies!

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Categorized as House