I should smile at the camera
The back of my head was in a recent 9 News piece on Berthoud water quality. While I’m sure that the cameraman did film my smiling face at least once, the very brief news clip showed my friend Dorian speaking, and the camera was positioned behind me as I listened to her. My hair looked great. However, my volunteer life coach really thought that I should have turned around at that moment and given the camera a big cheesy grin.
Xcel – making a random list
Say you have a list of 100 words in alphabetical order, and you need them in random order.
This is how you do it…
Add a column next to your list and put this in those cells:
=Rand()
This will put random numbers next to your list. Then you can select both columns and sort in descending or ascending order on the cells with the random numbers. Everytime you do the sort, it should change the order because the numbers change on every new calculation in the sheet.
Why would you need this? For a first grade reading test of course!
I should make a globe
My daughter (age 4) traced two circles at preschool today and colored them in with blue, brown & green.
Of course, the helpful mom told me what I should do with it…
“Do you have a hole punch? No, you should get one! Then you should punch holes all around the edges of the circles, then sew them togther with yarn. Don’t have yarn? You should go to this great craft store in Boulder. Then you should stuff the paper globe with wadded up newspaper. It will be soooooo cute!”
CSS Drop-Down menus hidden behind flash elements
If you have a flash element that occupies the same space as a CSS or javascript-driven dropdown or flyout menu, the menu may disappear behind the flash. There are 2 solutions to look for:
#1 – the solution that I found all over the web and seemed to work for most people:
Make sure your embed and object codes include the wmode parameter set to transparent:
param name=”movie” value=”xxx.swf” />
param name=”quality” value=”high” />
param name=”wmode” value=”transparent” />
embed src=”xxx.swf” width=”xxx” height=”xxx” hspace=”0″ vspace=”0″ quality=”high” wmode=”transparent” pluginspage=”http://www.adobe.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash” type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
#2 – When #1 didn’t work, I figured this one out for myself:
Do not use Absolute Positioning to place your flash element. Absolute positioning will override the CSS, even when it is set to transparent.
Waking up little sister
This morning I made my 6-year old son a cup of warm cocoa, handed it to him, and then asked him to please go wake up his 4-year old sister. A few minutes later she walked out of the bedroom, all smiles, dripping hot cocoa from her hair. My son woke her up by pouring it over her head.
I believe what I learned today is to be careful what order I do things in. Tomorrow, no one gets cocoa until everyone’s out of bed.