Wayne D's Blog

My new 500 Gbyte Seagate drive is spinning away and I now have so much disk space I don't know what to do with it. Of course there is a saga to go along with it otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it.

Last weekend Tigerdirect.ca put these drives on sale for for $109.99. Sunday afternoon I went to the Markham store and they told me they were sold out. I asked for a rain check and the guy behind the counter gave me a business card with the drive part number written on it after telling me they didn't give out rain checks. He told me they were expecting a new shipment on Tuesday. I went home and decided to buy it on their website, but when I found out that shipping was $15 I decided not to. $15 shipping on a $110 product reminded me of eBay and the way people make their money there. I guess it's probably their minimum shipping cost and the $8 for the SATA cable and the power adaptor didn't raise the shipping cost that much. Tigerdirect.ca total cost before shipping and taxes $117.97.

I stopped by Tuesday night on my way to play trivia and another guy told me that their shipment had come in but that it took a couple of days to unpack, he didn't know if there were any of the drives in the shipment and I should call and ask if they had any in stock before I came over next time. This was irritating for two reasons:

1. The drive question was a featured product on the website, wouldn't it make sense to try to keep your featured products in stock?
2. Tigerdirect's Canadian headquarters are about one kilometre from the Markham store, couldn't they put a few in a car and drive them over?

I figured I'd call them today (Thursday) and see if they had the drive in stock I went to the Canada Computers website. They have a location in Vaughan that is on my way home so I thought I should check out their prices. They showed the Seagate drive priced at $119.99 but had a Western Digital Drive priced at $109.99. When I got there they had a sign in the window saying the drive was on sale for $114.99. The strange thing was that the Western Digital drive was priced at $116.99. I decided to just buy the drive from Canada Computers and not worry about the five dollars. I got the drive and the two cables and went to the check out and when the guy rang it up he charged me $116.99. It turns out that the $114.99 price was the cash or debit discounted price. Oh well, seven buck more but at least I had the drive. After he told me that he said that he'd throw in the two cables for free. In the end I ended up paying less than I would have paid at Tigerdirect.

There were a few new shows that looked interesting but having been burned in the past I try to stay away from shows in their first season. The ones I like invariably get cancelled and I end up disappointed. The late start and my lack of subscribing to a newspaper that supplies a printed TV guide also means I never know when a new show will premiere. I have been watching Californication but it has went downhill in the past few episodes and now I find it disapppointing. I watched a few episodes of Blood Ties but it didn't really grab me and I can't keep track of when it's on. Chuck seems pretty good from the one episode I saw. Now I just have to remember when it's on. I also thought the first episode of Reaper looked good but I managed to miss the second one.

Election day is Wednesday, I think I'm in a new riding but I'm not sure. I'm not sure our local politicians have done a very good job campaigning, there aren't even any lawn signs on our street. One very nice lady did come to the door campaigning for the Conservative candidate in the riding but I haven't seen hide nor hair of the others. I don't watch TV news anymore and haven't been following the campaign so I'm not sure who I should vote for. I guess I'm not a very good voter. I do know that I am going to vote against the harebrained Mixed Member Proportional voting system that the governement is trying to foist on us.


I got to conduct the Argonotes yesterday. Our regular conductor was out of town at a wedding and he let me take over the band. It was fun but stressful. When the word comes from on high via the headset you have 10-30 seconds notice to get a herd of cats all going the right at the same time. Then we play for anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes and then it back to being perched on the pointy stick. I really shouldn't call the band a herd of cats, they were very charitable to me, their neophyte conductor and we sounded really good. I also learned what to not do the next time, if there is a next time. Thanks Steve.

This month's emusic.com downloads were a bit short, I left it late and didn't realize my downloads were going to refresh so early, I only managed to download 28 of my 40 songs before it reset to forty. The 28 I did get included Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full and Leigh Nash's Blue on Blue. Thanks for the recommendation Chris.

I got energetic this afternoon and decided it was time to freshen the design of argonotes.com, the website of Argonotes - just Argonotes, not The Argonotes, thank you very much. Argonotes has been the official band of the Canadian Football League's Toronto Argonauts since away back in June of 1995. We think this makes us one of the oldest continually operating bands in the CFL.

A few years ago I took over the operation of the public website and it was starting to show it's age. The thing that finally spurred me into action was my desire to integrate the image galleries that I have been using iGal to create into the overall site design. iGal is a great program for making image galleries. The old Argonotes website design relied on tables to position the design elements which is an old technique that was used before CSS became widely implemented. The old design was a two column layout with a fixed header. I decided to stick with the same format with an fixed footer to include out contact information. I found a nice simple example of this layout on http://www.456bereastreet.com/. I spent most of the afternoon tweaking and tuning it. Argonotes.com already made extensive use of php includes to pull in the repetitive design elements across the different pages. After getting everything looking nice in Firefox I realized that it wasn't rendering the same way in IE, the main column was getting pushed up against the left side of the page instead of being centred properly. I traced the problem to the DOCTYPE declaration, if I used <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"> IE didn't render the page the same way as Firefox did, I found that I had to use <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd"> to get it to render properly. Along the way I also learned how to find easily find the document base using php to include my fixed design elements. My page template looks like this:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html lang="en">>
<HEAD>
<title>Title goes here</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=">
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/top.html"); ?>
<div id=main>
Content goes here
</div>
<?php include($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT']."/bottom.html"); ?>

The $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] tells you where your document is based so that you can use the include statement in pages that aren't in the same directory as the file you want to include.

Another useful thing I learned was how to position things on the left and right side of a particular element. This is the CSS code required

.container {
position: relative;
height: 90px;
}

.left-element {
position: absolute;
left: 0;
width: 50%;
}

.right-element {
position: absolute;
right: 0;
width: 50%;
text-align: right; /* depends on element width */
}

and this is the HTML required:
<div class="container">
<div class="left-element">
Content in left item
</div>
<div class="right-element">
Content in right item
</div>
</div>

I found this information at Do You Want To Do That With CSS? — Align Elements Left and Right. You might be asking why I am bothering to blog about this at all. There are three reasons, I want you to go and look and tell me what you think and because I use my blog to archive things I want to remember and because I hope that by psoting this I may make it easier for someone else to find the information. I just realized that I have to fix up some more errors in my HTML that are making the pages render differently in Explorer and Direfox. that's it, there is no more.

My neighbours salt shaker pyramid. I was too shy to ask him what it was for.


My lawn may be bad but my other neighbour's is worse. If I was him I'd ask for my money back from the lawn care guys he has hired. My lawn is the green one on the right, his is the brown one on the left.

My two youngest sons and I went to the baseball game today. I can't remember when I last attended A Blue Jays game. We had a lunch and a game package courtesy of my employer, the lunch didn't include drinks other than tea or coffee. The two beers and four pops we had cost almost $28 so I'm glad that my boss was picking up the lunch tab. It was a cool fall day so the dome was closed which was a bit disappointing as we had brought jackets, sweaters and sunscreen. Other than that it was pretty much what I remembered. Baseball has it's own flow and speed that takes a bit of getting used to after five years of watching football. I missed the old mascot, Ace is OK but he's no B.J. Birdy.

After the game I stopped by Canada Computers to get a new USB to digital camera cable, my old one seems to have mysteriously disappeared. I also considered buying a new 500 Gb hard drive as my computer is chronically short of disk space. The prices on the hard drive was the same as Tiger Direct but I ended up leaving the store with neither hard drive or cable because I wasn't prepared to join the extremely slow moving line up of at least eight customers waiting to pay for their purchases. Saturday afternoon and only one cash register operating? I'm not that patient.

I spent the last two weeks driving out to Oakville and the daily trip across the 401 reminded me of when I lived in North York and worked in Etobicoke. At least once a week I'd come home shaking because of the scary driving and drivers I would see. On Friday a car almost passed me on the shoulder as I took the ramp from the 401 East to 400 North. The guy thought better of it but I watched as he rocketed through traffic and into the distance.