Dalegroup.net random images

I just noticed what is (to me) a new feature over at the Dalegroup.net root website, which loads a random image for each request. It’s quite stylish; my personal favorite image is number 6, because dead trees are cool! Erm… yes.

What, you want details? The contrast between the tree and the sky is great, as is the degree of change in lighting (specifically shadow) evident on the tree itself. Perspective is a bit wonky, but as always, it’s a subjective thing! That, and the crop probably enhances any perspective evident in the original (which I have seen, but don’t recall all that well).

I’m tempted to steal this idea, although I have no idea how best to apply it here. Whenever I get around to working up a new style for this website (I’ve got a sketch, but no time to implement), we’ll see how best to plagiarise that concept — which is of course featured on other websites in turn, perhaps most notably Photo Matt.

One thing I’ll bear in mind, and would perhaps recommend Michael looks at, is keeping the filesize of the images right down, to the extent that load times aren’t consequential to any users — this is far more important when displaying images as CSS backgrounds, because there aren’t any placeholder graphics displayed in user agents by default, so users won’t wait for them to load! Another suggestion more immediately applicable and concrete is that instead of generating a new stylesheet from PHP, thus completely killing browser caching (half of the advantage of CSS), you have a single CSS file and use inline styles, or the style attribute with a specific tag, to specify your custom backgrounds.

Aside from that, it’s snazzy!

Book-A-Minute Classics

Rinkworks Book-A-Minute Classics website is hilarious. Go there.

(Thanks Tori!)

The City, Zetland and friends.

I just uploaded (as in, about 20 minutes ago) a new roll of film to the photography section, as an album entitled “The City, Zetland and friends“.

Some of the photographs are garbage, but one of the things an antique film SLR camera doesn’t give you is auto focus, so that’s more than part of it! The photographs of Tuffy, for example, were taken with absolutely no control or predictability of the movement of the subject. They’re necessarily poor, because I need to learn that kind of rapid control sometime, and now is as good as ever.

Favorites? Mine is either that of captured salt between windows of a train, or the Centerpoint silhouette (I love those clouds!).

Address changes

Following on from the previous post in which I panicked about such things, I’ve taken action with regards to the physical mailing address situation.

I’ve registered a post office box, and it’s requested that all written correspondence be directed to:

P.O. Box 536
KENSINGTON 1465

As yet, I don’t have anywhere to live certainly, but at least my mail won’t get lost. I’ve updated my domain contact details this afternoon, so that should be up-to-date — I have no idea how long these things take to propagate/change, so we’ll see. As of 1702 Eastern Standard Time, I’m still getting the old records on my whois lookups here. Tomorrow, time to see banks and other such organisations… I can’t wait </sarcasm>

Uni vs. Car

An interesting opinion from Nick…

You don’t need uni if you’ve got a cool car!