online pool

Tuesday, July 25, 2006

I grew up with a pool table in my house. Not long after we moved to New Orleans East, into the house with the 20' x 25' den, a friend of my Dad loaned him his pool table, essentially using our house as storage while he remodelled his rec room into a baby nursery. I was probably about 12 at the time. By the time the guy took the table back, I was moved out and living on my own. We were pretty young so we didn't get GOOD, but we learned the basics pretty solidly. I also learned that playing pool alone is pretty meditative and rewarding.

Then my brother got a job as a bar back at Racketeers, the biggest pool hall in nola. That's when he got really good. I would hang out at the pool hall all hours of the night (especially after 6am when the tables were free) and learn things from him... how to use English, when to use English, how to see a straight shot, how to hit a bank shot (though i still can't hit the wall, then the ball and make it in).

So at my office we have a pool table. It's not the best table in the world, but it's pretty good. The rails are all rock solid and the felt is old, but it's a full size table and it has balls and straight pool sticks. I've been playing nearly everyday lately during lunch, usually by myself... but other people are getting into it too. I can generally out-play whoever's around, but they're not embarrassing blow-outs. And I don't gloat! But there are a few people who can hold their own, and it's fun to have some competition.

So last night I was messing around, reading stuff online and i found a link to a game on this site miniclip.com. I had never heard of the site before, but i started looking around and i found:

Click to see actual size

The first thing you notice playing pool online is that people are way better at virtual pool than they are on a real pool table. The game play is really nice, though. I think the physics of the angles is off a bit... hitting bank shots is pretty freakin hard and sometimes balls bounce off the edges of the pocket in those frustrating near misses that seem to happen all the time on real tables too. (Is it a near-miss if you actually miss it, or is that a near-make?) They show a ghost of the cue ball where it is projected to contact a ball or rail, and give you a line represnting what direction the hit ball will go in. That line is the great equalizer, as far as I'm concerned, cause most people just aren't that good at geometry. The graphics are really nice, although there is only one view--bird's eye--and you can't zoom in/out on the table. You get this little three panel control to set your angle (moving the cue around in a circle), set a limited amound of English (no jumping balls or nailing the top of the cue ball to swerve around your oponent's balls), and to set the power of the hit. The power scale is a little weird in that on the lower side it hits softer than you'd expect. Overall, especially for a free game on the web (it's not flash...), it's a really solid little game. And for what it's worth, all of the people i've played so far have been very cordial.

Just watch out for the timer when you set the game up. Trying to get a good aim, set some English and hit the ball withing 30 seconds can be pretty difficult. Just turn the timer up as far as it can go, 1:30, and you'll be fine. Let me know if you're looking for a game of pool. (Maybe my wife will play me like she used to back at UWM's Union back in the day!)

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

Free stuff from Cafe Press.

Sunday, July 16, 2006

I just went to my cafe press store to order one of the oval NOLA stickers I created last year. I made it for the sole purpose of putting it on my scooter, with nothing else in mind. However, apparently 60 other people have found and bought them, earning me $1 per sticker. I had no idea about any of it! It stays in my cafepress account as CafeCash until I tell them otherwise, but that's awesome. I can spend it anywhere within CafePress, so I ordered myself a sophrosyne t-shirt and two oval NOLA stickers-- for free! Awesome. The obvious thing to do now is create more stuff.

posted by j. Permanent Link 3 comments

2002.7 miles

I went out for a ride on my scooter this evening, while it was still really warm out but not nearly as hot as it was around mid-day. It hit mid-90's here this weekend, yay! (I need to keep this whole global warming thing in mind whenever I think about not wanting to live in Milwaukee anymore.) As I was on my way home I glanced at the odometer and noticed that I broke 2000 miles today. That's not bad for a bike I bought last August, which soon after sat for 6 months throughout winter. It's an average of about 350 miles per month, though I guess that doesn't seem very far fetched, since it's 22 miles round trip to work and back.

The route that I take to work pretty much follows Lake Michigan into downtown. It's a nice drive and the traffic isn't ever very heavy except on one stretch just outside of downtown for about 1.5 miles. For the most part, though, it's a lot easier for me to zip down that stretch of Water St. than it is for most of the cars. It's always just a matter of other drivers respecting me on the road. Motorcycles have it hard enough. I think people see scooters and think "I need to get around this guy." Or through me.

I always find it kind of funny when I'm at a stop light and a Harley, of which there are MANY in milwaukee, pulls up behind me. You can't help but feel the difference as you sit there waiting for the green, but I've started to notice that those guys are always very slow off the line. I'm not saying they're not capable of taking off and leaving me behind without a thought (adny). But the 55 year old guys on their touring bikes with their wives smoking cigarettes and writing thank you cards in the back seat always seem to crawl to lumbering starts. I haven't had the privilege yet of being first at a red light with a crotch rocket behind me, but I'm sure that'll be an interesting experience when it comes. I should just wave the dude past me.

One other note of scooter interest -- there is a Milwaukee Scooterist Yahoo! group (which tends to confuse itself with a scooter "club"). Once a month people meet up at a bar called Brigg's to get to know other people in the local "scooter community" and go for rides. The idea of meeting up at a bar to go riding seems kinda counter-productive, but about a week and a half ago one of the newer group members emailed me off-list to ask if I were going and did I want to meet up on the way out. Turns out that this guy and his wife both work at UWM and know a bunch of the same people I know from my previous job. They're a really cool couple. It was almost like knowing them instantly by having friends in common, though I didn't wind up having much of a chance to talk to them after the ride due to a minor disaster (which I won't repeat here to spare spreading someone else's misfortune!). Seems, though, that perhaps I managed to accomplish the one thing I hoped to do by meeting up with everyone - finding someone cool to ride with when I have the chance.

I'm also hoping to get Kim on the back of my bike soon, but that'd require getting an M endorsement on my license, which Wisconsin seems opposed to doing, judging by the difficulty in getting in to take a test.

posted by j. Permanent Link 0 comments

css-only rollover navigation

Friday, July 07, 2006

After doing about 4 months of nothing but ActionScript, I've finally been able to get back into doing html and css lately (and a bit of javascript). I've had a few projects at work (one was a bit scattered, one was really cool) as well as a couple of side-projects. The thing about working with other designers is that they all seem to have varying levels of knowledge about the code that's going to go into putting their designs together, but they _never_ use text for navigation. It's always images. Tabs, image text, whatever. The thing is that, SEO wise (search engine optimization) and browser-degredation wise, text links are better.

So i was working on this css-only navigation scheme that would use both text links and rollover images. The solution that i came up with was to wrap the text in span tags with "visibility: hidden;" in the class to hide the text:

<a href="#" id="home"><span class="hiddenNav">Home</span></a>

It works well, but i don't like using span tags and it adds a bunch of ugly code. Then i was on Jeffrey Zeldman's site the other day and noticed his rollover-image buttons in the right column linking to A List Apart and Happy Cog. I knew there was no chance that he was using javascript rollovers, so I started digging through his code to see how he did it. I found that we were doing basically the same thing with one big difference: text-indent. I've never used text-indent in the past simply because i had no reason to, but the thing with it is you can use negative values. So, rather than wrapping the text links in span tags to hide the text on top of the images, you indent the text negatively off of the page entirely.

The one negative aspect about this that i've found is that when you click on the link in Firefox, the dotted outline (that outlines any link you click) extends clear off the page to encapsulate the "indented" text. But that's small potatoes. The benefit is that javascript isn't required for it to work (and who wants to write javascript rollovers, anyway?), and if CSS is turned off for whatever reason, you don't lose the navigation, it just reverts to good old text links.

posted by j. Permanent Link 1 comments

post-katrina google earth

Tuesday, July 04, 2006

I opened up Google Earth this evening because I remembered that they'd updated the satellite images and I wanted to see if my old house in New Orleans East was visible now. I was getting my bearings, figuring out where I was starting with the Seabrook Bridge (I think it's called something else now). Moving past the Lakefront Airport I noticed this:

Apparently some of the satellite images are post-Katrina. It's kinda funny when you start looking around, you can tell that things are all dirty and just not right. The swimming pools are black. Everything looks dusty. And then there's the 9th ward...

They haven't updated images for the whole city... most of New Orleans proper still looks bright and sparkling clean. You can totally tell the difference by the 17th Canal, where the Metairie side's images have been updated (on the left) but the New Orleans side have not. It's kinda strange looking at it all as it was, knowing I drove through there and saw those houses along the levee devastated.

I'm not sure if I would rather them update the satellite pics for the whole city, or leave it as it is. There's a sort of permanence to the destruction, the more it becomes a part of the mundane.

As a side note, I don't have time to say what I really think about this article, Get Over It, New Orleans by Robbie Hartman, that Kim and I read in the Sheperd Express (local weekly paper) today. It's hard to tell what is sarcasm and what is his actual retarded opinion. If there's some larger point that he's trying to make, it's lost in the fact that he's a complete f-ing knob. I hope that I remember to make the time to write to the editors about printing something so ludicrous for public consumption. Thanks for helping the world take a positive step forward, jackasses.

"By no means am I trying to minimize the loss. In fifth grade, I spilled Kool-Aid on my favoritest sweatshirt in the whole world. No matter what we tried, the stain wouldn't come out. In fact, it just got more splotchy. So I know a thing or two about pain and suffering."

Anger.