Speeding Tickets from CNN

I’m not sure how I feel about news articles detailing ways to avoid getting tickets, but that aside, I read something absolutely hilarious at the end of one such article on CNN today:

The worst possible thing you can do is combine all the no-no's listed above by driving a flashy car too fast, late at night when you're the only car on the road while looking like you just robbed a bank.

If you do that, expect a speeding ticket. And expect no mercy.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/07/23/aa.speeding.ticket/index.html

I Hate Microsoft

<rant>
I’m working on a site for Bethel Lutheran Church in Northfield, and, as with any new site design, the bane of my existence always comes back to cross-browser CSS compatibility. I’ve got my design working beautifully in Safari and Firefox, now comes the scary part: testing in Internet Explorer. I start up Boot Camp and open the page... Surprisingly, IE renders almost the entire page correctly, there’s only one glaring mistake. Fortunately, this *should* be easy to fix, because IE supports conditional comments, meaning I can insert style code that only IE will read and no one else.

Here’s the funny part: in looking up documentation on how exactly to do what I want, I found this little diddy on Microsoft’s site:

Conditional comments make it easy for developers to take advantage of the enhanced features offered by Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 and later versions, while writing pages that downgrade gracefully in less-capable browsers or display correctly in browsers other than Windows Internet Explorer.

It’s terribly ironic, because EVERY OTHER BROWSER is displaying the page correctly, it’s ONLY IE that fails miserably, time after time, site after site. Oh, Microsoft, how I hate you.
</rant>

Family Bonding

It may sound weird, but some of my fondest memories of “family bonding” growing up came from cleaning up small floods in the basement, either after a very heavy rain or if the drains backed up. This happened again a few days ago at my house, after my parents finished some unrelated plumbing fixes in the upstairs bathroom. Dad happened to go downstairs to get a tool or something, and came back up to tell Mom and I that there was water everywhere. Without any pause they immediately jumped into action with the shopvac and some rugs, and in a short time our team effort resulted in a nearly dry floor. The worst part: it was almost fun.

Free Gas!

I’ve heard and seen ads that TCF Bank is offering free $50 gas cards if you open a new checking account with them, so, given the amount of driving I’m doing between Minneapolis and Northfield, I decided I’d give it a try. Less than half an hour and a very small deposit later, and I walked out the door with my gas card. Even better, because I already had two business accounts with TCF, I was qualified for a slightly special free checking account with a few extra benefits and free checks (only pay $6 shipping, rather than the $16 cost of checks themselves). Counting that against the free $50, I still came out $44 ahead - that’s about two thirds of a tank, w00t!