This sounding appealing to me, so I threw together some code one afternoon, but never really got the finishing polish on it. Frankly, I kind of forgot about it until something made me think about it just now. So, here it is, in it’s unpolished, ready to be criticized and improved.

Check out the DEMO (Currently only works in Safari & Chrome)

The HTML is pretty simple:

	Lost

The CSS really isn’t that bad either:

A little something to set the stage.

html, body {
	background: #000;
	height: 100%;
	margin: 0;
	overflow: hidden;
	padding: 0;
}

I used a white text shadow to blur the text and then rotated it to the starting position.

#lost {
	text-shadow: 0px 0px .42em #fff;
	color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0);
	display: block;
	font-family: Futura, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
	font-size: 4em;
	letter-spacing: .1em;
	position: relative;
	text-transform: uppercase;
	top: 35%;
	-webkit-transform: rotate(-20deg);
}

This is just to get the container into the right position.

#container {
	height: 100%;
	margin: 0 0 0 -150%;
	overflow: hidden;
	position: relative;
	text-align: center;
	width: 400%;
}

On hover it uses the CSS transition to gradually change the text shadow from the blur effect to the 3D block effect.

#container:hover #lost {
	color: rgba(255, 255, 255, .7);
	font-size: 85em;
	letter-spacing: .13em;
	text-shadow: 1px 1px 0 #777, 2px 2px 0 #777, 3px 3px 0 #777,
		4px 4px 0 #777, 5px 5px 0 #777, 6px 6px 0 #777,
		7px 7px 0 #777, 8px 8px 0 #777, 9px 9px 0 #777,
		10px 10px 0 #777, 11px 11px 0 #777, 12px 12px 0 #777;
	-webkit-transform: rotate(20deg);

	/* transition */
	-webkit-transition-property: color, font-size, letter-spacing, text-shadow, -webkit-transform;
	-webkit-transition-duration: 8s, 9s, 9s, 5s, 7s;
	-webkit-transition-timing-function: ease-in;
}

Check out the DEMO and let me know what you think, and how you would do it differently.

Oddly enough, the bamboo was the easiest thing to get. we have a friend who works at a zoo where they happen to grow a lot of bamboo. She told me they had set some aside, and I just needed to come pick it up. Little did I know, that they set aside approximately 300 feet of bamboo. I think there should be enough in there to a build a bike, or four.

I’ve managed to scrounge up some parts and a donor frame (for the bottom bracket, head tube, and dropouts) from craigslist. Special thanks to Alexis and Colin for picking up my out-of-town purchases.

So, afte rI get the frame from Colin last weekend I should have most of the parts I need to get going. So I started working on the bamboo tonight. I cut a small piece, put it on the grill, and took a heat gun to it – experimenting with the best ways to heat treat the bamboo. It seems like it should work pretty well.

It was too dark for pictures, I’ll take some when I start treating actual bike parts.

A few months ago I came across @bencallahan while looking for some info on less css. His name caught my eye because I don’t often come across local web developers on Twitter, so I started following him (on Twitter, I’m not a stalker). This led me to find out about his company – FORGE. FORGE is the kind of place that I have wanted to work at since I left full-time church work. The more I read about the company and saw the kinds of things that they do, the more I wanted to work there. The question then, became how to get a job there, not even knowing if they wanted to hire anybody. While trying to figure out the best way to ask for a job, I came across this. This started making me think, and after deliberating, and talking it over with Deb, I decided that the I would create a simple site to send to the guys at FORGE.

I went ahead and purchased heyforgepleasehireme.com, and started to lay out what would be on the page. After about a week of fitting in some time around an already busy schedule, I had a site that I was pretty proud of – making use of the new HTML5 tags and a smattering of CSS3 for good measure. All that was left was the delivery mechanism. While I was hoping I could come up with a way for FORGE to simply stumble across my new site, that didn’t seem reliable, and I had no idea how long it would take. After losing another possible job because a company I had a contact with had just hired somebody, I didn’t want to wait around too long. I decided to simply send the URL in a tweet to @forgeideas. It felt like such a significant tweet, I was hesitant. I was talking to Debbie and Dane about it on IM when Debbie typed, “Just send it!” So I did. An hour later, I got a message back from FORGE asking me to come have lunch and talk.

The rest, as they say, is history…

Lesson learned: it can pay to be creative when searching for a job. I could have easily sent a resume with a nice cover letter, but that wouldn’t have conveyed how much I wanted to work at FORGE. If you want something, go after it whole hog. When I first walked into FORGE, I was introduced as the guy who made the website

Here is a list of pages that about CSS and learning CSS. Some of these are things that I have used, some just seem like good information for those starting to learn CSS:

• A good starting point for the basics:
  http://www.w3schools.com/Css/css_intro.asp
• Useful article on positioning a footer at the bottom of a page without javascript:
  http://themaninblue.com/writing/perspective/2005/08/29/
• This page has a good list of web standards, and some good info on CSS:
  http://www.opera.com/company/education/curriculum/
• Everything at http://meyerweb.com, especially http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ (useful for creating cross-browser friendly sites)
• A great site for debugging crazy IE CSS issues:
  http://www.positioniseverything.net/
• Always make sure your HTML and CSS are valid.

That’s probably good for now. I’ll may post some more later. Also, these and other CSS/HTML related links can be found on my delicious bookmarks page.

Really, I have no problem with this – I don’t intend to use this knowledge to do harm. The funny thing about it to me, is that it’s nothing more than a signature saying that we aren’t going to use this knowledge to hack into a computer network. My first thought is, that if you are the type of person that intends to hack into a computer network for some sort of personal gain, are you going to care if you signed something that said you wouldn’t do it?

If your ethics, or lack there of, would allow you to hack a computer with malicious intentions, would you really feel bad about ignoring the agreement you signed at school? seriously…

So, one of the things that I wanted to do now that I am blogging here, was to write about beer. I think the first time I had a beer was one a trip up to Idaho with Mike. One of his friends made it his mission to find me a beer that I would like.

While I do enjoy a few beers, there are a lot that I do not. We found this cool shop recently that sells all sorts of different beers, and you can mix and match 6-packs so you don’t get stuck with 5 beers you don’t like. So, we bought a few different beers, and I started to think that it would be good to keep track of which ones I liked/disliked and why… and what better place than on my blog – well, maybe here.

I came acros this website today on accident, but I think it’s great, so I’m going to use it as a way to explore a few new beers, and share my thoughts, and I’ll figure out a good way to link that and the blog together. So, go to 97bottles.com, sign up and connect with me, maybe we can go grab a beer together.

Zane: “Why are you moving this?”
Me: “We’re selling this crib to a family that needs it, because you guys don’t use it anymore.”
Zane: “This isn’t a selling house.”
Me: “What?!”
Zane: “We don’t sell baby cribs here.”

But I digress, the baby crib is the first major thing that we’ve gotten rid of from them being babies. Sure, we’ve gotten rid clothes, and toys (countless toys), but this feels different. Maybe I just have a weird connection to furniture. It just feels like a part of their childhood is gone. They’ve moved on to big boy beds, bunk beds at that. I feel like I’ll wake up tomorrow and they’ll be asking to borrow the car… Which I suppose will be OK, as long as I wake up and they’re in their own big boy beds.

I still remember pulling up to the house after church – everything I owned in my Toyota pickup and a small Uhaul trailer. We moved all of my stuff in, and I settled in to life with a family that I didn’t know. I spent that night watching Rush Hour and eating frozen waffles with Cheryl (their daughter) and Kate (her friend).
Over the next year we became great friends, they are an extension of my family. They were all involved in our wedding, I got the chance to be part of Cheryl’s wedding. Whenever Brad breaks his phone we have a replacement for him. They’ve walked with us through difficult times, watched our kids, cleaned up after me, supported a pretty hefty frozen waffle addiction – they truly are part of our family.

All of this is why seeing this video on YouTube last night was so difficult.

We started looking around real estate sites on the Internet, and Craigslist.org; but most sites didn’t have a lot of rentals, and Craigslist is over-saturated with apartment complexes who apparently are paying people to post their openings every other hour.

So, we ended up just driving around a couple of neighborhoods (old school style) writing down numbers on for rent signs (I’m suppose to be calling them right now). Ironically, we ended up in the neighborhood of some people we know that Deb just started to reconnect with the other day.

All that to say that, The Tarr’s are MOVING OUT! If you know anyplace in the Dayton area for rent, let me know.