T-Minus 2 Days

I have never been more ready for a vacation in my life. I’ll have a full report, with pics and nabe breakdowns when I return.

In the meanwhile… check out the Mini-B’z madness over at Grunta.

I ain’t no holla back girl

not much to report… still getting geared up for the NY trip and that includes some serious poring over maps.

Spent some time this weekend cruising the depths of Southeast Dago, looking for reasonable alternatives to Condo living.

Interestingly enough there are some very killer neighborhoods in south-east-side Dago… you just have to look to find them. Ever been to Darnall? El Cerritos? How about the ‘Wine Glass’?

Realtors have started calling the area between the 805 and 15, south of Landis in North Park, the ‘Wine Glass’ (see a map for the reason… it looks like a wine glass, I guess). Anyway, this is also a canyoned area, a bit more run down than North Park proper but a very quiet area with some great blocks and some not so great blocks. Unfortunately the presence of the ubiquitous 1BR “TJ Shack” kinda ruins some of the aesthetic.

South of City Heights is the Canyoned neighborhoods of Azalea / Hollywood / park. A very secluded area with twisty, hilly dead-ended roads. Lotsa gays and lesbians hiding out back there… but the housing stock is not the best.

Continuing south we headed into Oak Park, east of 54th to College. This neighborhood is very quiet and the lots are large. But it’s truly awful housing stock – 50’s tract homes with very low-slung cielings.

Crossing College and heading East from Streamview gets you into a neighborhood which I will call South Rolando. It’s still south of University and it’s eastern border
is La Mesa. This is a truly nice area with some great homes… you just have to find them.

Finally, El Cerritos is a great little hood which is directly east of Horace Mann Middle / Crawford, East of 54th and south of El Cajn Blvd. Some killer homes in the canyons through here.

Madness

Been a crazy couple weeks. Took an unexpected trip to NY for a few days for some family stuff…. crazy job things happening… wife got poison oak on her ear… Tibs bit a rigg….

On the agenda for the weekend:
– skate
– skate again
– skate some more

NYC 2k5

Sassy & the wife will be visiting the Eastern climes in late July. This time around there is more than just R&R as a motive. This trip is a critical fact-finding mission.

I know what you’re thinking: “Sassy, what the hell are you talking about?”. Well, here’s the deal: Sassy and Wife are strongly considering relocation to NYC.

Now you’re thinking: “NYC? Are you nuts?”. Well, of course, but we already knew that. Truth is, after 10 years in San Diego, yours truly feels restless and bored in the beautiful and very laid back city of San Diego. Missing his family, missing the bustle and history of the city, Sassberto has decided that NYC is an option which must be considered.

Another reason – Sassy is a sucker for pre-war apartments, and if I’m gonna spend 2500 a month to own a 1BR, it’s gonna be in NYC, not San Diego (sorry Dago!). The stucco 70’s shitbox will not cut the mustard.

Anyway, the itinerary is just coming together. The plan is to rent a car and hit up all of the spots of my short list nabes. For fun, y’all NYC’ers can critique my picks.

Criteria:
– We are looking to buy, not rent
– 1 or 2 BR sub 400k
– prefer pre-war brick
– prefer low-rise
– Co-op or Condo
– prefer quiet and safety to nightlife and restaurants
– sub 1hr commute to Manhattan

Anyway, here’s the short list, by Boro, in order of consideration

– Brooklyn
— Clinton Hill / Fort Greene
— Bay Ridge (concrete skatpark!)
— Red Hook
— Prospect Heights / Prospect Park South
— Ditmas Park / Lefferts Gardens

– Queens
— Astoria
— Jackson Heights (Landmarked District)
— Forest Hills / Kew Gardens / Rego Park

– Manhattan / Bronx
— Riverdale
— Hamilton Heights / Inwood

– Jersey City
— Downtown JC / Paulus Hook / Hamilton Park
— Hoboken
— Weehawken

Chime in, kiddies!

TGIF

Big doin’s in Sassy-land. Upheaval could be around the corner… but then again… it always is.

Couple things

Firstly, Cheers to Cousin Joey C who is back home after a nasty case of Teenage Driver. Feel better kid!

Felix Tibs’ Eyunta post regarding the MiniBosses should not be missed. I enjoyed the show, most especially the fact that I secured a padded living-room style chair while we waited for the band to play.

The Lee Household continues to grapple with decisions of the heart… and wallet. Padre Lee was last seen galavanting about in his shorts making remarks about “Julius the Nut” or something another. Mom got a Dell.

My former co-worker and friend, Mutey is getting hitched.

And as for yours truly, let’s just say I am sucking wind to the fullest.

Tabby Tabbareens

So the app I’m working on needed tabs. I figured this was the perfect chance to use some of those sporty CSS tabs that just take an unordered list and makes purty tabs. Since it’s just CSS.. it would be simple, right?

Wrong!

I tried nearly every example on
this page, and to my astonishment, most of them completely failed to work at all. Why?

First things first – HTML/CSS guys are not necessarily programmers. That means they may miss that pedantic little charater trait which forces you to scrutinize every single tiny possible boundary case to keep your shit from breaking.

In no particular order (an unordered list!), here’s the problems I ran into:

– Absolute Positioning: Face it, this shit doesn’t work. Nothing better than seeing the tabs rendered on top of each other.

– Inflexible designs: Some of these tabs can’t handle more than n tabs before they start overlapping or doing other weird stuff. Most can’t handle wrapping at all.

– Hacks and unsupported standards: “Supports XHTML 1.0 Strict and CSS3″… hmmmm mmmmkay… Problem here is that no one cares about that shit.

– Relative sizing and spacing: Normally this is a good thing, but this shit has never really worked and it ain’t about to start. My favorite was people using em’s to set header widths and watching everything get scrunched into a teensy little wad in the corner of the screen.

– Ones that just don’t work… at all. Some of these rendered out as oddly colored bars which seem to resemble a child’s Lego™ creation. Others had nice little submenus rendering a good 6 inches above the menu itself. I love that!

So, in conclusion, the reality of CSS in 2005 is that it’s barely adequate to make tabs in a web browser.