I have a webpage! I have a css technical question!

Today I have some announcements and some related technical questions.

1. Announcement: In the past six months, several people have asked me, where can I find your visual work, and I've said "uuuhh." So, I've been working on a webpage. It's still very much in progress, but if you'd like to read even more information about me:

http://www.spooksbyme.org

2. Technical Question: Does anyone know how to make a background stretch to fit not just the width of the screen but also the height? I have several different background images, so here's what I've done in my stylesheet:

body {
background-color: #339999;

#background2 {
background-image:url(Images/bg_about.jpg);
position:relative;
top:auto;
left:auto;
}

#background3 {
background-image:url(Images/bg_sand.jpg);
position:relative;
top:auto;
left:auto;
}

Then, I can make a div and give it either one of these backgrounds as an id and then make its width 100%. That works fine. But height 100% doesn't work.

Any thoughts?

My North County

is nice in the winter. I am glad that I do not have to take all the asthma and allergy medication I used to have to take (ooo, a many modaled sentence).

The interview went quite well. It looks like I'll get to work on a small initial project, and then we'll see how it goes. The people at the firm are from New York. In a professional context, I do find it much easier to communicate with people from back east. I appreciate the directness.

Cross your fingers for me.

I have a meeting tomorrow for a possible design freelance job.

I am thinking more than usual about what to wear to this meeting.

And, of course, I'm biking to the meeting, so that makes it even more challenging.

It's Raining!

We're all slowly adjusting to being back at home. Lester has a lot of pin feathers, and it's too cold to give him a bath, which means he's been getting extra head scratches and preening--not that he minds.

Beyond cooking, food, and fluffing around, there's not much happening, and that's fine with me. I'm working up to a post on Jennifer Moxley's The Middle Room and perhaps a paragraph on Lester and post-structural Wittgenstein.

And also how many designs from McSweeney's were featured in the recent Print magazine annual.

And also about how Peter Gizzi is the new poetry editor for The Nation, which most of you probably already know.

It's a survey!

Should I send a manuscript to Litmus Press? I'm skeptical, but someone I like and respect told me at a party that I should.

I slept a lot this weekend. Until 9:30 on both days, which may not sound like much but at this point in my life is significant sleeping in. I was exhausted after this past week.

I made broccoli in a new way. I roasted it. It was good.

I connected the external hard drive and put some things on it.

I'm going to do a few projects for International Arrivals in the new year--probably designing a journal and some file folders. Yay! I want more jobs like this.

Prudence was tired but wouldn't take her nap

Somehow, I managed to get on the 6:50 bus this morning. I'm not sure how I got up, got dressed etc, rode to Oceanside, got my coffee, and made it to the bus stop in time. The bus driver didn't recognize me (because I usually get the 7:05 bus) and yelled at me for having coffee, which I'm not supposed to have on the bus. I said, "the OTHER bus drivers are cool with it," and sat down.

I had only one student in the TOEFL class this afternoon, but that was just as well. I'm glad enough to be teaching this class, but teaching TOEFL is boring. About as boring as preparing to take the TOEFL, I'm sure. Someone stole her clothes out of the dryer this weekend, so I structured most of the speaking exercises around the topics of laundry, style, theft, and crime.

I worked on a few design projects this afternoon. I pretended I understand Bezier curves. I'm trying to make a logo and am totally out of ideas. I didn't actually have any ideas for this particular project in the first place. I want a huge huge flatbed scanner and some paint because right now I'm bored with manipulating letter-objects in Illustrator.

Design Note

Avoid weird gutter jumps when working with images of people's faces.

Having working front and back breaks will improve my commute, no doubt.

Had drinks with a friend and her husband. Being social always feels good. Today was a beautiful SoCal day of the sort that visitors expect, and I was glad to be outside for most of it, even while driving down the 101 (listening to Pavement). I took the bike to REI to get it overhauled--new brakes, new saddle, a rack. The frame is a solid metal Gary Fisher original , and after the tune up, it's going to be even better.

Once I was over at REI I got coffee at somewhere in the Forum and did some editing. The music the upbeat yet soft jazz they pipe in everywhere is terrible.

I've been diligently reading through Krause's Design Basics Index, and it's been very helpful. I'm intuitively a pretty good designer, my clients think so, but this book is giving me the grammar of design. It explains the structures that design uses to talk about itself. It's very helpful.