In case you missed it, the photo of our Performa that I featured in this post the other day was chosen for the unofficial Apple weblog’s rig of the day! I discovered this when I got up this morning and had not only several new comments on the afore-mentioned post, but also dozens of new Flickr comments and literally HUNDREDS of new page views directed from tuaw!
All of this meant that by 2:00 pm, when it was time to go to the dentist for a routine cleaning, my ego was roughly the size of a swollen melon–and growing by the minute. As the smiley dental hygienist started ordering me around and poking me with menacing dental tools, I felt like telling her, “Hey, Lady, you don’t know who you’re dealing with! My photo was featured on TUAW today. I’ve had 300 new hits since breakfast. Can you compete with that?” But instead I just lay there all limp-like and let her shove things around in my mouth.
In addition to a cleaning, I was scheduled for a panoramic X-ray today to look for my wisdom teeth. I’m at that age where we need to start worrying about the little buggers erupting out. Now, I don’t know if you have ever had a panoramic X-ray of your head before, but let me tell you: the dental technicians (or whatever they are) were bored the day they came up with this process. Their thinking must have been along the lines of “Let’s devise a method of X-raying a person’s head that makes them look as completely ridiculous as possible!”, because I don’t think they could have succeeded so spectacularly otherwise. Smiley dental hygienist lady: “Now just walk around behind that machine. That’s right. Now stick your chin on this plate. And bite down on this stick. And put these prongs on the side of your head. And do the monkey dance. There you go! Just one moment.”
So, long story short, I have wisdom teeth. Four of ‘em. And they’re looking ripe. They said it’s not urgent that I get them removed immediately (groan), but sometime this year I need to. So probably we’ll do that this summer–and I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to the days of numb-mouthed puffy-faced drooly eating. Oh joy.
(BTW: Lylium.org seems to have developed a really annoying problem. Everything is fine in Firefox, of course, but in Internet Explorer my right sidebar is being pushed all the way down the page beneath the content. Any ideas as to why this could be? It didn’t used to be this way, but I can’t think of anything I’ve changed. Also, does it look this way in Safari, Mac users? Thanks in advance.) Thanks Phil! 
April 3rd, 2006 at 8:39 pm
Nope, no Safari or Firefox Mac problems, ’cause, you know, they actually pay attention to html and CSS standards. IE can’t exactly say the same…
BTW - you’ve won me as a new reader. I saw your photo on TUAW, and then checked out your photos on Flickr, and then the site. Liked what I read, I guess, you’ve earned yourself a spot in the blogs group on my RSS reader…
April 3rd, 2006 at 9:01 pm
Thanks, I’m glad to hear it looks fine and good in Safari and Firefox for the Mac. Unfortunately, IE users are still too large a part of my audience to be ignored, so I need to figure out what’s wrong with that sidebar… :-p
Glad to know you enjoy the site, though! I’m happy to have more readers; thanks for letting me know.
April 4th, 2006 at 12:56 am
It is probably in margin issues in your CSS is what I would imagine… Just make sure they aren’t overlapping. I am having the same problems… that I have not fixed yet… in my photoblog. Why won’t people just switch to FF?
Not that this really helps at all… heh
April 4th, 2006 at 12:57 am
PS. Having your wisdom teeth out isn’t really that big a deal. Just means you eat icecream and watch movies all day for a few days.
April 4th, 2006 at 1:21 am
I’m not 100% positive since I can’t test it, but I think the problem has to do with 1 or 2 of your pictures. In IE, the Dilbert comic strip and photo of you eating Taco Bell are both more than 450px wide (especially Dilbert) which is the width of your main column. So it pushs out the column, apparently bumping down the right content. Why doesn’t this happen in Firefox but it does in IE? Because of this declaration:
p img {
max-width: 100%;
}
Your images are restricted to no more than 100% of the containing block, which is set to be 450px. Unfortunatly, IE 6 (but not 7) does not recognize max-, min-width and max-, min-height.
Solutions? A few things. You could add width/height styles inline to the particular image () The problem with this is you need to know your ratios. Or you could put the width attribute into the tag ( and that will automatically scale the height (when it is left out) Or you could just resize the images before putting them up.
So yes, this is an issue with IE’s CSS rendering and faults. They have added this in IE 7 afaik.
:) hope that wasn’t too lengthy.
Congrats on the tuaw mention!
April 4th, 2006 at 1:47 am
Matt - I’ve got some answers for you, but it isn’t letting me comment again…
April 4th, 2006 at 1:48 am
Matt,
I’m going to put a guess out there that your problem is due to using position: fixed which from what I’ve seen IE doesn’t do respect. I haven’t used this declaration before so I know very little about it, but a quick search came up with this website which you may find helpful. You do also appear to have some overlap, but that would only matter if you weren’t dealing with absolute positioning. I can overlap stuff all I want without bad flow if I use absolute, but I do think it is that fixed. I can see why you want it too, it looks real nice in FF! You may want to consider either using that fix that I linked to above or using something like the star-html hack to alter that class for IE. But please be aware that this is a hack and has its own can of worms
Just in case you need more help, I’m going to throw my web address into this post so you can contact me through the form.
(I wish some HTML tags were turned on for us!)
April 4th, 2006 at 2:05 am
Sorry, Phil! I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam, so I turned on a filter to look for common spam words and save any comments that used those words for moderation. Apparently something you said was “spam-like” (beats me, seems like a strange filter), so it saved aside your comments.
Thanks for the help though! You were totally right! I was thinking something along those lines but hadn’t figured ito ut that clearly; but you nailed it. I just resized the Dilbert comic for now, but that worked fine. Thanks a bunch.
Oh, also, what HTML tags are you talking about that you want to use but can’t?
(P.S. Matt - don’t tell people it’s no big deal! I don’t want to miss out on an opportunity to complain about something!
)
April 4th, 2006 at 8:57 am
I was hoping it just got saved for moderation.
I’d like to have style tags like i and b (or em and strong), and img wouldn’t be bad either - i tried to give yousome examples and they got munched.
:)
shrug it’s okay though, i just didin’t know what was allowed and what wasn’t. i thought there was a link to a popup of allowed tags
April 4th, 2006 at 12:23 pm
Congratulations and thanks for pointing me to that flickr pool. Guess I have to take pictures of my old Apple /// now.
April 7th, 2006 at 3:18 pm
Thanks for the suggestions Phil, hopefully I will actually be able to impliment then over the next few weeks! And thanks Erin for allowing me to be given some help in your blog.
April 10th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Erin - I wish you well with the wisdom teeth. No worries though, that are not actually connected to your actaul wisdom so you will be just as smart if they are taken out.