CSS image border effects. Is it me or are CSS chops more important than ever in web development? Here are some very cool image border stylings using CSS.
Flash Templates? Where are my Silverlight Templates??? This is very enabling for those with Flash skills, templates for quick plug-n-play reuse. I'm looking forward to the equivalent template services for Silverlight developers. Maybe by that time I'll have the Silverlight skills to take advantage of them.
Today's MP3 downloads. Thanks to Pandora discoveries, I added two new songs to my Zune library today: "Are You a Dreamer" by Denison Witmer and "Gather Up" by Peter Bradley Adams. Don't bother checking out the remainder of the album contents. Nothing else is as immediately impressive as these singles. I love this line from Denison Witmer's "Dreamer." "One time we met, you were outside floating in the forest. I placed my stigmata on your hands." Stigmata is a term associated with Jesus's crucifixion wounds, which is why it's so haunting. Witmer was the lead of the band The River Bends, which explains the symbolism. Here's Witmer with River Bends in "Are You Lonely?" on PureVolume.
Urine in Space. Apparently the new Space Station Toilet (it costs $250 million, so I'll capitalize it) will convert urine into drinking water for the astronauts. It's an excellent idea, since transporting water to the international space station is a huge shuttle payload expense. It also carries a very heavy psychological payload, seems to me. "Are you capable of drinking recycled urine?" This PopSci lunar habitat illustration describes recyclable urine as a filtered resource first for the algae tanks, then sent back to the crew quarters "for washing or further purification to make it drinkable." Mmm, Vermont water sure tastes good to me tonight. Oh yes, something else humorous about the PopSci article was that the description of urine recycling was under the heading of "Urinate Often." Will do!
Vista Nostalgia. A very Everyman sort of article for you tonight from Paul Thurrott who "upgrades to XP SP3" for the sake of comparing it to features he misses in Vista. Paul Thurrott writes some great stuff, but I only read him through TechMeme. Maybe it's the SuperSite for Windows site name that prevents me from subscribing, I don't know. "SuperSite" is so goofy.
Major Announcement: V.Next DBVT.COM is in the works. It's that time of year when I revamp DBVT.COM. I think you'll find DBVT2008 interesting for a number of reasons. (I'm a dreadful tease, aren't I?) DBVT.COM V.5 (or V.6, whatever...) will initially be somewhat, umm, feature-lean compared to the current version, but that's always the case when I perform my annual upgrade. I won't have the blog title mouseover popups at release time, for example. I'll try to bring them back soon, since I like them a lot, too. My iTunes app won't be online at first, but that's been the case for the last two or three annual upgrades. I'll get that back online as well. My running blog is going away for good, as is my CS Bits list blog. My Downloads area has been dead for a while now, I simply haven't recognized it, and Downloads will likewise disappear. I'm not sure what I'll be doing with the Stylin blog at the moment. It depends on the format of my blog, since Stylin was simply a category that I re-purposed as a mirrored blog to display differently than my main blog. For now the new DBVT.COM will have a Home Page, a content page I'm calling "Services," a contact page, my blog, my photos, and that's it.