Bumbling my way through life and web design

Reform
Maybe we should get ourselves some of that reform.

I had plans on writing my take on the health care/death panel/reform debate going on right now, but I came to realization at about word 400: I just don’t care.

You heard that right. I don’t care.

The government is going to do whatever they want. The public be damned. The previous administration got the country into two wars, passed tax cut after tax cut, bank bailouts, and some prescription drug thing. It’s okay, though, because my kids will pay that bill.

This administration has passed a stimulus package, more bank bailouts, auto industry bailouts, some “cash for clunkers” thing, and pretty soon, its health care reform package. It’s okay, though, because my kid’s kids will pay for that. As far as I know, he’s planning on bringing an end to one of those wars. I think.

I’ve been paying attention to the protests. From what I can tell, it’s a case of the shoe being on the other foot. The dirty, hippy, left-wing liberals protested the wars. They defaced the president by making him look like a vampire, Alfred E. Newman or Hitler. These people were vilified for being unamerican and disrespectful to the office of the President of the United States of America.

With the current administration, you have the hick, gun-totting, right-wing conservatives protesting outside town hall meetings and yelling in the faces of politicians. They deface the president by making him look like the joker, Alfred E. Newman, or Hitler. These people have been vilified for being unamerican and disrespectful to the office of the President of the United States of America.

I don’t care what your political stance is or who the President is at the time, but pulling the Hitler card is just plain wrong. I’m fine with vampires, jokers, and Mad Magazine mascots, but neither one of these guys should be compared to what is basically pure evil. Besides, pulling the Hitler card is lazy. You can do better than that.

(Quick note: It’s late/early. I didn’t feel like hunting down Fox News or MSNBC clips to support my vilifying statements. I’m sure it’s there. O’Reilly and Olbermann have to get in their airtime.)

[SOAPBOX]
The one big difference between these two protests is that dirty hippies never brought friggin’ assault rifles to a protest!

assault rifle
[Image Credit]

Further research tells me that this guy calls himself a Libertarian. I always thought of them as that other party nobody really cared about. I guess they’re heavily armed and pissed off. I take back my previous statement about the gun-totting conservatives. I’m all for the second amendment. Better to have a gun and not need it then to need a gun and not have it but leave the assault rifle home when going to a protest when the President is a mere few hundred feet away.

This was in Phoenix, too. It’s just a bad year for Phoenix and Obama. First Arizona State University wouldn’t bestow an honorary degree on him. Now, the citizens apparently want to show him they’ve got guns and know how to use them. I consider Phoenix my home, but I guess I gotta start packing heat when I go back.
[/SOAPBOX]

Here’s my final word on health care and health insurance. People are bringing up death panels. Like them, I never read the proposed bill. What I do know is that every two weeks, money is taking out of my check goes to my own death panel/health care provider. Health insurance is always about the “what-if’s.” You pay it because you feel you have to. I haven’t been to a doctor in two years. The only reason I went was so I could make my mother happy. I have to agree with a friend of mine who said when you pay for health insurance, you’re paying for that person who goes to the doctor for minor bump or scrape or ache or pain. What you get out of it versus what you put in is a very wide margin.

Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

I read somewhere that Internet Explorer 8 was supposed to be the end-all-be-all for web browsers developed in a Seattle suburb. It was going to grab a web designer and love them and hold them and even name them George.

hugo011

But, sadly, like previous of Internet Explorer, it does have it’s shortcomings. This time, though, it removed a feature that actually existed in previous iterations: the opacity filter. Sure they could’ve just implemented the CSS standard for opacity, but that would have been both smart and easy, and we all know Redmond doesn’t want to do that.

What to do, what to do

Despite declarations that it was back, nothing ever worked. No hack. No filter. No custom CSS implementation. Nothing. After bashing my head on my desk for a good 30 minutes, I said to myself, “Self, why can we just use a transparent PNG to handle the background opacity?” DING! (or PNG!)

In my mock-up, I adjusted the opacity of the area I wanted to have a little see-through and grabbed a 5×5 swath of the area and saved it as a transparent PNG-24. Plugged in as a backgorund, and bickity-bam, I had a transparent background with an opacity of 90% that works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer 8. I’m assuming they’ll work in Safari and Chrome because those browsers are pretty standards-compliant when it comes to transparent PNGs. It should work in Internet Explorer 7 because I know it’s pretty friendly to the PNG. If you have Internet Explorer 6, upgrade already. You’re hurting America.

Added Bonus

It should be noted that this workaround (not hack) will not cause your text to be dithered out. It stays clear as day. Also, the 5×5 was only 117 bytes so the file size was really small.