Microsoft is far behind – as always
My project of the recent past has been the redesign of the website of my new employer Carstens Medizinelektronik from Göttingen. The basis is one of the most simple and standard WordPress themes out there. The site may well be enhanced later. Anyway, the gradient that can be seen in the navigation is inserted with the -linear-gradient CSS3 property. When I constructed the webpage, I only looked at it in Mozilla Firefox. Yesterday, I realised that it would be a good idea to check the website in Microsoft Internet Explorer. Well, I guess you know that the gradient is not displayed there. Why? Because Microsoft sucks. They don’t maintain their browser very well. CSS3 is out there for quite a while already, at least a year… If you want to please those poor souls out there who still don’t know that Firefox is the browser to use, you need to insert some extra code into your CSS-file:
background: -ms-linear-gradient(#color1, #color2);
That will do the trick but only, ONLY in Internet Explorer 10. It comes with Windows 8 and uses the new interface. A Windows Vista/7 adapted version is in the making but as you will guess, a release date is unknown. Give it up for Microsoft! For now, it’s a good idea to also include this line of code. It is all familiar and self-explanatory I reckon. 
background: #color; /* Show a solid color for older browsers */
Song for a grey November day
I don’t publish songs very often. I’m not a great guitar player and my voice and breathing definitely need a lot more practice. However, the above recording is fairly decent I think. If only I knew why the microphone makes my voice sound like I’m lisping…
The song is my very simplified approach of William Fitzsimmons’ “From the water”. He is of course a much better guitar player and his voice is just incredible. I did my best anyway and I think it’s a good response to the winter depression that kicks in about this time every year. I’m glad that this is a problem that doesn’t affect me – at least not as much as other people. So, the song goes out to those who suffer yet again…
Testing the Tamron AF 70-300mm 4-5.6 Di SP VC USD
For my birthday, I got myself the Tamron AF 70-300mm 4-5.6 Di SP VC USD. I missed the opportunity to take pictures of objects that are far away. Especially birds were tough motives since I had to get really close – well actually that close that they would flee. Also, I always wanted to take pictures with a huge moon in the background. My standard lens only covers 18-105mm though. It was impossible to fill an image with the moon or a bird. The new lens is quite an improvement even though I’d need even more focal distance for screen filling pictures. The Tamron lens is the best entry level telephoto lens however. It begins where most standard lenses end (70mm) and ends at 300mm. It comes with a built in vibration compensation that is supposed to compensate shaking and helps you to avoid blur. Here are two rather random shots that I took on a bright day in Kassel. I can’t exactly tell how far I was away but it must have been about 100 metres in the first case and 50 metres in the second case. Both objects were not moving (quite obviously). Good victims for first shots…
Here’s one attempt to take a picture of a bird. Ok, it’s a duck and they usually don’t rush off when you get closer. Anyway, the sharpness is great and the bokeh Continue reading →
You can finally ‘like’ my pictures.
I’ve been looking for ages to find a plug-in that allows visitors to ‘like’ my photos with a facebook button. One would assume that there are some dozen out there that have that feature. Nope! I finally found one, though. I had to pay for it but I’m willing to do so, if I get a working piece of software that does everything that I want. As I once said, I’d never upload my precious pictures to facebook directly. They get all the rights – at least for the files uploaded to their servers. I could have uploaded crappy, reduced versions but that wouldn’t have been pretty either, right? Now, the pictures are on my very own webspace but people can still like and share them if they want to. If I sometime decide that I don’t want them to be online anymore I just delete them and they’re gone. That’s not possible on facebook either. When you delete something, it is only invisible for you and the public and neither you nor any of your friends can access it anymore. It’s still on the facebook servers however. There was this Austrian guy who once deleted his account and asked facebook half a year later if there was anything left on their servers. He got more than 1000(!) A4-size pages listing every conversation, comment, like, file etc. he ever had had on there. Nothing had actually been deleted. Enough said! Anyway, I hope you ‘like’ my pictures. Just take a look at the galleries…
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