Ground rules.
Those who know me well know that I am a huge baseball fan, especially of the Oakland A’s, and one of the many things that intrigues me about baseball is its long history, and more specifically how its colorful jargon has crossed over into common English speech. Phrases like “out of left field” and “get to first base” obviously originated from baseball, but there are dozens of equally common phrases that we use every day without ever consciously thinking of their baseball etymology. “Ballpark figure,” “off base,” “touch base”, “dropped the ball” are so ingrained in our vocabulary that their connection to baseball has all but disappeared. And although “ground rules” doesn’t appear on that Wikipedia entry (perhaps I should add it?) it also has its origins in baseball. Since every ballpark has different dimensions, different fence heights, etc., there is a unique set of ground rules specific to each park. And that is my long-winded way of introducing the ground rules of this blog.
- The first rule of Colevault is, you do not talk about Colevault.
- OK, that’s not true. On the contrary I want everyone to talk about Colevault. And if you have an opinion on anything I’ve written, please leave a comment. Better make it witty though!
- I highly recommend using Firefox to view the blog. Not having done much web publishing prior to this blog I’ve been amazed by how non-standards-compliant IE is. I’ll make a simple change to the stylesheet and it’ll look correct on Firefox but will be screwed up on IE. I’ve read that IE7 is supposed to be a vast improvement but until then I’d stick with Firefox. You can download Firefox via the link at the bottom of the side menu bar. Note: I haven’t got a clue what this thing looks like in Safari or Opera.
- Any text you see in red is a link that will take you to a site that’s relevant to the content of that sentence or post. I have an addiction, and it’s called the Web, so you can be sure these posts will be chock full of links to interesting sites that you might not otherwise come across. I also have a reputation for tracking down good deals online, so reading this blog could save you money!
- Images within posts can be clicked on to show the image in its full size, usually 1024 x 768. The image border turns blue when you mouse over it, indicating that it’s a hyperlink. (The link simply points to the full size image in the gallery.) Posts will just have a few representative photos relating to the post topic, the gallery will have many more (too many?) photos from the same time frame or event.
- Right now I have two albums in the gallery, one called Justin and one called Remodel, both of which can be accessed via the links in the header bar below the banner image. I will be constantly adding photos to these albums, as well as adding new albums later. The newest photos will always be at the top of the album, however when viewing the photos as a slideshow you can choose to view them in reverse order, which is useful if you want to view the remodel photos from the beginning. If you have any questions about how to use the gallery, or anything else, just send me an email.
- To subsribe to the RSS feed of this blog, simply click on the RSS link on the right-hand sidebar. You’ll be taken to my feed page on Feedburner where you can quickly add me to most RSS readers, including My Yahoo and Google’s customizable home page.
- If you have a blog and want me to add it to my blog roll just ping me.
- The banner photo was taken in Tuscany in 2002 and is one of my favorite photos from that Europe trip. I am an avid photographer and you will see many examples of my photography in posts and of course in the gallery. One of my goals for this blog is to scan and publish a bunch of classic “analog” photos from back in the day. My high school friends should be very afraid. (Someone needs to come up with a little Flash or AJAX widget that would enable bloggers to embed a Hot or Not applet on their site. Although in the case of my high school friends it would just be called Not.)
