Do not fear the turkey, it is just a giant chicken.
– Heather, Countdown to Turkey Day 2008: November 6, Home-Ec 101
The 2008 election: An Outside Perspective
Based on all of the postings that have passed through my web browser throughout the day, this is the imagery that pops into my mind following the election.
Obama supporter:
Suddenly the sun broke through, birds tweeted and flew merrily through the skies, the land turned green, rainbows spread throughout the sky and prosperity spread throughout the land.
McCain supporter:
Gloomy clouds gathered overhead. Darkness and blight spread o’er the land. Doom and despair reigned.
Late season storm
3 weeks until the official end of the 2008 hurricane season, and just to remind us that we’re not quite through yet, there is TD 17 just off the coast of Nicaragua. May even become a tropical storm in a day or so and a hurricane by the weekend, which would make it Paloma. The current 5 day track has it curving around to the northeast and heading over Cuba early next week so it shouldn’t pose any problems for the US.
Fuel stats
For nearly the entire time I’ve owned my Camry, I’ve been tracking my gas purchases and fuel efficiency using a ThinkDB database on my PDA. Finally got around to exporting nearly 8 years worth of data into a spreadsheet for some analysis. The data is kind of interesting to look at.
Here’s what gas prices have been doing over the past 8 years.
Almost hard to believe these days that gas was going for less than $1/gallon
Here’s what the fuel efficiency looks like over the past 8 years
I chose to plot fuel efficiency in terms of gallons/100 miles, so lower numbers mean better fuel efficiency. I think the two spikes that get close to 7 and 8 gallons/100 miles are anomalies probably due to typos entering the data, so I’ll ignore those. The average comes out to about 4.2 gallons/100 miles, which is pretty decent (just under 25 mpg). A lot of the noisiness in the first few years are due to frequent road trips. The graph smooths out toward the end because I just haven’t been taking any long road trips with the Camry for the past few years. Where it starts smoothing out also coincides nicely with when we moved out of the apartment and into the house, and didn’t have to spend time stuck in rush hour traffic on the James Island Connector anymore.
What kind of surprised me is that there really hasn’t been much change in fuel efficiency over the years. I figured as the car got older, efficiency would go down a little, but there doesn’t seem to be that upward trend in the data.
This next graph shows how much it costs to feed the car per mile.
Follows the graph of gas prices pretty closely (which is expected).
Over the entire reported period, the car has been driven about 87100 miles, consumed nearly 3500 gallons of gas which I spent close to $6900 on.
A solution
After a week of mucking about trying different things to fix the problem I was having with the CSS menus dropping down underneath the content section, I found a remarkably simple solution that I didn’t expect to work, but did, at least for IE 7.
MovableType’s built-in templates tend to suffer a little bit from div-itis IMO, but they work pretty well and once you figure things out, makes styling pretty easy.
The basic structure for the menu and content looks something like this:
<div id="main-navigaton">
<div id="main-navigation-inner">(insert nav stuff here)</div>
</div><div id="content">
<div id="content-inner">
<div id="alpha">
<div id="alpha-inner">(insert content here)</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>By putting
#main-navigation-inner { z-index: 1; }in my CSS file, I was able to get the drop down menu to pop up to the top. Works in IE7, but since I don’t have a computer with IE6 on it, I don’t know if it works with IE6 yet.