April 1st, 2004:

Sometimes I really hate CSS.

I have a div with the following in it:

    blah
  

Unfortunately, no matter what I do, the width of the p is defaulting to the maximum width of the parent. I, however, don’t want the object to be that wide. I only want it to be as wide as the image, plus padding, margins, and borders. What do I need to do to make it work this way?

I know you, apathy.
Your face is cold and blank.
Your eyes are null
and your lips, coiled.

Your ears dance,
dodging my words
in anticipation of your own.

So now that I have a dSLR, I’m drooling over all of the lenses available to me. I’m also remembering fondly the lenses I had that were stolen. I had three, one of which I was very grateful that it was stolen — it was a boneafide piece of shit. The other two, I absolutely loved.

That being said, I tend to lean more towards prime lenses (as opposed to zoom lenses). As you know, I’m of the school that one should choose a focal length before composing the image, and not the other way around. Because of this, given enough prime lenses to cover the range of uses I employ, a zoom lens buys me very little. Well, that’s not entirely true. One zoom lens is more portable than the 2 (or 3) prime lenses it might replace. But, you sacrifice sharpness for a convienience. Aside from that, a few millimeters in focal length could save you from having to step forward or backward when framing the shot, but that’s just plain lazy. So, unless I can’t possibly move any closer or further away, and don’t want to crop the image at all, all of the focal lengths around a prime (i.e. 33mm, 34mm, 35mm, 36mm, 37mm for a 35mm) are useless to me. Another upshot of zoom lenses is that, most likely, you will need fewer of them, and therefore, you will save money. This might be worth it to some. It might even be worth it to me. I’m not sure yet. Even if I go with Zooms, I’d really like to have the 35mm f/2.0.

That being said, here are two wishlists — one for primes and one for zooms. Each lens is followed by a number from 1 to 5 indicating how much I will use it (5 being the most) and, additionally, a current price (new, USA warranty).

Prime Lenses

Nikkor  18mm f/2.8 D                           (2) $1,300*
Sigma   20mm f/2.8 ES ASP HSM AF-D             (3) $360*
Nikkor  24mm f/2.8 D                           (4) $270
Nikkor  35mm f/2.0 D                           (5) $265
Nikkor  50mm f/1.8 D                           (5) $100  (HAVE IT)
Nikkor  85mm f/1.8 D                           (4) $345  (STOLEN)
Sigma  105mm f/2.8 EX Macro AF-D               (3) $330
Sigma  180mm f/3.5 EX APO Macro IF HSM AF-D    (2) $740
Nikkor 300mm f/2.8 D ED-IF II                  (1) $4,400

* = I don't need the 20mm if I have the 18mm.

Zoom Lenses

Sigma  17- 35mm f/2.8-4.0 EX ASP AF-D          (4) $490
Sigma  28- 70mm f/2.8 EX ASP AF-D              (5) $330  (STOLEN)
Sigma  70-200mm f/2.8 EX APO Macro IF HSM AF-D (3) $740
Sigma 100-300mm f/2.8 EX APO IF HSM AF-D       (2) $1,900

If we look at just the 4′s and 5′s a Prime system will cost me $980 (actually $880, since I already have one of these) while a Zoom system will cost $820. I get smaller with the Zooms and Longer with the Primes. The Prime system is 4 lenses. The Zoom system is 2.

The nice thing about going with the Zoom lenses is that, with only one lens I account for almost 4 of the primes (take a little on both ends).

Sigma makes GREAT Zoom lenses. Their EX series is VERY comparable to Nikkor, which is why they’ve been chosen for all of my Zoom lenses. Unfortunately, they don’t make very many prime lenses at all, so they couldn’t be used in too many places.

So yeah. If you want to buy me a present… this is the list.

The April Fools jokes are ripe today.

“Dunstan’s”:http://1976design.com/blog/ house is “on fire”:http://1976design.com/blog/commonpics/day/april-fool.jpg and “Bonnie”:http://empurple.com/ is “pregnant”:http://www.empurple.com/file/000396.html. Also, “Google’s”:http://google.com/ Lunar Station “is hiring”:http://www.google.com/jobs/lunar_job.html, if you’re interested.

In more news, “PHP has been acquired by Microsoft”:http://www.phpdeveloper.org/index/2025 and “DeadJournal is being bought by LiveJournal”:http://www.deadjournal.com/community/new_shit/34659.html. The best part of that news is that the biggest complaint from the users is due to the color scheme change (from the DeadJournal Black & Purple to the LiveJournal Blue & White). Additionally, “lj_serialadder”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/lj_serialadder/ will allow you to mass-add as many friends as you want. In addition, banning it from your journal results in quite an interesting surprise (of course the LJ user community is a bunch of jerks who can’t take a silly joke or at least manage to ignore it and move on with their day. So the comments are full of hundreds of people complaining about how horrible it is that LJ would allow or sponsor a prank like this).

I thought about doing something silly myself but, then I forgot to plan it all out.