Sunday, February 17, 2013

Transformation Step 1

I'm starting a journey.
This isn't a sprint.
This is training for something greater and really accomplishing lasting change.
This isn't a quick fix, a fad, or something that just sounds good.

I am going to morph myself into something greater. Physically and spiritually. I have had a desire to change things that I didn't like about myself for the longest time. I wanted to quit smoking for a long time, and I've accomplished that! I'm at over 90 days without a cigarette.  If I can do that on my own. I know that I can accomplish anything. And with help and support I can do so much more. I'm not talking about just eating better and working out more, I want to get to a point where I don't think about it, its just who I am and what I do. Being physically fit is definitely a goal of mine. I've been running on and off for the past few weeks. Not really as consistently as I'd like, but at least I'm doing it. Its starting to become a habit. Which is something that I'm really happy is happening.

Instead of saying I'm going to flip the healthy switch tomorrow. Or next week. Or any day or whatever I'm going to slowly turn off the unhealthy habits. One by one. Keeping a lasting change and expecting to just drop everything in one day is unrealistic, like I said, this is training myself to become better. The final race will never happen, but there's things along the way where I can benchmark my progress.

Some things that I need to get eliminate from my life by order of hardest.
  1. coffee
  2. Drinking
  3. Eating out
  4. soda
  5. over eating
  6. energy drinks
  7. skipping workouts
Those are just a few, but in 6 months from now I'd really like to be able to quit drinking coffee. Right now I'm just setting goals for myself, I'd like to accomplish all of them, eventually. I know some are a lil unrealistic, but I think by writing down what I want to do I'll be a little more conscious about them. All in all I want to achieve a lasting and meaningful change.



Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Things Im thankful for


  • A job
  • A place to live
  • an amazing family
  • an awesome girlfriend
  • A one of a kind dog
  • My health
  • the ability to walk and run
  • friends who care about me
  • cousins
  • Aunts and uncles
  • Pastors 
  • My jeans
  • My phone
  • The internet
  • chapstick
  • a safe neighborhood
  • snow free roads
  • Clean air to breath
  • Water to drink
  • Food to eat
  • Music to listen to
  • the ability to hear that music
  • Sunsets to see
  • Beaches to rest on
  • Trees to sit under
  • Lakes to swim in
  • Those who defend our country
  • Those who lead our country
  • Our country
  • Sports teams to watch
  • A cup of coffee in the morning



Monday, February 4, 2013

Making a responsive HTML email:

The core concepts:

  • Percentage based tables
  • Max and min widths
  • A sprinkle of media queries

after looking at http://www.zurb.com/article/1119/create-emails-for-any-device-introducing-
I had some ideas on how to achieve said repsonsiveness.... this will be an ongoing thing as I try to develop a foundation template for a responsive email.

A few things I didn't like that I had to do to make it work.

To get it to display properly in IE7 I had to set a width on the body. Which is ok with me since in gmail this will be converted to a containing div. Thanks for the heads up on this http://www.emailology.org/#2  IE 7  for some odd reason only liked max width on the body... this will restrict the 100% table from filling the whole width of the browser, we need our images to only be their original size or smaller.
<body style="margin:0; padding:0; max-width:710px; margin:0 auto;" >

The core of the template works with this little container table
<td style="max-width:710px; display: block;   margin: 0 auto; padding: 0; clear:both; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
 <table width="100%" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" >

what it does setting it with display:block forces the table to fill the width of the container, and allows it to have a max width.

The responsive guts!

<td style="max-width:355px; display: block; float:left; ">
</td>
<td style="max-width:355px; display: block; float:left; ">
</td>
When at full width: 710px, this will display as intended, two columns floated left. But when the window shrinks below 710 the container will be too small and the columns will stack on top of each other. The trick is to do some basic math!

Also if you want something to look correct on mobile...

The main idea is to set min widths so that tables don't get to small and create gigantic vertical columns usually you will want to set this on a container table and nest tables inside of that min width tables.
style="min-width:285px; display: block; "

!!!!WARNING!!!

This is no where near completion. There's a lot of testing that needs to be done. It's just a starting point.