Tips from a weekend warrior on installing your own laminate flooring

Our existing wood floor was less than desirable—and we really didn’t have it in us to sand it down and refinish it, especially with two cats who need their freedom to roam about. In addition, I wasn’t up for the chemical smell nor the labor involved in sanding down the floor. So my wife and I decided that we’d do IKEA’s laminate flooring—it’s inexpensive (averaging $1.29 per square foot) and we’ve been told it’s both durable and easy to install. Don’t be too quick to believe everything you hear. Installing it wasn’t easy… at least at first.

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Filed under: Home Improvement
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My wish list has suddenly changed. Now granted, I have no need for this, but it would be so fun to have a lens like the new one offered by Sigma. It’s a simply MASSIVE lens that shoots at a range of 200 to 500 mm with a constant F2.8. To top it off, it has a digital display of the distance of your subject, and has built-in macro capability, increasing the length to 400 to 1000 mm.

Now THAT’S a lens.

Filed under: General
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It was indeed a beautiful morning here in Saint Paul, the warm air moving into the atmosphere and the fog filling the valleys and waterways. And taking the advice of a photography blog I read regularly, I got out and relished in the mysterious moods and settings that only fog can convey.

What I particularly enjoy about photography is not just taking the pictures, but messing with the RAW data—tweaking contrast and saturation values, adjusting the brightness and shadow levels, and extracting the kind of mood and emotions I want the photos to convey. Some purists might frown on manipulating the photos to create something that wasn’t there; but that’s what painters do in a sense. Some take real imagery and recreate it to accentuate feelings or ideas—it is the same for me when I manipulate my photos.

Enjoy some of the newest works I’ve uploaded:
Morning Fog Gallery
No Parking Gallery
Bench

Filed under: Photoblography
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I deal with stylesheets every day and frequently have to find ways around the oddities and quirks between both Firefox and Internet Explorer. One quirk that’s been bothering me for quite some time now has surfaced again, and I figured out a “fix” for the issue.

The problem: When I have a <DIV> tag initiating a content section and it is immediately followed by an <H1> tag, it does something funky. The <DIV> tag pushes itself down in the layout about 18 pixels or so depending upon the size of your H1 font.

Allow me to illustrate:

What you see here is Firefox 2.003 (left) and Internet Explorer 6.02 (right) with the arrows indicating where both browsers are interpreting where my div tag “begins.” As far as code structure is concerned, I’ve got a small nested div setup under the header (the blue bar)… like so:

CONTENT
–left column (floats)
–center column (static)
–right column (floats)
/CONTENT

That shadow is a background element of each of the nested div tags and is supposed to line up. However, throwing that H1 tag into the center column div throws everything off. The H1 tag (along with all other heading tags) have a margin-top value—I’m not sure what it is, and I don’t really care—all I know, though, is that it is forcing the center column div tag to start LOWER than it really ought to.

So I tried something out—I added a line-break tag after the start of the center column div tag, but that produced not-so-desirable results:

The arrows show that both IE and Firefox cannot seem to agree on just how much space to give a line break. While this did solve the problem of moving my div tag down, it posed another problem; therefore there’s got to be another solution out there.

So I gave this a try—instead of putting the “fix” in the HTML, I tried adding a padding-top value in my center column of 1 pixel. Which produced the near-desired result:

Both browsers are relatively matched up, but there is a three pixel difference between Firefox and IE. While that may be sweating the small stuff, that kind of variance is what can make creating more complicated layouts more difficult than they need to be.

Anyway, I hope that this little discovery is helpful to others that are experiencing div placement quirks with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Filed under: CSS, HTML, XML / XHTML
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This morning I attended St. George Antioch Orthodox Christian Church for the second time—and I was fortunate to meet up with the gentleman who remembered me from my first visit. Taking him up on his offer, I sat with Cherif (I think that’s how he spells it) and followed along with him in the liturgy as he explained various aspects about the order of worship and the sanctuary itself.

He took great care to make sure I didn’t feel lost amidst the shifting from page to page—pages 120 to 123 and back to 105 and 106, then over to 142 and back to 124. It was confusing, but apparently they’re putting together a new liturgical book that will flow better.

The service, by contrast to my last visit, seemed more meaningful than before. But it still left me with questions—questions like, “where is the life in all this tradition?” and “who decided that this was the right way to worship God?”

Well, following the service, Cherif bought a ticket for me for the falafel dinner the church was hosting, and answered my questions about the Orthodox church and gave me much more than I asked for by way of information, his personal history with the Church, and how his quest for finding the “missing pieces” led him to the Orthodox Church.

One thing was apparent: he knew what he was talking about—whether it was church history or the reasons things were done—within the Orthodox church and beyond into the Catholic and Protestant churches. He was quite well educated and seemed to be able to point me in the right direction.

But beyond being given good reasons for this or that and educated responses, I felt like the Holy Spirit must have been a part in our discussion. At one point, he switched topics and went onto an issue of leaving a church bitter about an individual [making a connection to the point of what happened in the Protestant reformation and the centuries to follow], and by way of illustrating his point, said if you left bitter towards so-and-so—but he didn’t say so-and-so. Ironically, he used the first name of a pastor that I’d served under—and left under less-than-desired conditions.

It was spooky. Coincidence, sure, maybe. But the illustration he used and the name connection was piercing to me. The answer isn’t just breaking off if you suddenly disagree with so-and-so, the answer is in going back to the source and (re)connecting. That involves humility, truth, love, and forgiveness; all to bring about reform and renewal.

But anyway, Cherif bought me a copy of Becoming Orthodox: A Journey to the Ancient Christian Faith, by Peter E. Gillquist. It’s a short book and a relatively easy read (especially for me), but resonates with a great deal of my past—between my birth into the Lutheran church, finding Christ and the Holy Spirit in the charismatic Lutheran church, defecting to the non-denominational churches to find freedom from the boring, ritualistic traditions of Lutheranism, and to a life of being disenfranchised and wandering through life without a church to call home.

I’m only a third of the way through the book, and I am beginning to discover that the Orthodox Church, whether I like it or not, is no small item to weigh into my spiritual quest to find communion with God. Rather, considering the Orthodox Church is nearly the same as considering the source of the church—before the split incited by the Catholics; before Luther called for reform (which just led to a branch of Christianity all its own); and before the tangle of denominations and church affiliations grew to massive, out-of-control proportions.

I still am not sure what to think about all of this stuff—many questions awaiting some answers as I dig deeper—but one thing’s for certain: I cannot ignore the fact that before the non-denominational church, before the Charismatic Lutheran Renewal, before Lutheranism, and before Catholicism, there was the Orthodox Church. Somewhere in there lies the answers to some of my questions. The rest, well, I’m sure I’ll discover along the way.

Filed under: Orthodoxy, Spirituality
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Last night, as I was rounding home on the finishing touches to our living room, I was well aware of my need to be connected with God; and my stark awareness of just how far off I seemed to be from the Presence I once knew. So I made sure that I didn’t stay up until 2:30 a.m., that I would be able to get up in time to visit St. George Antiochan Orthodox Church again.

Frankly speaking, I don’t understand much of what’s going on—not so much the confession, or the reading of the Gospel text, or communion—but the clinging to a liturgical tradition that spans nearly 2000 years. As an outsider to the Orthodox faith, I don’t know all the symbolism, the reasons, and the fundamentals behind what they do throughout the service.

There is a lot of chanting—a lot. I thought it was bad at the Lutheran church that I grew up at; but this certainly has it beat. Pretty much everything is chanted, save for the morning text the priest reads about a certain saint that they remember for that Sunday, the announcements, and one of the creeds. Other than that, it was a lot of chanting.

But I don’t necessarily take issue with the chanting—I just want to know where the life is, the sustaining life of Christ in the midst of a tireless tradition that has preserved its way of doing things for so long. The people certainly seem filled with life, hope, grace, and a love that radiates.

And that is one reason why I am going back this morning—to look deeper into Orthodox, beyond the surface, and look for God in the midst of that tradition. I don’t necessarily expect to walk away with any new revelations or have a life-changing experience; but who knows, maybe God might surprise me and show a glimpse of His shadow to me.

Filed under: Orthodoxy, Spirituality
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It’s been another busy weekend in the Tangen house. This weekend I spent most of my waking hours painting both the walls and trim of our living room and installing new window treatments to make the room look fabulous. We still have a lot of work yet ahead of us—in two weeks we’re installing a new laminate flooring that will span through the living room, to the kitchen, and into our “dining room.” And of course, we’re also ditching the old hand-me-down couch and love seat and going to pick up something nice from IKEA.

So as a little treat to myself for all the hard work, I’m lounging on the couch and watching the latest Bond movie with a tall glass of beer. Mmm.

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Filed under: General, Home Ownership
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This is the third night in a row that I haven’t slept all that good—or to be specific, barely slept at all until it really counted—namely just hours before I am supposed to get up in the morning.

With all the preparations that we’re undertaking to get our house ready for the market, I’ve been watching a bit too much HGTV, planning wall colors, scoping out the big laminate flooring job I’m taking on in a few weeks, and all the other “little” projects around the house—all in the name of getting this home to sell; and quickly.

I’ve got a checklist that covers a full sheet of paper, listing all the things that need to be done before we even think about contacting a realtor. They’re things the realtor would tell us to do anyway, so why bother start up a realtor’s contract if we’re not even ready to sell yet. But back to my list, I can’t help but to think of all the money we’re sinking into this. It’s probably not nearly as bad as it is in my head; it just has its way of causing just enough anxiety to keep me up at night.

So here I am at 2:11 a.m., wasting time that would be better spent sleeping. Unfortunately my mind has already made itself up—it wants to pour over and over my list of things to do, how much money it’s going to cost, and worry about how little our how may or may not go for. And when it’s done worrying about that, it’ll start to worry about our next home and how much money we need to sink into that place, the furniture we “need” to buy, and the bigger mortgage that we’re going to be responsible for.

Houses are just so much fun. I wish I could shut off the worry machine in my head. Unfortunately, I think that’s genetic and I inherited every ounce of it from my dad.

Filed under: General, Home Ownership
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Well, after sleeping in a little late with the hopes of recovering from an early Daylight Saving Time change, I set out to finish book four in the Harry Potter series. It was an exhausting read and am glad that book is finally over.

I have to say that is sure ended with quite a bit of difference from the movie—in story development, emotional level, and set up for what is to come in the next book (presumably). I’m excited to start book five, but I think I’m going to wait awhile. My eyes are pretty well bugged out from a full day of reading.

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I had a weird feeling just a moment ago that brought be back years ago.

Frustrated with the pressure of coming up with a logo for a client and the void of creativity that I was experiencing, I decided to surf Google for awhile and see what the competition was doing. That was uneventful, as it seems other job bank providers haven’t given much thought to branding, identity development, and the power of a logo. ‘Course it doesn’t help that the idea of a job bank doesn’t lend itself to a metaphor very easily—at least one that hasn’t been exhausted already.

Then I came across caljobs.ca.gov, and was greeted by the banner saying, “Welcome to California.” Of course I know that I physically haven’t arrived in California, but thinking about that just for a moment brought me back to when the internet was still quite new (to the general public).

I remember when web-based radio was a new thing and you could listen to radio stations on the other side of the planet; specifically I remember just how fascinating it was to hear through my computer what others were hearing then and there with their radios. The idea of connecting personally or virtually to another part of the world was such an incredible concept, I remember thinking that the possibilities would be so vast and virtually unlimited, save for the language barrier.

Now I think about how easy it is for people to access news and information about this and that, and how small our world has become. While it can be such a great thing, having access to such a wealth of information, it can be explosive.

I think about how crowded the world seems to be these days with the clash of ideas, civilizations, values, politics, and religion—and how the fuel for fighting one’s cause only seems to burn hotter with the ease of propagating an ideal. While I’d love to think humanity could rise above themselves and peacefully coexist despite our differences, I can’t help but to see only disaster.

I also think about how extremists have harnessed both the internet and the innocent to further their cause—cultivating a seething hatred for those that think differently, look differently, worship differently, and live differently. Bush calls them terrorists, but they’re all just different people that have extremely different values. The only difference is that some of those people use extreme measures of violence to defend their own perception of freedom.

But what is freedom for one person might be prison for another.

I think that some places in the world weren’t ready for the liberation of information through the internet. Bad news (however you define that) has a sort of encroaching, crowding sensation about it; and can have a number of effects on a person. Some might get stressed, others concerned, and some might protest or resist through demonstration. Some also use violence and force to push back the “aggressor’s” foreign ideas to preserve their own.

I know generalizing is bad and leaves too many gaping holes, but I think that the crisis in the middle east (though very complicated) seems to be only fueled by the West’s creeping ideals and values, thus bringing a clash between world views and the violent resistance we see from various factions.

I wish there were a better way to fix this mess—the conflict between people that think differently. But as long as people feel threatened in any way, there’s always going to be a violent response from those that don’t feel the freedom and safety to negotiate. I wish there could be an end to the cyclical violence.

Welcome to the world.

Filed under: Awareness, Culture, General, Politics
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