The Wilds of Missouri

So I’m leaving this morning to drive from Winona, MN to St. Louis, MO. It’s a little over 10 hours on the road, and I’m driving down today (Sunday) and driving back tomorrow. That’s a lot of road time. I got up at 4:30am to get ready, and completely forgot about DST. So I got up at 3:30. I might actually get on the road an hour early ;-). I’m not taking a laptop with me, I’m actually going to take a break from my computer for a couple days. I got a couple books on tape for my iPod and I’m packing my new PowerShot SD630 so I have something to show for the trip, although I’m quite certain it will end up being my usual benign snapshot photography. Maybe we’ll find something interesting along the way and I’ll suddenly be struck with impressive photographic genius. Perhaps not.

Speaking of books, I have an Amazon.com addiction. My latest is The Elements of Typographic Style which, besides being wonderfully bound and presented, is very thorough. So far it’s been a great history and I’ve learned all the things that I’d kind of slept through back in art school. I wasn’t the most attentive student, but I’m making every effort to redeem myself these days. And Amazon is correct, it is better together with Thinking With Type, which I had previously owned ;-). Honestly, that’s the root of my Amazon addiction; they are constantly barraging me with recommendations that are actually relevant and interesting. Sometimes I just can’t pass them up. In fact, in the process of grabbing the links for those books, I almost bought another one. But I resisted. Money is tight…

One last thing to share, and it’s a little silly. So silly that I was embarrassed to put it on the TextMate list. Here’s the Ruby code for the TextMate command that made the Daylight Savings Time acronym tag at the beginning of this post:

<pre>#!/usr/bin/env ruby
# Highlight text to create acronym from, i.e. &quot;Cascading Style Sheets&quot;
# and it will take the first letter of each word, capitalize it, and
# create the acronym and tag for you
str = STDIN.read
phrase = str.gsub(/\b(\s)?([a-z])/) { |s| s.upcase }
initials = &apos;&apos;
phrase.each(&apos; &apos;) {|word| initials += word[0, 1]}
print %{&lt;acronym title=&quot;#{phrase}&quot;&gt;#{initials}&lt;/acronym&gt;}</pre>

See, it’s silly. The acronym tag can really be a waste of time, but some hold it dear for accessibility.

Anyway, have a great couple of days, I’ll see you on Tuesday…