Saturday, January 15, 2011 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM

Rio Grande River, Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM, March 26, 2009

Never a duh! moment

Back on January 9th I started a project to update the bones of this website. There were lots of things bugging me, the big one being poor navigation. Stuff accumulates and there are now about 1,500 pages here on lots of unrelated topics. It's a mess. I've tried several navigation schemes over the years and none of them pleased me. Determined to do something about it I set out to tune up some underlying structural issues while thinking about the navigation mess.

In the process I bumped up against the HTML <strong> tag which hadn't been working for a long time and I wanted it back. It is widely used around this site but you would never know it. I made a few half hearted attempts to figure out what went awry in the past but now I wanted it fixed, dammit. I'm a self taught tinker in this HTML and CSS world and I assumed I had tinkered with something in the CSS files that was suppressing it but I couldn't figure out what I might have done.

By yesterday I had had enough. I was going to fix this thing once and for all and I spent most of the day trying.

I went to bed last night no closer to an answer than when I started. Frustrated, I was. This morning I went at it again, this time in a very systematic way and finally isolated the problem in a CSS file. For some reason way back in the dim past in some experiment I had added "font-weight: lighter;" to the body element and then forgot to take it back out. Well DUH!

Night camp

Site 23 - Percha Dam State Park, Arrey NM

• Verizon cell phone service - good signal
• Verizon EVDO service - good signal
• Go to the Percha Dam State Park website
• Locate Percha Dam State Park on my Night Camps map
• Check the weather in Arrey NM

Words Get in the Way

Research shows that language suppresses visual memory, This is called verbal overshadowing and is a well-established phenomenon .... For example, in one study people watched a short videotape of a bank robbery, then spent twenty minutes doing something unrelated. Then one group spent five minutes writing down everything they could remember about the bank robber's face, while the other group did an unrelated task.

more...