Another video of the Autistic basketball player

Update: Seems You Tube pulled the CBS video so here is another one.

Rochester Basketball Player scores 20 points in final 4 minutes...he's also Autistic

My dad called me a work tonight all in a frantic..."you going to be home by 7PM?"

"Probably"

He proceedes to tell me about this report that's going to be on CBS.  He said he also saw it on the internet on AOL.

But apparently a Autistic High school senior whose father coaches for Greece Athena High School right here in Rochester, NY had his son on the team getting water managing the equipment and so on.  So in the last game of the year he let him dress and sit on the bench. (Update: After reading the article and learning more about the story...the coach was not the kids father...I am leaving it in here though as is as that's the way my father told the story to me.)

With the team up by double digits with four minutes to go he let him in the game to have a shot.

What happened was a miracle.  His first couple of shots were airballs but then he caught fire sinking 6 3 pointers in a row.

Here is the complete article be sure to watch the video.

Truly amazing.

Update: I read today that Greece Athena beat Greece Arcadia in the first game of the Section V NY Sectionals Playoffs.  66-42.  No doubt Jason had a hand in that victory in some way.

Here is the original local news coverage of the story from WROC Rochester (CBS)

Aparently Universal Studio's has contacted Jason's family about the story. 

Homestore Busts a Move

The last couple of weeks I have been working on a project for Homestore, Inc. which officially announced yesterday it's plan to change it's name to Move.

There are future projects in the works with them and I am not sure what I am allowed to talk about in terms of what I am doing now or is planned to do in the future but all I can say is keep an eye out on Move in the future and perhaps it might of been something I worked on. 

Probably when things are more official I might be able to highlight some of the work I have been doing but currently it's all internal to Move.

Here is an MSNBC story that explains the name change.  You could also check Google News for other stories.

US and Canada out in Mens Hockey at Winter Olympics

So yesterday was the first round (quarterfinals) of the tournament after the round robin play for the last week.  US squeaked into the tourney after losing three in a row with help from Kazakstan of all countries.

Canada had a lack luster performance as well, getting the ire of Wayne Gretzky over the weekend.

So why did these teams do so bad?  Well here's my opinion and it's probably not going to be popular.

Professional players is what doomed these teams...yep the exact opposite of what you were thinking.

These players haven't played together all year...the last time the practice together was probably back in August before the NHL season started.  They are then uplifted from the middle of their season transported between 6-9 timezones over to Italy and expected to perform with horrendous jet lag.  Well that was the excuse the media allowed when US tied Latvia the first day.

My opinion is these athletes are honored to play for their countries but playing isn't really first on their list.  I mean if they get hurt playing in the Olympics they are out a lot of money when the season starts.  It's a high risk for the player and the team that's letting them go over there.

US and Canada probably have the highest number of professional players from the NHL compared to the European's who probably have few on each team.  The difference?  The difference is because the majority of the team is not professionals they probably have the chance to practice together a lot more before the start.

Team USA should not be a hack team of NHL All stars cause that doesn't seem to work very long...look at Men's Basketball two years ago (they embarrassed us).  Team USA should just go back to getting college kids to play for 2010 and create another "Miracle" team that beats the professional teams.  Now that is a team I could really rally behind...these professional teams are just boring to me.

Woman's hockey was more exciting to me this year with the huge upset Sweden delivered to Team USA.

Reading the CNNSI Article about Team USA's failures this quote stuck out at me..."The only player who might have made a difference was Ryan Miller, the Buffalo Sabres goalie who had a broken thumb when Waddell was forced to finalize his roster in late December."  I totally agree, would it help them advance to the next round?  Chances of that are high in my opinion, but to win the gold probably not. At least they could of been more respectable. 

IE 6, XHTML and the image space

OK IE 6 has a great little bug/feature where if you set your page type to XHTML and you put an image on the page let's say a logo in your header, most times you want your image to be flush with the bottom element, perhaps a border of the container div the image is in.  If you leave the image unprocessed then you'll run into the problem where a 1px space shows up under your image.  This is very frustrating when your looking for a clean layout.

I googled for an answer and either I wasn't searching right or there really isn't an answer on the topic but I couldn't find a solution to the problem.

Asked my friend Travis and he gave me the simple solution to this problem.

img
{
    display: block;
}

That's it.  This will butt everything up on all sides.

Here's a 2006 word of the year contender

I was debating politics on a discussion board today and a very identifiable Republican was dissing us Democrats (not that I am declaring I am, but with Bush in office it's hard not too) so I called him a Partist

This is how I am defining a Partist:

par-tist
n. & adj.

adj. based on party intolerance "a right/left wing comment" 2. discriminatory especially on the basis of political party views n. a person that believes that their majority controlling political party is superior to other minority political parties.

Feedburner feed updated

With a little help from Travis I updated my Feedburner Feed to include my Del.ic.ious feed and my Flickr Feed.  If you are already subscribed to my Feedburner feed you will now enjoy these new updates if your not subscribed to feedburner then use this link to update your subscription.

If your not subscribed...well let's just say you don't want to come to your house and force you to subscribe.  Things could get messy.

Open Letter to Representative Randy Kuhl (R-NY) of the 29th District

Dear Mr. Kuhl,

I read today that President Bush is going to ask Congress for up to $120 Billion in additional funds to support various war efforts.

$70 Billion for the war in Iraq. Why? Because the military says they are spending the money too fast. Well I am sorry to hear that but unfortunately you voted last night to take money away from the American citizens by cutting the budget on Educational and Medicare funds.

We heard Monday night that the President wants to curb federal spending and help America deal with skyrocketing health care costs. It is now two days later and we are seeing the exact opposite from this Administration.

It is time to say NO to the extra money this Administration is asking for to fight a war in a country we already accomplished our mission or so we were told.

We need to start focusing on us as a country then on everyone else's problems. We have problems. I watch my two oldest children in school try to learn Math in a system that isn't teaching them how to innovate themselves into learning but rather memorizing the basic facts to pass a state mandated test that "No Child Left Behind" is demanding. The President talks about America's children needing to be innovators to push America to lead the world. Well I am sorry to say but "No Child Left Behind" is hindering this effort.

We need a educational overhaul. We need a health care system overhaul. These two systems alone are failing this country. The amount of spending this Administration is doing will make us fall like the USSR fell. We are going to go broke. And it's so sad too because when President Clinton left office we had a surplus now I can't even figure out the deficit on the very laptop I am writing this letter to you today. Record deficit Mr. Kuhl.

It's time to say NO to the spending and time to start looking inward to the citizens.

Sincerely,
Ralph Whitbeck

Stylizing a Quote box with CSS

I had to create a quote box the other day and decided I would try the nifty little CSS quote boxes you see on all those fancy CSS designers sites.  So I went googling for a tutorial and found one by Simon Willison called Quick top: Styling blockquotes with CSS.

Basically his tutorial has you create a blockquote and then nest a div inside of it.  The reason for this is because in the Blockquote you put a background image (your left quote) to stick in the upper left.  Within the div you stick a background image (your right ending quote) to the lower right.

His use of Blockquote as the container wasn't ideal in my opinion so replacing that with a div and giving it it's own class work just the same for me.

Here is my mark I used for the quote box.

<div class="quote">
    <div>
        The numbers vindicate&#8230;that children who are given clear behavioral 
standards and social skills, allowing them to feel safe, valued, confident, and 
challenged, will exhibit better school behavior and learn more to boot.<br/>
        <span class="quotesource">-NY TIMES Op-Ed, August 16, 2005</span>
    </div>
</div>

The CSS to add the background images.

.quote 
{
  background: transparent url(images/leftquote.png) left top no-repeat;
  
}
.quote div 
{
  background: transparent url(images/rightquote.png) right bottom no-repeat;
}

That'll give you a box with your quote images on both side and your quote in the middle.  All you need now is to give it your personal touch.

Here are my end results.