J. Kevin Crowell – Java, CSS, Music, Guitars, Cars, Politics

I used to own a BMW E46 M3. It is not an exaggeration to say that it was my dream car. Silver with red leather, xenons, nav, 19?, SMG, the works. So why don’t I have it still? SMG.

SMG is a blessing and a curse. It does very well at keeping a high level of involvement with the driver, while giving the ability to switch gears automatically if need be, say to grab a drink of water to dial on a cell phone. Ideally, this sounds perfect for me. In some ways, it is. But the reality of SMG for me is that while it is perfectly possible to produce smooth shifts, the level of effort and concentration required is equal to (and even occasionally greater than) the concentration required with a standard manual. It’s just that instead of involving both feet, it’s just your right foot. But the position of the throttle, and how that influences when the clutch engages and how rapidly it engages, is so precise that it always has to be on your mind, similar to how shifting smoothly with a clutch requires you to be aware of engine speed, car speed, and other factors. And small changes in throttle make larger changes in behavior, making it easy to send passengers heads snapping back when you get too excited an really put your foot down.

And while I will not advocate not paying attention in a car, there are genuine times that you don’t want to focus on shifting a car. Say, on the way home from work. Or in traffic. Which is usually the same thing.

Earlier in my life I vowed that I would never own an automatic transmission. Obviously I was wrong. But I think the key here is that while it’s true that my priorities have changed, the bigger change for me is actually the quality of automatic transmissions now. They don’t immediately suck all of the fun out of the car. Even though steptronic type ideas have been around for a while, it’s not until this latest generation of cars that these transmissions can changes gears with that RIGHT NOW mentality that I demanded. The steptronic in the 335i feels nearly as fast as the M3, sometimes even faster, and definitely smoother and easier to operate.

The ride quality of the 335i is an excellent compromise as well. It’s amazingly good at absorbing bumps on the freeway, while still feeling fun and responsive while going around corners. BMW still sets the standard here, and anyone who has ever driven one can tell you.

The M3 handling is also a great compromise, though more in the sports direction. However, no car I’ve ever driven was so beautifully balanced. You could really feel like a driving hero with the traction control switched off, allowing the back to come out just enough to enjoy yourself before regaining traction and blasting off ahead. That feeling is something I miss in the 335i.

In the looks department, I’d still have to give the nod to the M3.  Not just because it rises above all of the more common 3 series, but because the E46 is a car of classic proportions.  The short front overhangs, flared fenders, hood bulge, and oft copied side vents all look the racer part, but in a way that stays classy.  It’s like wearing an Armani suit without a tie.   The E90, while decidedly more modern, is not quite as timeless.  Though it’s a prettier car than all of its current rivals.  And it does look quite a bit sexier with the M-Tech aerodynamic kit installed, as on mine.

Performance wise, it’s an interesting contrast.  The M3 feels like you have to push it a bit harder, but it’s more rewarding.  The M3 felt wrong going slowly.  The 335i feels perfectly at home at any pace, cruising around in a parking lot searching for a spot or tearing down the freeway.   The torque of the 3.0 liter twin turbo is amazingly satisfying in normal traffic, but I do miss the crazy machine gun/sportbike/turbine wail of the 3.2 liter six in the M3. You could often turn someone’s head just by revving to the magic 4500 RPM where the raspy wail would come out and wake up the neighbors.  And the M3 was definitely faster when you really, really were on it 10/10ths.  Just not below that.

Either of these cars could make an enthusiast happy.  But I’ve found out which one I’d rather live with, and that’s the 335i.  I just wish my 6’4? frame would have fit in the coupe.

A few of the flaws:

Well, this is a long story really. This was my first attempt to buy a nice carved top jazz guitar. At the $2500 I paid for it, I thought I was in for an amazing bargain from an up and coming luthier. But, I just could not bring myself to be happy with this guitar and its numerous flaws, and I wanted to post my account so that anybody considering such a guitar had some point of reference.

First, the good. The materials used were clearly top notch. The flame on the back and sides was exquisite. The polished ebony tailpiece was in itself amazing! Ditto the polished ebony pickguard. And the split block inlays. These are certainly the marks of a classy instrument. And most importantly, the tone of the guitar was great. It was very loud acoustically, and quite resonant. Notes leapt from the fretboard.

Unfortunately, there was the bad. The frets were the roughest frets I’ve ever felt, even in comparison to a $99 Fender Squire Bullet. It was like murder trying to slide up and down the fretboard. There were numerous frets which weren’t level. But even these playability issues were overshadowed by the terrible nut, where the G slot looked like it was half an inch wide. I’m sure I’m exaggerating to some degree but it was huge, probably 5 times the correct size. So anything played with an open G sounded like a sitar with the string buzzing in the slot.

Then, there was the ugly. It looked like there was wood filler along the seams. Bits of glue which had gotten dirty and turned black were in the finish. Glue was leaking out from the seams.

So, one of the main reasons I gave this guitar a shot was because there was a return policy to go along with it.  I am taking down the actual content of these emails because some time has passed and I want to give Les a break and the benefit of the doubt by assuming he might have changed his ways.

In summary, he fought me tooth and nail to give me a refund which was supposed to be a pretty painless process as promised in the ad.  My hope is that he’s gotten better not only in his business practices, but also in his building.  From the photos I’ve seen of his recent work, I believe that is most likely the case, but I have no further personal experience to comment on.

Published at May 24, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

So since I build amps, and more specifically since I like to buy tools that are of a higher caliber than I require, I have a TPI 440 Scope Plus Scopemeter which I bought off eBay (used). I’d had this scope for about 3 years when suddenly, it became stuck in logic mode, rendering it pretty useless to me.

Since I was in the middle of trying to diagnose a Ceriatone DC-30 clone build, I quickly inquired to TPI if they could fix my meter, how quickly they could do it, and how much it would cost. Shortly after I fired off my email I got a response saying go ahead and send the meter in, we’ll fix it for free.  Wow! I thought, that’s really fantastic.

Well it gets even better.  Since I asertain they could not figure out how to fix my meter, they actually sent me a BRAND NEW ONE.  Yup, brand new.  In the box. Shiny. Mint. You get the idea.

So, props to you TPI instruments, I’d certainly buy something from you again with that type of service.

Here’s an odd one that took me quite a long time to figure out.  There were a few styles on a page I was working on which were using background:url() to overwrite a background image, instead of correctly specifying background-image:none.

Well in addition to looking generally ugly in your code, this CSS hack has another much nastier component: it causes Firefox to request your page more than once.  For instance, if you are looking for /myform.html and using a POST, if you watch the traffic coming from the browser, you’ll set a POST for /myform.html and later, a GET for /myform.html.  If you use a GET for /mypage.html, you’ll see a GET for /mypage.html and later another GET.  In the cases where you are using a POST especially, this can be some pretty nasty behavior as you can imagine.

Firefox will not request the page once per background:url() appearance in your code however, it will simply request the page twice until all instances of background:url() are removed.

This behavior was tested on various 2.0 forms on Linux and Windows, I’m unsure of the behavior with 1.5 and prior browsers.  I have not tested it yet in 3.X versions.

This was one of those things I’d wanted to figure out, but I hadn’t sat down to finally come up with a workable solution. When I did, it seemed so simple, but I hadn’t read about it anywhere else so I thought I’d put it out there for other people to use.

The basic idea is it’s nice to have images for things like submit buttons, but it’s equally annoying to generate as many of these as you have text to put over them. Wouldn’t it be nice to just use the same image but vary the text which is displayed? Of course. And clearly you can do something by putting a background-image over any div and having JavaScript trigger the form submit, but that is a little ugly in my opinion. You always would have to remember to include the form submit code in your page, instead of simply using the div as you would a standard input type=”image”.

Well it turns out you can have both. All that you really need to do, is put the image you want to use as a submit button into the background of a div, as you might before. And put the text you want over the image as the content of that div. The next part is the trick, and it’s a simple one: using absolute positioning, put a input type=”image” right over the top of that div. But, just use a clear gif as the image. Viola! Now you can see and read the text and the image behind it, but when you click on it, you’re really just clicking on the submit button. Just make sure the container is position:relative so that it works in Internet Explorer as well as FireFox. Also note we’re sizing the input at 100%, so that all we really need to size is the image part, making that class reusable for different sizes of submit image.

About the only downside I can see to his technique is that you can’t easily copy the text on the submit button, since you’ll be selecting the clear gif sitting on top of it. But, that really doesn’t bother me much. And you would not be able to copy text that sat inside of an image in any event.

Markup is like this:

<div class="image-submit-container image-submit-big">
Continue
<input type="image" name="image-button" value="Continue" src="spacer.gif"/>
</div>

And styles are like this (flavor to taste):

.image-submit-container {
	color:#FFFFFF;
	font-weight:bold;
	position:relative;

}
.image-submit-container input {
	width:100%;
	height:100%;
	display:inline;
	float:left;
	position:absolute;
	top:0px;
	left:0px;
}
.image-submit-big {
	background: transparent url(btn_blank_big.gif) no-repeat 0 0;
	height:36px;
	width:190px;
	padding-top:6px;
}