Still got the fever…

I was perusing some of the older articles on my site today, such as the one about Bucker and Garcia. For those of you who don’t remember B&G (or, shame on you, were too young to experience them), they’re the one-hit wonders behind everyone’s favorite video game themed song, “Pac-Man Fever.”

Well, as we can see from this video, they’ve still got the fever.

It clearly is a home video, apparently shot in the home music room of either Buckner or Garcia (although I notice that the plaque on the gold record says “Presented to Mike Stewart). Our heroes are set up with a pair of microphones and appear to be performing the song. Buckner (I’ll assume top billing means he’s the lead singer) most definitely is singing live, but the backing music sounds suspiciously canned, despite Garcia’s keyboard (and miraculously chorus-like backing vocals).

I got suspicious when I realized Garcia was lip-syncing the backing vocals even though Buckner was really singing, and when the guitar solo appeared, note-for-note and bend-for-bend consistent with the original that’s permanently etched into my brain from the 8 billion times I listened to the song in 1983 alone, I finally realized what was going on…

You see, it was fairly common for singles released by Columbia Records at the time to include an instrumental version of the song on the flip side. And that is what was playing in Buckner’s spare bedroom. He was doing karaoke to his own song.

It’s not finished yet, but it’s already pretty stupid…

You may or may not have seen my Stupid JavaScript Tricks A–Z page. For a while I’ve had a mildly enticing teaser on that page promising “something big” when I get to the letter D. Well, I finally decided to skip C and get started on that “big” letter D. It’s about half done, but since I only get the inspiration (and time) for these kinds of things in short, sporadic bursts, I decided to run with it and post it in a half-completed state. The real topper is what comes next, and hopefully someday I’ll get around to it.

In the meantime, please check out the incomplete… Delete the Internet.

Parenting an infant… imposed insomnia and one-handed typing

Pardon the brevity (and any typos), but I’m typing one-handed while my slumbering one-week-old daughter slowly cuts off the circulation in my left arm.

I’m not bemoaning parenthood, though doubling the size of your brood certainly brings a new set of challenges. (At least we’re not outnumbered.) Especially when you’ve got a newborn who only sleeps peacefully at 2 PM or while being held. (As noted before, I’m in the latter situation here, being precisely as far away from 2 PM as possible.)

There’s not much more to say without beginning to sound like I regret and/or resent the role of father, when in fact, looking down at her beautiful, peaceful, sleeping face, nothing could be farther from the truth (although I wouldn’t mind terribly trading places with her at the moment).

When nothing really isn’t nothing

I’ve spent the better part of the past two work days trying to figure out a weird scenario where a few elements in a heavily CSS-based page layout are inexplicably shifting a few pixels to the right. It is generally happening in pages that have content in the left column, whereas pages that do not have content in the left column are displaying normally. However, there are a few pages with empty left columns that still don’t display correctly. Comparing the source code, I discovered that some of the empty left columns nonetheless contain comment tags and those comment tags are what seems to be making the difference. But strangely, it’s the pages that have left column content or have completely empty left columns that are breaking, whereas the only ones that are not breaking are the ones where the left column block contains only comment tags.

Once again, the mysterious Microsoft voodoo amazes and confounds me.