Mike Munhall

We have some family that recently purchased a nice condo in Estes Park. We had the opportunity to spend some time up there this weekend to attend the annual Scottish Festival. Dorrie and I have been there the last three years in a row to enjoy the meat pies, dog shows, jousting and of course, the Highland games.

It was a typical September weekend for Estes Park. The weather was unpredicatable; there was clear blue skies with mild temperatures and the next moment it was pouring rain and nearly freezing. Whatever. Dorrie and I like that kind of stuff.

For the most part, it was a very relaxing weekend in the condo. We left only to attend the festival. The most exciting thing for me during our stay was learning Vampire: The Eternal Strugle. I won’t bother to try to explain how this game works; however, I will say that it is a tremendously fun game if you have the time to devote to learning it. I’m looking forward to playing again with my brother-in-law and his friends.

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This fella was hanging out in the neighbor’s yard when we arrived.

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Yes, jousting. I thought it was just a form of entertainment performed by actors at these types of festivals. Nope. Check out the guy standing in front of the Night that says Ni. That’s a Canadian flag on his uniform. Yup. He’s on the Canadian jousting team. I’m not too sure what he’s doing in the next photo.

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This was really cool. It’s a rail model where the trains travel through different miniatures of European towns and villages from the 1910’s and 1920’s. The detail was impressive. The last photo is of a dragon driving a tractor.

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As usual, Nephew B was his usual charming self.

Olberman is my hero for today.  He (and a few others) have an incredible ability articulate how many of us feel about the state of our country and the current administration.  Watch this:

http://movies.crooksandliars.com/CountDown-SpecialComment-Bush-911.mov

I have a ton to write about, but I’m not going to write about anything right now.  I’m working on the new site, mikemunhall.com.  I was going to install WordPress to use on that site, but the version available from my hosting provider is outdated.  So I installed Mambo and I’m trying to learn that instead.  Mambo should suit my needs much better than a blog, but it’s a rather large system so I can’t just sit down and be productive.

A lot of people have sent kind comments about the post regarding the technique to expand and collapse blocks of HTML. McKack asked how to change text or an image source from within [div] tag. Since the original post helped so many, I thought I’d post a solution to the first part of McKack’s inquiry. I’ll provide a snippet for the second part in a separate post.

There are dozens of ways to dynamically change the text on a web page using JavaScript. One way is to hide and show the contents of tags, as described in that first post. Another way is to use the innerHTML property:

[Download Snippet]

This example simply takes the contents of a form field and shoves it inside an HTML element, in this case a [div] block. It’s really that simple. Note that you can use innerHTML to set the contents of an element to anything that makes sense. That is, the content does not necessarily have be just text, it can be HTML elements, too.

Dorrie and I finished the loft this weekend. The loft is being used as a library. Along with the books we have various games and puzzles and a stereo for the iPod. This is definitely my favorite room in the entire house. The only thing missing is the photos and artwork on the walls. That will come later.