Boilerplate is not a template or framework, just a set of tools to get that site developed quickly. I know I will be making use of most of it in the near future.

Franki Nguyen recommended Tra Vinh to me last year and I made the long trek up William Street passed my current favourite Vietnamese Noodle House, Phong Vinh to Brisbane Streer to Tra Vinh.

I had made the trek twice before, once to be scared off by the queue outside and the second time with a couple of work colleagues and we where lucky to get the last table. This time it was busy, but there where a few tables available.

The menu was very similar to Phong Vinh I was almost tempted to order the Spicy Beef and Pork Vermicelli Soup, that I had the day before for a direction comparison. Instead I ordered the Tra Vinh Special Vermicelli Soup. I am really enjoying noodle soups at the moment and this one did not disappoint. Great robust flavour.

So what made it the Tra Vinh Special, well it contained pork, beef, chicken, duck, fishball, prawn, squid and liver. For somebody who has just started eating meat on a regular basis after 10 years of avoiding it. It was a little overpowering, particularly the liver. Still I finished the bowl and enjoyed it.

So what do you get for $10, a large bowl of noodle soup, packed with 8 different meats and complimentary chinese tea.

Will I be back again, yes, will I order the Tra Vinh Special Vermicelli Soup again, probably not it was a meatlover’s delight with just too many flavours for me. There are many more interesting items on the menu for me to try.

Once back at work, my usual blogging time on the train trip to and from work disappeared, as my MacBook Pro died and I started riding to work more often.

I need to start blogging on a more regular basis, I looked at what I do on a regular basis and are passionate about. Food, cycling and web development and decided that I should try and blog more about what you can get for lunch under $10AUD. For those that don’t know me that well, I work in Northbridge, Perth’s Chinatown with probably 100 restaurants within 3 blocks, I enjoy lunch it is my big meal of the day and while I am watching what I eat, I have managed to lose 9kg in 11 weeks. Mainly through consuming 2500 calories on active days that I burn over 3500 calories. The big surprise for those who do know me is that after 15 years, I have started eating meat again.

So hopefully you should start seeing more regularly posts about things I am passionate about, food, cycling and web development.

I was riding to work on Friday morning, when I started having a pain in the chest. Mild pain which I have been getting recently when I push myself on the bike, but because it is accompanied by a bout of nausea, I always put it down as stomach related. Instead it was angina and last Friday morning it did not go away in a couple of minutes after easing the pace.

So I stopped at the nearest train station intending to catch the next train to work. However, the pain did not go away while waiting for the next train and the nausea got worse. So instead I caught the next train home. About 10 minutes into the trip, I realised I was having a heart attack, my chest pains where much stronger, it felt like my lungs where being crushed. I was having trouble breathing and I was losing sensation in my left arm.

I rolled my bike out of the station and got home quickly, dropped the bike off, announced to Angie I was probably having a heart attack and walked across the road to the ambulance depot to get help.

I was then rushed to Fremantle hospital, while being told I should of called the ambulance from the train and they would of come and met me and saved 10 minutes, which could of made a big difference.

The reason I was being rushed to Fremantle hospital instead of Rockingham hospital which was closer, was Fremantle has a specialist coronary care unit, which I got to see at close hand. I was in the Fremantle emergency department for a little over 10 minutes, as the prepared me for surgery. Then I was in surgery, getting a blockage in an artery which supplies blood to the heart cleared and making sure it stayed open by inserting in a steel tube.

Because the operation was only done under local anaesthetic and a big dose of morphine, once I was in post op and I located my phone, I was tweeting about it a little over two hours after I realised I was having an heart attack.

48 hours after the operation, I was out of hospital, with no permanent damage to my heart. My lifestyle is about to change, I need to take drugs to reduce the thickness of my blood, my blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol every day for the rest of my life (even though only my cholesterol was above average). Lose a few kilos and eat less bad cholesterol ( reduce my intake of cheese, eggs, chocolate and fried noodles, because I eat little dairy or milk).

So a big thank you to everybody at the Kwinana ambulance depot, the Fremantle Hospital Emergency Department and Coronary Care Unit, without you I probably would not be alive right now.

However, you can easily fake it for backgrounds of block elements in IE with
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#aaRRBBGG', EndColorStr='#aaRRBBGG);
The filter gradient places a alpha channel colour gradient over the background. So as long the background is transparent, the start and end colours the same and the alpha (aa) channel a value greater than 0 (fully transparent) and FF (fully opaque), you get a block element in IE with a RGBa background. You can see an example of RGBa in action in IE

The simplest way is including in your CSS
background: transparent ;
background: rgba(255,0,0,0.5) ;
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#88ff0000', EndColorStr='#88ff0000');

Which is clean and simple, even it does deliver you invalid CSS. There are two problems, if a browser does not support RGBa and is not IE, (eg FF2) the block element background will be transparent. I do not think that is a major issue right now. There are a handful of browsers outside IE in use that do not support RGBa. My main concern is future proofing, the next major version of IE (the beta is due within a year) will support RGBa (as well as HTML5 and some CSS3 according to sources) and as usual will maintain backwards compatibility with earlier versions of IE. So you will get a semi transparent background colour overlaid with a semi transparent gradient.

The solution, is to provide a stylesheet to all browsers and an extra stylesheet to IE8 and below with conditional comments. So your CSS will have:
background: fallback color RGB or hex ;
/* background colour for browsers that are not IE that do not understand RGBa */
background: rgba(R,G,B,a) ;
Your HTML will include (note don’t try and cut and paste from here as grab the text file instead):
<!--[if lt IE 8]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/xtras/ieonly.css" media="screen" />
<![endif]-->
And ieonly.css file include:
background: transparent ;
/* needed to clear the background colour */
filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Gradient(GradientType=1, StartColorStr='#88ff0000', EndColorStr='#88ff0000');

If you don’t believe me and do not have IE6, here is the screenshot. And I was not the first one to suggest this method for implementing RGBa in IE, Hedger Wang did some time ago, and even suggested using canvas to provide the transparent background to FF2. I only found his example while finalising this post.

I will not submit it, because Dave has not accepted any new submissions almost two year, my demo is far from the visual standard of most other design and I broke one major rule the CSS does not validate.

There are no hacks in the CSS just lots of browsers specific declarations like:

-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 7px rgba(0,0,0,0.66);

And even worse Microsoft specific declarations, which break the W3C rules for CSS

filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.dropshadow(OffX=5, OffY=5, Color='#AA666666', Positive='true');

As I said in my presentation, the important thing to know about validation, is why your code does not validate, if you know that, then validation is irrelevant.

What I learnt is enough from probably a dozen blog posts, so hopefully I will be writing lot in the next few weeks.

The aim is to show how you can use CSS2 and CSS3 to improve the experience of visitors using modern browsers, while not blocking access to those people still using older browsers like IE6. I want to convince the audience, that you can build sites that do not have to look the same in all browsers.

I will be looking at what CSS2 and CSS3 you can safely implement now. The main provision it must not break IE6. It does not have to work in IE6, just have a safe fallback position.

The presentation is not aimed at people who read Surfin Safari, CSS3.info or similar sites and then go off an experiment with what they have been shown. That is what I do

I know I will be covering those I covered indepth before like opacity/transparency and <a href=http://nickcowie.com/2008/font-face/”>@font-face. Are there any other CSS2 or CSS3 properties you would like to see me cover? Otherwise I might go all shock and awe with transitions ;-)

So this is what I created to clean up Word HTML, you paste the HTML is to the editable div, hit the button and if you are using Internet Explorer the converted HTML is copied to your clipboard. So you can paste the clean HTML (note it is HTML code) straight into the CMS editor in HTML mode or WordPress.

Note, while you can use JavaScript to add to the clipboard with Internet Explorer, you need to use Flash to copy the contents to the clipboard for other browsers. I have not do that yet. Mainly because Internet Explorer is the corporate browser and this was created for work.

So have a look under the hood, see how it works, take the code and modify it for your own use. It appears to be working for what I need, but maybe needed to be modified for your situation.

*** does not currently work in IE8, I need to investigate further ***