The Programmer and the Ant



Old programmers never retire … they just create a new routine.

Hacking code was one of my favorite pass times during my high tech career. Small wonder that my son continues to hack the parental controls on his laptop computer. But that’s a shaggy dog story for another time.

Programmers dream code in their sleep.  They are perpetually optimizing subroutines, seeking performance efficiencies and debugging PHP script.  For them it  is as autonomic as breathing itself. So it is no surprise that the idea to improve upon the ANT schematic magic was lurking in the annals of my own cortex-codex this morning.

Hmmmm, the text just wasn’t crisp enough in the animated Ant-gif yesterdayt.  How can I overlap text on top of an image within the confine of the blogging code? I can’t use a background command.

Or CAN I?!!!

What if the entire post was inside an embedded table cell? Oooh! Then I can use the background=cell command to load the image and the text would fall naturally on top of the animated gif!

Yes, it could have occured just like that. Or I could have googled “overlay text on top of image” and found a tasty tidbit of code in a Yahoo Answers post!

And for all the fellow geeks and programmers:

<table border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="590" height="440" valign="top" background=" IMAGE-URL" >
<p>VIOLA</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The NEW and IMPROVED! … ANT

Egoic Mind: Fussy little thoughts running through my mind like ants running all over a dead carcass.

Gnani: The dead creature doesn’t mind at all.

Egoic Mind: No I suppose it doesn’t.  So if I was brain dead, I suppose I wouldn’t mind my mind!

Gnani: Ego death would have the same effect.

Egoic Mind: Bring on the ants!

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