No, not the show, ha. I'm talking about the real world. As in the big, cold n' scary world of...post-graduation. In exactly one week I will have a Bachelor's degree in Digital Media from my university. Hooray, right? Yes! I'm excited! I'm happy to be moving on and starting a new life.
And yet...I'm not. I've been trying really hard this past week not to get too nervous about it. Also, I've been waving off these lurking feelings of regret and "wishes". Like I wish I had gotten more involved on campus, or met more people, or had more to show. But really, now is not the time for regrets and looking back at the past. It's time for the future! Space! Technology! Televisions that will flip on automatically and go "Melissa, Lost is coming on in 5 minutes!" and then cheerfully switch to the right channel. Yes, I can dream.
Maybe it's because I'm just still in denial about this whole thing. Anyone ever have experiences or thoughts like these? But even though I don't think my mind is currently grasping the entirety of this whole situation, I know things will end up being ok for me eventually and I may even find my dream and purpose in life someday. Here's hoping!
There are some super cool things I've been learning about CSS and design lately. Obviously, I like to talk about this stuff, ha! CSS is my new favorite web toy, if you can call a language a toy. 
Not only am I gleaning some amazing tips from the book that I mentioned in my last post but I've also discovered something pretty sweet from this CSS Layouts site. It is a repository for several kinds of validated and optimized layout markup that you can use for any kind of template. I'm not talking pretty colors and blog themes, this is the bare bones kind of stuff. It's great to play with!
The cool thing I found was a tip on setting your site's container div widths. Instead of just setting an official pixel size for your main div container (like 745px, for example) you can set an em size. Depending on how familiar you are with CSS, you may have seen this before in the syntax as like "font-size: 1em;" or something. An "em" size will set whatever it is your sizing as relative to the font size of the parent element.
You know what that means?? It means that if you set your main div container to an "em" size, it will be scalable. Yes, you read correct. It will scale itself according to the font size of that container! So ultimately, it means that any user who needs to increase their font size via their browser will have the whole design scale a bit larger right along with it! That is kind of "wow" to me, I had never really heard of that before.
Now, of course, this means that you're layout must be able to be scaled. Meaning you can't really have a fixed width with fixed image sizes for your header and so on unless you make it so when the design is scaled, it doesn't break and go splat. Also, the "em" width has to be calculated according to whatever width you do want your site be. And technically, you can have that 745px by setting it as the min-width so your site doesn't shrink. See that image up there for an example. But how do you calculate the correct "em" size?
Divide your desired pixel width by 13; the result is your width in ems for all non-IE browsers. Take the em width you just calculated and multiply it by .9759 to find the width in ems for IE. ~ YUI Grids
Isn't that just a novel thing? I thought it was pretty amazing myself. 
Am I right? 
@Jessica: Hehehe, yeah! That and super busy trying to finish things up. You know what though, I bet that someday we will find our niches in life and they will just bonk us on the head. Randomly…I bet!!! Puzzle Pirates! Lol, I need to check that place out.
@Angela: Yaaaay, I’m excited too! And yeah, I probably will be re-evaluating for quite a while.
@Ashley: Yes you are right!
Yeah I don’t think I’ll find the “established” job right away either, but it would be so awesome if I did.