Tuesday, January 08, 2002
|11:22 AM|
Educational. The "How Stuff Works" website is incredibly dangerous.

Remember those little sponges that came in a gelatin capsule? It looked like a big pill, but when you put it in hot water the gel would melt away and a dinosaur or some other child-exciting creature would spring forth into fully inflated being. Those were pretty neat, but what were more interesting and harder to define were the creatures that grew in tanks of water. You'd get a rubbery alligator or a dinosaur of some kind, measuring only a couple inches long. When placed in a tank of water it would begin to absorb it, and grow in size.

Though my family never used anything much larger than a bucket, in high school a friend of mine "boosted" a very large trashcan and managed to grow the biggest damn rubber foam animal thing I had ever seen. Touching it's slimy, water soaked flesh was an experience I do not think I could duplicate any other way. Touching the creature gave the impression that if it was removed from it's watery home it would fall apart like a handful of mud. Despite our best efforts at work we cannot find an explanation of how those worked, nor can we even find a name for them. It is frustrating.

I came up with an odd idea, should I happen to find a place that sells the sponge capsules on a wholesale basis. They were per pill fairly cheap, even in museum gift shops. I wonder how long I could get away with selling them to ravers. "It's called sponge...no, not the birth control. No, not the 'midnight at the well of souls' sponge. Oh for God's sakes, it puts the power of the dinosaur into you! Now eat it!"



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We need one created for the years, and then the months. The months are the /////tricky ones, since they need their ID to increase more than the years, but since the functions keep referencing ///// the same name system, we have to be careful not to make the years close up when we click on a month. ///Set some Variables $YearMenuID = 1; /////What ID the preceding year link controls. Needs to be same for all the months under a given year. $MonthMenuID= 1; ////What ID the preceding month link controls. Needs to be the same for all the weeks under a given ////Month but not the same as any year, etc. $LastYearUsed = 0; $LastMonthUsed = 0; echo '
'; /////That should be the "Year" div. All the years should be in this one DIV. ///Start the main loop. foreach ($myDateArray as $key => $value) { ////Pulling the year/date. $month = ExtractMonth($value); $year = ExtractYear($value); $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; $PrettyMonth = $MyDateArray[$month]; ////Is this a new year? If ($year != $LastYearUsed) ///Then we need to put the year down. No DIV created quite yet. { ///First off, we need to close the preceding year's DIV. Twice if it ain't 2001 if ($year != 2001) { echo '
'; } echo '
'; //That should close up the previous year. ///Say this is the swap from 2001 to 2002, that should close up the 2001 links. ///Problem is, we also need to close up the final month links too. /// echo '
'; //We Need to set the $YearMenuID $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; ///Now it should be different than other menu items, but the same for all parts of this //year's DIV. ///This all needs to be in HTML. print<<<_HTML1_

$year

_HTML1_; ///Okay, so now we have a year link that controls...nothing. We need to create a DIV ///For it to control. Since this is the first year, We also need the first month to be put down, no matter ///what. ///So a DIV for all the months is needed. print<<<_HTML2_
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