Kind of pretty, but...

The abstract image, an interesting combination of geometric and organic shapes, happens to be the LCD screen from my 6-month old Casio Exilim camera that's been my nearly constant companion for the past few months.

Since I've been working on this website in earnest I've tried to keep my camera with me  pretty much all the time, to grab the odd photo, sound or image that catches my eye (or ear).

I had it in the side pocket of my jeans when I walked around Nashville the other morning, trying to find a good breakfast place. When I pulled it out to take a picture of my croissant and coffee from the Provence coffeeshop, I saw—to my dismay—this pattern. I tried turning the camera off and on, even taking the battery out and putting it back, in hopes that this was an electrical malfunction that might reset itself. But no.

The lines radiating from the center of the black blob seem to show that something sharp punched in the screen at that  point. I didn't have any sharp objects in my pocket, but I did have some crumpled up dollar bills. It would be ironic if a dollar or two in my pocket cost me a couple of hundred for a new camera.

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Life on the street

Click on the image at right to learn the story told by this collection of discarded items that I saw on a Nashville sidewalk.

Geeky details:
To create the interactive image, I followed the tutorial How to Create an Image Map using CSS by Stu Nicholls, at WebReference.com. It was exactly what I was looking for, very clear and specific. This technique uses a definition list to created the hotspots, meaning that all the descriptive text is searchable in the HTML of the document.

Stu Nicholls is something of a wizard with CSS. His site CSS Play is a collection of demos of how to use CSS to create image galleries, scrolling images, animation and more. Well worth a visit—I can pretty well promise that you'll see things you never imagined you could do with CSS.

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