For those of you who have asked: Yes! I’m observing No-Shave November again this year. This is only the 2nd consecutive November that I’ve gone without shaving, but the tradition started back in college. I know I had a “no-shave” beard when I proposed to my wife on Thanksgiving of 2001 and that was neither the first nor that last time I went without shaving for the month of November. Anyway, hair I grow again…

Last year I waited until November was over to post about it so I could show the progression of fuzziness. This year I decided to show my face as soon as I had a beard worthy of my last name.

So, who’s with me? Anybody else out there laying down their razor* for the month and sporting the woolly caveman look?

* I make an exception for occasionally shaving the hair on my neck.
I just can’t get into the wild neck beard.

I'm a big fan of President-Elect Barack Obama. I'm also a big fan of Chuck Norris. So Keith Robinson's idea of going to chucknorrisfacts.com and replacing "Chuck Norris" with "Obama", nearly made me fall off my chair laughing. So... I decided a bookmarklet was in order:

Directions:

1. Click & drag the bold "Obama Facts" link below to your bookmarks toolbar. If you're using Internet Explorer, right-click the link and Add to Favorites...
2. Visit chucknorrisfacts or any website that mentions Chuck Norris.
3. Click the "Obama Facts" link in your bookmarks toolbar.
4. LOL
5. Repeat step 4 OVER and OVER!

Obama Facts

PS: This is just a simple snippet of javascript that replaces every instance of "Chuck" with "Barack" and "Norris" with "Obama". You can click the link to see it in action on this page, but if you do, be sure to hit refresh before dragging it to your toolbar. Otherwise the bookmarklet itself will be altered so that it replaces "Barack" with "Barack" and "Obama" with "Obama". Enjoy!

Update:By @dkr's request, I also give you the Bacon Facts bookmarklet.
Powered by http://www.bacontwits.com - not really.
But sort of.

Update Again: After Bruce's comment, I was tempted to make a Tim Tebow version of the bookmarklet as well. Instead, I made one that prompts you for what word or name you would like to replace Chuck Norris with. Go ahead, give it a whirl: Custom Facts

Over a year ago I posted about the lack of a View Background Image option in Firefox when right-clicking on links. As a web designer, I use that context menu item on a regular basis, so for it to not be there for links seemed like a glaring omission.

To my surprise, a very kind volunteer came to the rescue with a head-start on an extension and an invitation to improve on it. The problem was that his simple extension did exactly what I wanted it to. When you right-clicked on a link, there was a “View Background Image” item that, when you clicked on it, linked to the CSS background-image of that element.

I didn’t feel the need to improve on James’ extension until it stopped working in Firefox3. Yes, there are many other ways of discovering the background-image of an element in Firefox (specifically through Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar) but I wanted my context menu item back, so I dove into the extensions folder and added the following functionality:

• It checks for a background image on the link you right-clicked on.
• If it…
  • Finds an image: You get a “View Link Background Image” context menu item.
  • Doesn’t find an image, but finds one on its immediate parent: You get a “View Parent Background Image” context menu item.
  • Finds no image on the link or its immediate parent: You get a disabled “View Link Background Image” context menu item.

While it doesn’t seem like a mission-critical extension, I’ve started relying on it for my day-to-day work and thought you might find it useful as well.

So without further ado, you can download the extension here.

Last week’s Refresh Columbia meetup was a lot of fun. We had nearly 30 people show up to hear 5 exciting lightning talks. I gave a presentation about how to stay connected to the web design community without drowning. Of course I added the disclaimer that I haven’t REALLY figured out that latter part. For those interested, here’s my slide deck: