kite...see 'let's go fly a'.
The translucent background image is a Pyro XS stunt kite that I picked up while on Cape Cod a few years back. Very fun; you pull on one of two lines wrapped around your wrists to make it veer left or right. With a bit of practice you can do loops, swoop along just above the ground, or sign your name in the air.
The last time I had a chance to play with it in a nice wind was during my 25th anniversary vaction last summer in Nova Scotia. If you like rocks, oceans, eagles, and more rocks, and driving for eighteen hours, it's definitely worth checking out.
To create the pale background image, I used the GIMP (GNU Image Manipulate Program), selected the sky with the 'magic wand' tool, inverted the selection, copied just the kite, pasted it to a new file with a transparent background, and then turned down the opacity to about 20%. Voila.
sessions and persistence
You may notice that I've put the 'background:' buttons on this page, like the ones on the javascript page. The reason is that it illustrates the problem with client side scripts: they're not very good at remembering things.
If you click the 'flowers' button to change the background and then head over to the 'javascript' page you'll see that the background doesn't stay flowers; it swaps back to the kite. The reason is that these are two distinct pages, with no innate connection. What happens on one page doesn't carry over automatically to the other.
But there is a way to make this do what you'd expect, and that's to have the JavaScript create and query a browser cookie. I'll leave that one for another time.
