Not (Quite) Indispensable

Don't get me wrong: I love my iPhone. It's awesome to have the internet at my fingertips almost anywhere. But, for me, it's still a toy. It's not an indispensable tool. Not yet.

I regularly use my iPhone to Twitter, track my daily weight, look things up on Wikipedia, read USA Today, check my Gmail, track my to-do list, and check the weather. I rarely use it as the phone it is, as my friends are mostly e-mail or Facebook types, and I don't have a kid to track down multiple times a day. I do text with Aaron every now and again, when one of us is at work.

Very few of these things actually require a mobile handheld device. I could check the weather from my computer at work or at home. Same with my e-mail and Twitter (although Twitter wouldn't be quite as much fun that way). I have an Excel spreadsheet with my daily weight. And so on.

That said, the iPhone was the closest thing to an indispensable tool when we were in Japan.

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Testing, Testing...

Micfo to the rescue! Their customer support may have saved the day, after their mod_security updates b0rked my blog.

The big test will be whether I can post a link in a post without it barfing on me...

Still Broken

Tried to post my Photo Thursday entry from my iPhone, and got the same problem I've been getting from my computer. (Which sucks, since it took me for freakin' EVER to type out the image tag one-fingered on that little keyboard.) I wonder if it's something to do with having HTML in the entry?

[tests preview with a URL in the entry body]

Yep, that's it. Hmm. Guess I'll go and repair my database? There has to be a funky unescaped character in there somewhere, gunking up the works, since I haven't made any changes to anything lately.

Sorry for the nerdy website talk. I'll be back to normal blogging as soon as I get this damn thing fixed.

(I might have to miss a week of Photo Thursdays. That's disappointing.)

This Isn't Good Timing.

This is peculiar. My tweets were posting to my blog just fine around 3pm today, but I can't seem to make the regular Movable Type interface let me post a blog entry. It won't work from Firefox or Safari. I'm trying this from my iPhone, to see if it's something to do with my MT installation itself.

If this makes it through, I'll try posting from Aaron's computer. If not, I'll try posting to the help forums. Gah!

Roadshow Recap

After reading this article about how to present while people are twittering, I thought it would be fun to have the iPhone out and a-twittering during today's MicroStrategy Roadshow in Cleveland. Alas, it seems that I still scribble physical notes faster than I can type on my iPhone. So, instead of live-tweeting the roadshow presentations, I opted to take notes for later publication instead.

If you're interested in Business Intelligence software and would like to know what I thought of the new features in MicroStrategy 9, read on. Otherwise, just know that I got up excessively early, learned a lot, and got excited about an updated product for my work.

[Update: in response to a reader's comment, I've expounded on a couple of new features of MicroStrategy 9: Personalized Prompt Answers and the new Graph Report Designer.]

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It's Official: I *heart* my iPhone

I'm all curled up on the recliner, tapping away on my iPhone. Thanks to this MT plugin, I can blog from wherever I can get a signal on my cell. Granted, it requires me to type one- or two-fingered on a tiny qwerty keyboard, but I'm getting used to that, anyway.

This will come in quite handy when we're on vacation this summer. This will be especially handy if we can, in fact, make our iPhones work in Japan for an additional fee.

Is liveblogging your vacation cool or lame?

Ah, Courtship.

Aaron and I had been dating for less than a year when he moved out of his dad's house at age 22. After that, we were finally able to spend weekend nights together (as the twin bed in my dorm room wasn't terribly conducive to overnight stays, and I couldn't exactly sleep over at his house with his dad around).

Those days were lean for Aaron, monetarily speaking, so he'd make food for us most Saturdays, except when we went to the $5 Chinese Buffet for lunch. There were a couple of years, one in particular, that I remember spending entire Saturdays in his apartment, eating Chicken Helper Shake-N-Bake for lunch or dinner — rather, the more generic but still tasty Chicken Bakin' Magic or Chicken Bakin' Miracle — and playing video games ALL DAY LONG. Broken up by rounds of snoo-snoo, of course.

Recently, Aaron ripped the audio from the Puyo Puyo Sun PlayStation game, and we listened to a few select tracks on his computer, including the intro:

We played the shit out of this game back in the day, so I didn't even need the visuals. I pantomimed everything that went on during the intro, even though I hadn't played the game for years. And when the track got to about 1:35, I made the funny face I used to always make, mocking the main villain character (who, incidentally, is named Satan).

Yep, those were the days.

So, what else did we play? Let's see... we started out on Saturn and SNES, mainly, then moved to Dreamcast and PlayStation. I remember playing Bust A Move, and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and Dr. Mario. [Edit: And how could I forget Tetris Attack? We played the shit out of that one, too.] We didn't just do puzzle games, though; I held my own quite well in Soul Calibur and the occasional Bushido Blade. Later on, we got hopelessly addicted to the Tony Hawk games, with 2 and 3 being our favorites. As we got a little less rabid in our gaming days, we'd play Cool Boarders 2 and SSX Tricky and the later Tony Hawk games and Dave Mirra.

These days, we don't do a whole lot of gaming together on the weekends. When we do, we tend to stick with Carcassone on Xbox 360, or Boom Blox, or sometimes Wii Sports or Rock Band.

We should really get back into gaming together, though, even if we have to drag out the Saturn or the Dreamcast to do it right. Those days were so much fun.

Twitter Update (#1081720320)

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Twitter Update (#1074760341)

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Weekend of Techie Goodness

It was Saturday evening, after a scrumptious dinner of Vietnamese deliciousness. We had come home from dinner and Starbucks, and had been snuggling on the couch, having a quiet evening together, talking.

I was looking at the packages under the tree; one smallish box in particular was wrapped in this year's signature "From Diana To Aaron" wrapping paper. And this present was mocking me. I couldn't let it sit there for another three weeks. I had to give it to him TONIGHT.

So I did. I gave Aaron his new 8GB iPhone as an early Christmas present — partly because I wanted him to have it sooner rather than later, and partly because it would be wasteful to be paying for this month's voice and data plans while it was just sitting there under the tree.

He loves the shit out of his new toy, and he's already texted his BFF several times (OK, guys don't have BFFs, but you know what I mean). Hell, he even went and signed up on Twitter. He might even get a Facebook account next! Who the hell knows.

I don't think it lessens his joy one bit that I went out and bought an 8GB iPhone for myself after lunch today, and signed us up for the Family Plan. If anything, shared joy is doubled. Right?

We spent the weekend setting up our new toys, learning how to make ringtones, downloading apps, texting (that was mostly him), using the wifi at Starbucks, and generally making the leap to "real" cellphones from our old prepaid jobbies. We even have camera phones now! Holy shit.

This is going to be fun.

Website Unb0rked

Hey! How about that? A simple suggestion (go back to static publishing instead of trying dynamic) proved to be the answer. I really should have thought of it myself, but I was so intent on making it work the one way I wanted.

So, you can now access my blog at http://www.dianaschnuth.net or http://blog.dianaschnuth.com — they both point to the exact same place. Comments work again, feeds should no longer do funky things, and all is well.

I can now go back to posting normal blog entries and waiting with bated breath for my regulars to post comments. Oh, yes, and I can also go back to finishing my website redesign.

Website Still Broken

For the sake of my RSS / LJ subscribers, I'm going to leave my website broken for now. Individual entries are broken, categories are broken, and basically the only things that work right are the main page and the RSS feed. (Well, except those extra 15 duplicate entries that came down the pike tonight.)

So, until the nice gentleman from the MT forums comes through with another idea for me, or until I come across the answer elsewhere on teh intarwebs, I'll just leave it like this. Anyone who would really want to comment on anything can either e-mail me or hit me on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or MySpace. I'm not hard to reach.

Come to think of it, maybe you should hit me up on one of those places even if you weren't going to comment. The beauty of social networking isn't so much that you make fake friends, or that you pretend to be closer to the friends and acquaintances you have, but that it's that much easier to get in contact with people. Think about that.

Success!

If you can see this entry, that means my domain has successfully propagated to point to my new server. Yay!

I'm sure there will be some broken things on the site. Files missing, homegrown databases yet to be restored, other indignities of that nature. Just shoot me an e-mail or leave a comment somewhere, and I'll address the problem as time permits.

Once things are back to how they used to be, I plan to do a major overhaul of the site. You folks who subscribe via RSS probably won't notice much, but anyone who visits the page will see the first big blog redesign in the past three years.

I just saved myself over $100 per year by moving servers. How about that shit?

Update, just before midnight: Well, almost success, anyway. I have some troubleshooting to do regarding my fancy new add-on domain and Movable Type. If I use the add-on domain or its corresponding subdomain (dianaschnuth.net or blog.dianaschnuth.com), MT gives me a 500 Internal Server Error. If I don't use one of those, and I use dianaschnuth.com/blog instead, I break all the links in my archive pages. Most notably, my stylesheets.

Argh!

My Queue

My plan had been to get a move-on with migrating my blog to my other server tonight. I'm planning an entire redesign, and am finally ready to sit down and do it.

My hosting provider had other plans.

Turns out that, somehow, I didn't get the Past Due Notice that I'm *sure* they must have sent before charging me a late fee. So, when I tried every possible password combination to log into my Cpanel and nothing worked, I decided to log into the Members section of their site, where I discovered that my account had been suspended. I promptly PayPal-ed them my annual $85 for 5GB of webspace (plus a $9 late fee), then contacted Billing (via a support ticket, since they had no e-mail or other contact form on their site) to confirm that my payment had been received and that my account would be un-suspended.

To their credit, they responded within an hour and reactivated my account — while I was writing this blog entry, in fact. I was seriously considering whether I wanted to continue my business relationship with a company that doesn't seem to notify its customers before suspending their accounts... but this is the first real issue I've had with them (besides their initial data entry error in calling me "Dina"), so I'm willing to stick with them for another year. After all, dianaschnuth.com has been hosted there for the past three years with no major snafus.

I hadn't been planning to go off on my web hosting provider, though. I'd been planning to detail my project plan for the next couple of months.

November, as usual, is National Novel Writing Month. I've never "won," meaning I've never successfully completed a 50,000-word novel in the month of November. I've never finished a 50,000-word novel at all. I have three unfinished novels, though: the first, started in 1999 (I think) and clocking in at 19,400 words, I haven't touched since 2004, according to Windows. The second was my first real attempt at NaNoWriMo, back in 2005 — between my NaNo wordcount and subsequent additions, it's up to 16,000 words, and hasn't been touched (besides the story bible) since late 2006. The third was last year's half-hearted attempt at NaNo, which only made it to 10,000 words, despite being a plot idea I'm particularly fond of.

I'm going to pick one of these to write on this November. Since I haven't successfully completed NaNoWriMo with 50,000 words in 30 days, I'm not going to be invoking the Zokutou Clause by finishing a previous work and still claiming to be officially participating. See, the rules clearly state that all actual writing must be done within the month of November (of the current year) in order to qualify. So, technically, I'm not planning to do NaNo this year. I am, however, planning to devote much of my November to writing.

Which means I need to get my blog redesigned (or well on its way) in the next 2½ weeks. And then decide which story I want to finish this November.

Oh, yeah, and after that? I should really update my portfolio and resume.

New Toy

I'm sitting in the recliner, typing on our new-to-us laptop with a brand-new stick of RAM installed.

(Note to self: need to trim fingernails before doing any hardcore typing on this here laptop.)

Aaron and I are preparing for our trip to Rhode Island this weekend for the Providence Anime Conference -- he's ironing and spot-cleaning his cosplay, while I'm trying not to fall asleep before I get all my stuff packed and ready to go. The laptop will be accompanying us, despite the fact that our hotel only has wired internet, and we only have wifi on the laptop. I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the Convention Center will have wifi. If nothing else, we'll be able to mess around and pre-write blog entries about the con.

New toys are fun.

Twitter Update (#926285556)

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One Down, One Zillion To Go

Apart from a few minor issues that I need to finish addressing, my freelance gig is complete. The site is done, the client knows how to update it, and I've been paid for my work. Now the trick is to get Chelsea Tipton's website to come up first in the Google rankings for a search on his name, instead of being stuck on the second page of results.

Now that I have one project in the bag (or I will very shortly), I can contemplate my next project: moving and redesigning my blog.

And after that's done, I have a laundry list of projects that will literally never end. Not until I'm dead.

Minor things like editing home videos and outputting them to DVD. Major things like finishing a novel or two. Mundane things like getting my fucking desk clean once and for all. Pragmatic things like updating my resume and portfolio. Creative things like songwriting, or photography, or scrapbooking. Oh, Lordy, the scrapbooking. I haven't even finished scrapbooking our honeymoon, and we celebrated our 5th anniversary this past May.

Whenever I hear someone say they need a hobby, I want to invite them to have one of mine. I have more than I'll ever use up.

Techy, But Thrifty

Aaron and I have been on the lookout for a cheap garage sale laptop for some time now. While we didn't want to plunk down multiple hundreds of dollars for one, we thought it would be helpful to have one for when we go out of town to anime conventions (and whyever else we go out of town), so we could actually use the free wireless connections we sometimes score. Granted, Aaron's Nintendo DS and PSP can access the web via wifi, but having a laptop would be so much easier.

Imagine our surprise when we were garage saling a few weeks ago and came across a laptop for $15. The woman manning the sale said it was her husband's, mainly, but that something was up with the power cord, and it wouldn't stay powered up. Usually the laptops we find have a cracked screen, which is a big dealbreaker — but this one had none of that. It was dirty, missing some clips and feet, and had cracks by the hinges, but the screen was fine. We talked the lady down to $10, and I ponied up for our initial investment in this used laptop.

We took it home and tried to power it up, with no luck, of course. I eventually noticed that the power light on the AC adapter wasn't even coming on, so Aaron took the next monetary hit for the laptop and bought a new adapter online for $17.

The adapter arrived yesterday, so we plugged it in and it powered right up. Rock! Then it came up with a Windows 2000 login screen. Suck! We tried various combinations of administrator and admin as usernames with various obvious passwords, but no dice. I went online and located a utility to boot into Linux from a CD-R and hack the passwords, but before we tried to use it, Aaron saved the day by suggesting the one obvious administrator username and password we hadn't tried ("administrator" with a blank password), and it logged us right in. Effin' A.

So, we sat down and played around with our new toy. Unfortunately, the previous owners didn't leave anything cool on the computer — just a Disney game that Aaron uninstalled without even launching it. We experimented with letting it run on battery power alone, and discovered that it only lasts for about a half hour on a full charge. I'd already requested a replacement battery from Dell, since we discovered in our online research that the battery had been recalled; but I haven't gotten any response back, so I'm assuming that the recall program is no longer being honored. Turns out that batteries are $60, so I think we'll be content for now with having a semi-portable computer that just needs an outlet.

Next necessary element: a wireless card.

Our new-to-us Dell Inspiron 5000 takes almost any PCMCIA wireless card. We could have had instant gratification by buying the Linksys Wireless-G card at Best Buy for $50, but that would really defeat the purpose of buying a laptop on the cheap in the first place. You don't pay more for the wireless card than you have for the whole kit so far. So, after some searching online, Aaron found the very same card on eBay for just under $20 shipped. Score!

So, in probably less than a week, we'll have a functional laptop with wireless connectivity. Next upgrade will be more RAM — it's running with 65MB right now, but can hold up to 256MB, I think.

Hey, all we really need it for is internet, so it doesn't have to do much. For about $50 so far, this is a deal.

FAIL.

Not sure if I'm relieved or totally pissed... but I just solved in half an hour what I've been trying to puzzle out for six, count 'em, six hours.

If only I would have Googled the right words when I started.

See, I want to include a list of upcoming appearances on my client's website, and I knew Google Calendar would be easily updated and — I thought — easily pulled into WordPress and styled just so. Turns out it's not quite as simple as all that.

Well, actually, it is, now that I've found the plug-in and don't have to write the damn thing from scratch. *headdesk*

Granted, I learned a lot about XML parsing in PHP during my research tonight. I also reinforced the unfortunate truth that I really can't just go out and learn the piece of a technology that I need RIGHT NOW without first learning more of the foundations. I'd put myself at a beginner-plus level of PHP. Parsing XML? That totally requires at least a novice level. At least I know enough to tweak the code in the plug-in now, I guess.

I still have a decent amount of work to do before the site is complete, and I couldn't really afford to spend so long on this one problem, but I still think it was time well-spent.

And I'm still including this evening in my billed hours. Totally.

PS - I'm getting really tired of Movable Type showing me a blank screen after just about anything I do with this blog anymore. I'm hoping a clean install will fix these annoying issues... but that's going to be easily another month, if not more.

My First Users Group Meeting

I think it's going to be an unusually early night for me, because it was an unusually early morning for me today. Before I crash, though, I did want to talk a little bit about the MicroStrategy Users Group Meeting that was the reason for my early morning. (Just in case you missed today's flurry of Twitter traffic.)

First, some backstory: I've been working with the MicroStrategy application for about eight months now. Before that, my only reporting experience was with MS Access, and I had no real Business Intelligence (BI) knowledge to speak of. Now, I'm finally to the point where I feel I can implement a simple project from start to finish on my own. Just about. So, I knew I wasn't going to get a whole lot out of today's presentations, from a technical standpoint, but I also knew it would be helpful to get an idea of how other companies are using the software and what's possible with it. Plus, despite the four hours in the car, I actually welcomed a chance to get paid to go someplace different and do something besides work at my desk and go to meetings.

There were three presentations: one about Supply Chain Management and BI, by an employee of Spartan Stores; one about using Narrowcast (a proprietary report distribution service), by an employee of Borders; and one about BI and Geography, by an employee of GM.

Frankly, I was surprised that such companies used this software. It's hard to get much info about MicroStrategy online, since the manuals and help files and training info is all copyrighted material. I guess I assumed that a lack of search hits — besides press releases, that is — meant that the platform wasn't popular. Apparently I was mistaken, as there were two dozen employees at our User Group meeting, representing eight or more companies, including the three listed above.

The Supply Chain presentation, while informative and interesting, was not something I could translate to my projects and experience at work. The Narrowcast presentation was more potentially useful, but since I'm not a Narrowcast expert, I could only take a few notes and hope that I can get my supervisor a copy of the presentation for later.

GM's presentation, while generally overarching and not technical, was eye-opening. The presenter basically listed all the things they track in their databases, mainly thanks to the technology of OnStar, coupled with a popular mapping software subscription service. We were proudly told that GM can pinpoint the location of a vehicle so closely as to identify its current parking space. We were told lots of things, most of which had little to do with possibilities for our own BI, and had instead to do with how much data GM has regarding its vehicles and business in general. Granted, we did see the ease with which this data can be aggregated into useful information via MicroStrategy. Mostly, though, our reactions were a combination of, "Wow, you can track how many times the car has cycled from a cold motor to a warm motor and back?" and, "So, you say only a court injunction can force you to disclose all this information you've collected?"

I did record audio of all three presentations with my digital point-and-shoot as a bit of an experiment; however, I think the experiment was a bit of a failure, as they're not entirely listenable. I might go through with my plan to tweak the audio a little and burn them to CD for my supervisor, since she couldn't make it to the meeting, but I'm not sure.

Either way, it won't happen tonight. I'm surprised I'm still awake, honestly. I don't generally get up before the sun. Not during Daylight Savings Time, anyway.

Little Bit of Everything

I don't do these massive update posts much anymore — I prefer to keep my blog entries on one topic at a time — but I figured I'd do one catch-up post, then maybe expound on parts of it later. So, working backwards from today...

Weighed in today at 196.5 lbs on my home scale — that's one and a half pounds away from my recent all-time low of 195 from May 2007. (Yep, I gained 15 pounds in six months, and it took me longer than that to lose it again.) It was a bit of a disappointment, then, to weigh in at my Weight Watchers meeting at 200.4 lbs, even after I had an ultra-light breakfast and didn't drink much water before the weigh-in. My mini-goal had been to weigh in under 200 pounds at the meeting. Oh, well — I guess I'll wait until next weigh-in to hit my mini-goal, and to reward myself with some shorts and dress pants and blouses that fit.

My supervisor asked me this morning if I'd like to attend a User Group meeting in Lansing (two hours away) this Thursday. Then she asked me if I could drive, since her car doesn't have air conditioning. D'oh! So, I'll be getting up at the buttcrack of dawn on Thursday, driving with my supervisor for two hours, attending four hours of Business Intelligence lectures and panels, then having lunch and driving two hours back. At least we don't have to work for the last couple hours of the day; basically, my day gets shifted forward by two hours.

I landed a freelance web design gig yesterday. Actually, I pretty much "landed" it last Wednesday, when he asked me if I do web design, but yesterday's client meeting was the first official sealing of our new business relationship. He's the resident conductor of a local orchestra, so I'm basically making him a PR tool, which is perfect work for me. I underpriced myself, as per usual, but I made sure to leave myself an out: a flat fee for the first 20 hours, then an hourly fee for the next 20, topping out at 40 hours. So, I won't have totally hosed myself.

This past weekend, Aaron and I went up to the Ann Arbor Art Fairs. Great time, as always. I took a few pictures (with the Holga, too, although I'll have to wait until those are developed to post them), and I bought one expensive thing and one not-so-expensive thing.

Oh, and I still need to get this blog moved to its new home on another web host, and not just because something's borked with my MT installation/upgrade (as you will have noticed if you tried to comment on a post lately — your comments ARE going through, I promise). I have until the end of August to get my stuff moved — which, incidentally, is also the deadline for getting my freelance site done. I'm going to be looking at some mighty busy evenings here. I'll need to carefully ration out my time.

And now I should get to bed, because I need to ready myself for my epic early-morning wakey-wakey in another day or so. I haven't gotten up at 5:30am since... um... well, it's been a while. Not counting jet lag in another timezone, of course.

Yep, Still a Trekkie.

Just channel-surfed to a fifth-season episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on Sci-Fi. Even though we have all the ST:TNG episodes on DVD, and even though the commercial breaks were atrociously long and frequent, I couldn't change the channel.

I did notice a few things, though (in addition to Wil Wheaton's fantastic eyeliner), that I never noticed before:

1. Wesley, why are you calling that guy Nick? That's Tom Paris!
2. I always thought Wil Wheaton was cute. I just never consciously realized it until now.
3. Wesley Crusher never grated on me as much as he did others exactly BECAUSE of his Mary Sue nature. Even though I was a girl, I was only a few years younger than Wesley at the time, and I was smart and precocious and socially inept, and I could identify with him — even though I never once saved the universe as we know it.
4. I miss Star Trek. REAL Star Trek. NEW Star Trek. And I miss Wesley Crusher.

Infinite Loop

This upgrade to MT 4.1 has been an interesting journey.

Last night, when I enabled MT-Twitter, I didn't put in the correct "regular expression" to keep it from ignoring tweets that started with "New Blog Post." Hence, when I got to work this morning and looked at my blog, I had hourly Status Updates about my New Blog Post about my Status Update...

So, i deleted all the unnecessary duplicate posts from work, but restrained myself from using Twitter until I could get home and make sure everything would work OK, with no infinite loops.

I think I'm addicted to Twitter.

To keep myself sane, I wrote all the tweets I would have liked to have posted in an email to myself, so I could post them here:

Enjoying hearing some long-lost prog rock on my iPod. I forgot how much I like(d) Dream Theater. 10:41am
Finally have enough tasks at work that I’m using the Outlook Tasks feature. Nice. 11:17am
Should be hungry. Focusing more on other kinds of cramps at the moment. 1:00pm
Yay! I know enough about my job now to know when a piece of data was left out. 2:53pm
I need a nap. 3:58pm
Damn, you, @wilw! You got me… 4:14pm

Anyway, I think my site upgrade is at a good stopping point... for now. Next up: migrating to a new server.

*girds loins in preparation*

Movable Type Upgrade

Just upgraded my blogging software, Movable Type, and added a new plug-in to incorporate my Twitter posts into my blog proper. My tweets don't look very pretty right now, either on the site or in the RSS feed, but I hope to remedy that tomorrow evening.

Until then, sit tight and know that I'll be working my magic soon enough...

(Wow, that doesn't sound egotistical or anything.)

Sapping My Will To Blog

I think that being able to Twitter quick updates all day long is diverting my blog creativity. Well, maybe not my creativity so much as my desire. I mean, I still have plenty of topics to blog about. I have a list. But twittering quickies about how I feel or what I think about during the day is seeming to take the place of blogging. Which isn't what I'd intended at all.

So, for those who subscribe to the RSS and don't read my sidebar (wherein lies my twitter feed), here's what I twittered today (in reverse order, of course):

• 19 days until Hawaii. 26 minutes ago
• Longest Friday EVAR. Because I had nothing to do and had to look busy at my desk. And it was beautiful outside. Now I am home. about 3 hours ago
• last.fm appears to be mainly unb0rked now. we'll see when i go to scrobble today's listenings... about 6 hours ago
• iPod just shuffled from the Beasties to Bonnie Tyler (Total Eclipse of the Heart). WTF? about 6 hours ago
• o noes! @wilw sez that last.fm asploded. well, their datacenter lost power, anyway. ungood - i'm addicted to tracking my listening habits. about 8 hours ago
• New live-action Speed Racer by the Wachowski bros looks sweet: http://tinyurl.com/6absre about 9 hours ago
• Still can't concentrate on work. Doesn't help that I'm waiting on someone else before I can actually do what I need to do. about 10 hours ago
• Can't concentrate on work. Want to be outside! Argh! about 12 hours ago
• Just found out how to set Windows Movie Maker to widescreen mode. AFTER I already captured and uploaded the video wrong. Fix it after work. about 12 hours ago

See the fun crap I post all day? My tweets seem to be par for the course: mainly self-centered updates about the status of me, occasional interesting linkage, and random observations about life in general. Kind of like my blog, but shorter.

My 8th-grade English teacher, Mr. Jay Falls, signed my yearbook (or was it a comment on an essay of mine?) that, like a world-class athlete, a writer like me should practice every day. So, in honor of Mr. Falls and his wisdom, I'm going to make a concerted effort to write a blog entry every day, from now until I go to Hawaii (on May 7).

That doesn't mean I'm going to stop twittering, though...

Edited to Add: Just for kicks, I Googled Mr. Falls to see if I could find out what he's doing now. I think I found him... so I wrote him a "thanks for being a good teacher" e-mail. Am I a goober? I think I might be...

Animarathon and Asimov's

I skipped out on the Saturday afternoon session of this weekend's Aikido seminar to go to Bowling Green with Aaron. We checked out the Animarathon for a short while, walked around campus, then got a coffee at Grounds.

But first, an aside. BGSU alumni: take a look at this landscape and tell me what's missing:

I'll give you a hint: I'm standing in the parking lot by Jerome Library and Anderson Arena. On the left is Kreischer. On the right is the art building.

If you said the Saddlemire Student Services Building, give yourself a point! The old bookstore building was torn down late last year in preparation for a new Fine Arts building. It was unsettling to see a big empty dirt plot where the bookstore once stood. Almost as unsettling as walking around an anime convention inside Olscamp Hall, where I attended so many classes nearly a decade ago.

Grounds for Thought, however, is a more comfortable sort of familiar, as is the taste and smell of a single mocha and the feel of the heavy, tall glass mug in my hands. It feels like home, somehow.

A good part of the joy of Grounds — for me and mine, anyway — is perusing the used books. In particular, I like looking for new-to-me science fiction. And we hit the jackpot this time, when we saw an entire shelf of Asimov's Science Fiction and Analog magazines. Aaron and I sat Indian-style on the floor in the middle of the aisle and scanned the table of contents for each one, looking for authors whose names we recognized. Our resultant haul:

• Asimov's, January 1985
  Including stories by Frederick Pohl, Connie Willis, et al.
• Asimov's, August 1986
  Including stories by Orson Scott Card, Harry Turtledove, et al.
• Asimov's, August 1989
  Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Orson Scott Card, et al.
• Asimov's, Mid-December 1989
  Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, Harry Turtledove, et al.
• Asimov's, February 1990
  Including stories by Bruce Sterling, et al.
• Asimov's, June 1990
  Including stories by James Patrick Kelly, Larry Niven, et al.
• Asimov's, November 1991 (double issue)
  Including stories by Isaac Asimov, Mike Resnick, Robert Silverberg, et al.
• Asimov's, November 1993
  Including stories by Frederick Pohl, Connie Willis, et al.
• The Black Hole: The Illustrated Adaptation of the Exciting Film.
• I, Jedi - A Star Wars novel by Michael A. Stackpole

After we got our coffee buzz and our sci-fi books, we went to Goodwill and found the Trivial Pursuit Pop Culture 2 DVD game (with questions we can answer! Yay!), then headed to the Woodland Small Mall to Steve and Barry's, where Aaron and I got some geeky T-shirts.

I'm going to have plenty of short fiction to read for a while, and hopefully will discover some new sci-fi authors to follow. I'm looking forward to this...

End of an Era

I finally did it.

After turning the thought over in my head for months now, I finally submitted my resignation as LSM webmaster.

It's nothing against them. It's just a reorganization of priorities for me. I can only handle so many projects at a time, and can only keep focused on so much. I'm sure that there is someone actively participating in the corps who has HTML skills and can do just as good a job as I did. Or better, probably.

I just haven't been devoting the amount of time to the website that the corps deserves, and it's been like that for quite a while now. LSM deserves more than I'm currently giving them. And I deserve to be cut free of the guilt I've been giving myself over that very issue.

The announcement feels like a weight lifted from my mind.

Mixed Feelings

Some of you may remember the drum corps website I worked on back in '05. Well, it seems that the corps is "streamlining" their communications, and they'd like to retool the site. That's fine. I can dig that. I can even use the design they'd like me to use, although I insist on trying a few different variations on it first.

The only thing that really makes me sad is that I worked SO HARD on getting the content management system to be robust enough to serve their needs, and now the site is pretty much going to be a static electronic brochure. No individual member logins, no real need for members-only news items... they'll keep the news feed around, and they'll keep the schedule up-to-date, and I think they'll keep the file upload feature for staff, but it's not the same. The site will mainly be used as a recruiting tool, rather than the multifaceted communications tool I'd wanted it to be.

Maybe I wasn't proactive enough. Maybe I didn't keep up with it as well as I should have. But I did what I was told, when I was told, and I was so proud of what I'd achieved. I learned so much by programming all that, and I was actually pretty proud of my design. (I went through lots of thumbnails and comps to get to that final.)

Maybe this is my chance to make something that really pops, though. I can take the site and streamline it all to hell. I won't be depressed about this — I'll be grateful for the chance to update this two-year-old design.

Really, I will.

Geek Chic

I decided to take a different tack on the job hunt this evening, and look one-by-one at each business that's located in the business development where I currently work. I'm a big fan of the location, being that a.) it's a fifteen-minute drive from home, and b.) there's a fantastic wooded walking path through the middle of the area. So, I sat down with a list of (most of) the businesses in the park, and went to all of their websites, and determined whether their industry is something I'd be interested in pursuing, and looked for job postings.

I found a few that sounded vaguely interesting, and a few that I'd already known about — but I found one business that finally sparked my interest enough to get the job-hunt juices flowing again. It's a national firm, an IT services and solutions provider, and I'm only vaguely familiar with most of their offerings. All of it made the geek girl in me drool, though.

Only a computer nerd would look through a list of technology solutions and think, "Ooh, HP Storage Area Network. I've never heard of that! Sounds cool!" Lots of the names like Altiris and Veritas and Citrix, and lots of the buzzwords like Web Content Filtering and Business Continuity Planning, all sounded familiar to me, but not enough so that I'd even be able to talk for two minutes straight about a given one.

The only section of their services where I know I can shine is Web Development, including website design and development and website management services. That I can do. The other stuff... it harks back to a day when I went around with Kirkum and installed new network cards in pizza-box Macs. Or imaged computers in the labs. Or installed a right-angle adapter in my own legacy Mac so I could install an ethernet card.

At any rate, I got fired up enough (and undepressed enough) that I worked on my Personal Marketing Plan like the nice outsourcing lady told me to. I have a list of about a dozen companies that may or may not be hiring, but that it would be pretty cool to work for. You can all expect that, once I have my Marketing Plan done and ready for prime time, I'll be sharing it with you and asking you, "Do you know anyone who works for...?"

I Am Teh Win... I Hope

I don't usually spend an excess of money on display items. However... I think I may have scored this before PodBrix.com exceeded their bandwidth:

A limited-edition Young Woz and Jobs custom "Lego" set. I read about it on Wil Wheaton's blog, who read about on BoingBoing (which I need to start reading again).

Their mockup of the 1984 commercial sold out in less than a minute, according to their website. This set may have done the same, barring technical issues. The Young Woz and Jobs set went on sale at 9pm, and I had a heck of a time getting the page to load. I just kept hitting Reload, Reload, Reload... and kept getting Firefox telling me to Try Again. Then I got a few minutes of 403 Forbidden errors. Then, just after 9:10 or so, I got through.

I do have a PayPal confirmation e-mail, so I *think* I'm golden. We'll see if I am one of the elite 300 soon.

Update: PodBrix says, "If you were able to make it through to PayPal checkout and ordered, we have your order." So, it sounds like I'm golden.

BTW, Aaron saw the $200 price tag on the 1984 Playset and about shit a brick (a Lego® brick, perhaps?), but then he saw that the Young Woz and Jobs set cost much less. :-)

Nuts-N'-Bolts

For the love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Why must I have these fantastic ideas like, Let's put the menu for my portfolio site in the bottom left corner! That way, I won't be able to use the standard nested unordered list to stylize my menu, and I'll have to come up with some effed up way to rig it! Yeah, that sounds like fun!

I feel like the answer is obvious, yet it eludes me. I'm sure that a.) it's just a little late at night for actual mental activity to be successful, and b.) upon a proper Googling later, the answer will present itself.

In the meantime, anyone who'd care to school me on how daft I'm being right now is welcome to take a gander at my portfolio in progress. I just want the goddamn submenus to stay visible. *sigh*

It's a very basic problem. I just need more sleep to conquer it.

Astronomy Geekgasm (or, Ursa Major Space Station)

I just watched the International Space Station and the Space Shuttle Atlantis fly over. That was SO COOL.

Earlier this week (or maybe it was this past weekend), Aaron had mentioned that our friend Kris took his three-year-old son, Sam, outside and showed him the ISS flyover. After that, from what I understand, Sam not only wanted to see it fly over ALL THE TIME, but every passing car and truck became a space shuttle.

I can dig it.

Earlier this evening, I got a SpaceWeather.com e-mail stating that the Atlantis had left the ISS and would be traveling behind it for the next visible orbit. Hmm, I thought. I should go out and look at that. So, I punched up the Heavens Above website and discovered that the flyover time for Toledo would be around 10:32pm. The ISS would come up in the northwest, pass through the Big Dipper, then arc overhead to set somewhere on the southeastern horizon.

I went outside a few minutes early, to get my eyes dark-adapted — but I got eaten by bugs and startled by neighbors, so I went back inside to wait out the last few minutes. With one minute to go, I stepped outside and sat on the front step, focusing my sight on Ursa Major.

And then, holy shit! There it was! No, there THEY were. One giant, fat, bright star, being chased by an only slightly dimmer star. They came up through the trees and passed through the Big Dipper, as promised. I felt like, if only my glasses were a little stronger, I could have seen those fancy new solar panels on the station. I was so excited, I not only gaped at the sky like a slack-jawed, grinning idiot, but I ran across the driveway in my bare feet to follow them to the other side of the house, so I could watch the ISS and Atlantis orbit over to the other horizon. As the pair set, they got dimmer and dimmer until, several degrees above the horizon, they both disappeared from sight. As they did, though, I saw another satellite crossing their path — I'm not sure which one it was, but it may have been Cosmos 1455 or TRMM.

That trumped the hell out of Halley's Comet. (I lied to my Girl Scout leader about being able to see the comet back in 1986, just so they would let me pass the binoculars to someone else already.)

I could easily make this a ritual and watch the ISS flyby every night before bed, chamomile tea in hand. Good night, astronauts... :-)

By the way... are there any other Trekkers (or Trekkies) out there who have trouble calling the International Space Station the ISS, in light of the mirror-universe ISS Enterprise?

Accomplishment

"Task" for potential employer: done.
Time to complete: 10.5 hours.

I've never coded someone else's website layout before. I liked it. Could be that my calling is strictly as a web developer, not a designer. That, plus I'm a grammar nazi. When I'm plugging in content, I *have* to correct comma splices and misspellings. Web copy editor, anyone?

Now, it's time to focus on following up with other companies to whom I've submitted a resume online. I am armed with legal-size paper and a full clip of determination.

I have three months to land a job in my field. Granted, if I don't, I get to take home a decent chunk of severance pay... but it's not worth it to waste job-hunting time and possibly miss the job for me, just to stick around and get my severance. You know?

Life Is Good.

Furniture was delivered Saturday afternoon. Only major downside was that the old couch didn't fit through the basement door, so the entire point of buying a new couch (so we could put the old one in the basement) was nullified. On the upside: we have a giant, nine-foot pillow-back sofa on which to lounge; a new, smaller dining room table with non-80's chairs and a bench; and after our return from Nihon, we will have a new massagey recliner.

In other news, Aaron has determined the status of his passport. Due to our change in departure date, it hasn't yet been processed, even though he applied for it back in February. It has now been expedited, and should be on its way by week's end. Which is still calling it close, and may mean that we'll need to obtain our Ghibli Museum vouchers after we arrive in Nihon instead of in advance.

Weight has stabilized at 198 pounds. I'm OK with that for now. Slow and steady weight loss means it's more likely to stay off. I won't make my goal of 190 by Japan, but so be it. I still intend to eat heartily while we're on vacation.

I am SO almost done with my freelance project. I'm hitting some snags with programming the content management system, and I'm going to just have to set some strictures on what it can and can't do. I can't make it account for every possible instance of weirdness. Hopefully, the client will be accepting of that. Honestly, though, I'm really just glad to have it done. I don't know if I'll get the remainder of my pay by the time we leave for Japan, which is unfortunate... but, again, I'm OK with that. Between Aaron and myself, we have enough money saved up to have a sufficiently good time.

Yes, indeed... life is good.

Productive

Finished the initial roll of film in the Brownie Starmite. Today was appropriately sunshiny, so I took identical photos to yesterday's overcast ones, plus some others to pad out the roll. Wrote a check to Dwayne's Photo for $14, packed up the film, and will be shipping it off tomorrow morning. I expect to have twelve 4" x 4" prints in my hot little hands by May 1st.

Put away the mess of clothes on the floor by the bed. Went into the small bedroom and arranged all of our board games on a small plastic shelving unit in the closet. (Damn, we have a lot of board games. Trivial Pursuit especially.) Moved my empty steamer trunk from the small bedroom to beside my nightstand. Sometime in the near future, I'll be going through the linen closet and moving blankets into the trunk to make room for the new sheets I intend to purchase.

Submitted the new freelance site to Google for spidering and indexing. I'm planning to use a Google search for the site search, so a good spidering by Google would be a definite plus. Still have a lot to do... I'm not going to end up getting everything done this week that I told them I would. I knew I was giving myself a mighty tall order, what with the laundry list of stuff I had yet to do. Not to worry. It'll get done well before the Japan trip. Hopefully by the end of April, if not sooner.

Paid my credit card bills. A simple task, but still one that makes me feel... satisfied? Relieved? Accomplished? Meh. It's done, anyway.

Paying bills is going to get more interesting in July, when Sky changes over to Huntington's payroll system. Bi-weekly instead of semi-monthly. This will take some getting used to, after being paid on the 15th and the last day of the month for the past 4½ years.

One Week Till Relaunch?

Stayed up a little too late last night after getting home from Easter festivities in Cleveland. Woke up this morning, way late and bleary-eyed, and decided to use one of my personal days. After all, I need to get my freelance project done this week, and there are a few important parts that aren't done yet. So, I stayed home, slept in a little, and worked for about four hours total on that.

I'm realizing that creating my own content management system (CMS) from a flat-file database is a little more challenging than I'd thought it would be. I thought it would be ridiculously simple, but it's really not. I'd really rather use SQL, but enabling SQL on my client's webhosting would cost them extra from their webhost. I'm highly tempted to just tell my client to edit the file themselves as needed, and upload it via FTP... but I know I should really afford them a way to edit their news and such in the browser itself.

I spent long enough figuring out how to check a username and password against a flat-file db, and remembering how to get PHP to remember that the user has logged in, via session variables. I finally had some ideas about how to edit and delete records after being flummoxed for quite some time... but I got sidetracked by Japan trip stuff, and never got back to coding, and now my brain's winding down enough that I'm not going to attempt it now. Maybe tomorrow after work. I'm thinking about feeding the db into an array to display it, then editing the array and spitting the whole array back out into a new file, overwriting the old. Should work, right...?

Back to work tomorrow. Meh. I'm looking forward to finishing this freelance job so I can a.) invoice the client, and b.) finish up my resume and portfolio redux in preparation for the pre-Japan job-hunting blitz.

Plug Your Desk Hole With a USB Hub

I no longer have a desk to accomodate such a thing, but I so could have used this back when I worked at RCC.

It's a USB hub that fits in the little 3-inch desk hole where your cables go. How cool is that. Belkin is apparently planning to release an iPod dock adapter along these same lines. OMGWTFBBQ. I <3 gadgetry... except when I currently have no earthly use for it.

Maybe someday I'll reclaim sufficient geek status to work somewhere with a desk hole. *sigh*

[via NOTCOT.ORG]

The Not-Really-Big Reveal

For anyone who's been interested in what my freelance gig is and how it's turning out, I thought I'd share with you the HTML mock-up I've created for my client. They chose this design out of over half a dozen Photoshop composites, and I spent this week creating a stylesheet that I can plug their content into. After I do that, there will be some content-management issues to tackle and some bells and whistles to add.

So, there you have it: the midpoint of my freelance project. I think it's some of my better work, IMHO.

Freelancing Update

Looks like the HR issues I was having with my contracting job may have been ironed out. I wasn't able to connect with the contact person to do the training on how to use the online timeclock, but she had sent me the Word file that explained the process. I had thought that a phone conference with this person was a requirement... but it seems that I am able to log in and record my hours, so that issue may be resolved.

This is good, since I finished a four-hour project this past Wednesday and have already been presented with another, more involved but similar project due by next Thursday.

My main contact there said that they could potentially give me enough work for a 40-hour week, but also mentioned that the summer months are the slow season for their firm. I'm not comfortable with the idea of relying on freelance and contract work to keep me financially afloat, even with a relatively steady inflow of work from this particular firm. Like I've said before: if it were just me, I might be more inclined to take the plunge. But I'm beyond the carefree "oh shit how do I buy food this week" days of my youth, and I can't afford to jeopardize my half of the mortgage and car and insurance payments, or my student loans and credit cards and whatnot. That narrow window of financial spontaneity has officially closed, and I now crave stability.

I also have new comps due to my freelance client by Monday. They happened to choose the design I liked the least, but because its main features (rounded corners) matched some of their previous marketing materials. Once I had a copy of their existing flyer to give me ideas, and vector versions of the logo and logotype, along with their ideas on what they wanted to incorporate into the new comps from the old, I felt much more prepared to give them what they wanted.

It's shaping up to be another working weekend of sorts. As long as I'm getting paid, though, I'm OK with it.

Step One Complete

Four composites are now completed and posted on a private website for my client to peruse. One of them totally sucks, one could become something decent, and two of them are actually not bad. Truth be told, I really like one of them, but it's the most totally boring one of the lot. Says something about my style and personality, maybe, that I prefer the muted and beige and straitlaced design over the one(s) with bold colors and rounded corners and other elements I don't usually use.

I sent the link to my clients around 9pm this evening; my self-imposed deadline was tomorrow. I said I'd have a completed website in four to six weeks once we finalize the design, and I think that sounds completely reasonable. The only issue is going to be figuring out how to allow them to make additions to content without using a database. (From what I can tell, it would cost extra on their hosting plan.) Their usual modus operandi is Frontpage, as I've mentioned before, and I'm afraid it would wreak havoc on any design I would throw out there.

We'll come up with something. I have a few tricks up my sleeve.

Definitely A Learning Experience

I gave myself one week to come up with three to five composites for my website redesign client. No problem — I did similar projects with similar deadlines in college. VCT, graphic design, yeah. No problem.

I hate all of my ideas.

No, let me rephrase: I can't seem to translate the ideas in my head to something that looks good on-screen. I feel like I'm missing lots of the finer details and the subtleties that I admire in other designers. Shadows, patterns, gradients, tiny lines and shapes and ornamentations that just aren't popping into my head. The 4x3" ballpoint pen drawings look like drawings of decent web page designs; my Photoshop comps look like a VCT 102 student put them together.

Maybe trying to take design cues from my favorite designers isn't the best way to go. Maybe I'm being too hard on myself because of it. In any case, I have one evening and two weekend days to finish at least one and a half comps, if not more, and preferably improve on what I already have completed. If I have to give them crap and say they're first drafts, I will, but I'd rather give them awesome comps and just let them choose what kind of website they want.

It's just so frustrating. I finally have the opportunity to wow a client with my flair... and now... *pfft*

A Productive Morning

This morning's accomplishment: the majority of a CSS layout for my new portfolio. It still needs navigation, which will be in the lower left of the screen, and my logotype in the lower right. For the most part, though, the basic framework is up.

Just thought I'd share. OK, back to work. Maybe I'll get the dynamic display thingie working before I tackle the navigation, as it's been a while since I coded pop-up layers/divs for menus.

Update, 6:15pm: I got my PHP/SQL displaying everything but the "keywords" I plugged in. I have a table that lists all the technologies and/or software used for a project; for instance, the LSM site has as keywords PHP, MySQL, HTML/XHTML, and CSS. Once I threw that keywords table into the mix, it totally screwed up all of my logic. I think I have some more ideas up my sleeve before I go calling for help (to Sheryl and Dan and whoever else knows and cares), but this has really been harshing my mellow this afternoon.

Apart from that, though, it works! Holy shit.

Update, 7pm: After a 30-minute, unrelated phone chat with Dan, I implemented one of my brainstorms, and it appears to work. Yay for arrays! Now, I just need to figure out how to put commas between the array elements... later. Details come later. For now, making the damn thing work in the first place is top priority.

Today's Coding Accomplishment

Today's accomplishment: making the beginnings of a photo gallery on the LSM site. Compares a table of events to a table of photos, lists the events where there are photos, links to a page of thumbnails and descriptions for said event, and those links open pop-up windows with larger versions of each photo.

For seasoned codeheads, this is no big whoop. For me, it's applying what I've learned in Visual Basic for Applications and Microsoft Access at work to PHP and SQL at home. And there are still things I need to learn and investigate, like the imagecopyresampled() function that could automatically make the thumbnails from the full-sized images. Hmm.

This weekend? E-mailing the owners of the broken Frontpage site and offering my services for a pittance. I need the experience, and I'm actually kind of excited about taking on a new project. As long as they understand that it won't be done super-quick; I have other things that take precedence, like my portfolio and prior commitments to LSM and my contracting job (if it ever gets started). I'll let you know how it all pans out.

Personal Improvement

I'm glad that I've finally reached a point in my life where I can summon some anger and determination to excel, where in years past I would have sunk into depression and given up for the time being. This is a step in the right direction.

I'm going to go start working on this now, while I have candles brewing upstairs, preparing to earn a big ol' twelve bucks for me tomorrow at work. Yee-haw.

When I'm not working on either of those things, I'll be visiting Cameron Moll's site for sources of inspiration influence.

I'm still so fucking fragile. At least I'm dealing with it in the proper manner now.

Update, 8:45pm: The SQL database backend of my new portfolio site is complete, apart from detailed descriptions of my work. I will now use all of my willpower to make it work *before* I make it pretty.

Update, 9:30pm: I've got a nice While loop happening now, and I've managed to make a dynamic (but unlovely) list of the work I plan to showcase in my updated portfolio. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about my candle wax melting upstairs; fortunately, it wasn't at a critical point where forgetting about it was a Bad Thing™.

Game Design Oversight

So, as per usual, I was whiling away the hours playing CivCity: Rome this evening. I completed the campaign I had started last night, then began a new mission. Unfortunately, I was so stoked about successfully completing the previous military mission that I failed to save my game before starting anew. This created a slight annoyance when the Egyptians overcame my legionnaires and velites (OK, non-Latin speakers, v's are pronounced like w's, so say it in your head: WELL-ih-tays. Close enough).

Anyway, the dudes with swords and the dudes with javelins were toast. I had no more army. And here come the fucking Egyptians. Dammit. Where's the "Concede Defeat" button? How about "Restart Mission"? No? You mean I have to just wait around for the damned Egyptians to either a.) destroy my Town Center or b.) inadvertently cause me to run out of money?

Wait. Where are they going? My Town Center is RIGHT THERE. Where you came in? Where you fellas headed, anyway? Oh, you're just going to plunder and sack the entire town. Nice. I'm gonna go get a glass of milk. Call me when you're done.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, the marauders finally, FINALLY made me run out of money. Killing all the workers and destroying the tax-revenue-generating houses will do that, I suppose. The bastards never did attack my Town Center, even when I used my last remaining... um... shit. Singular of "velites" is... *hits google in ultimate geeky frustration* ...veles. I think it's one of those funky third declension nouns? It's been over seven years since I took any Latin. —Anyway, even when I lured them over toward the Town Center to kill my last javelin dude, my dude proved victorious over the one enemy dude that was sent over to dispatch him, and no one else cared.

Long story short, I finally got to restart after I ran out of money and the Senate refused to grant me another loan. This time, I was sure to save BEFORE I started the mission, so I can reload my saved game if things go south on me again.

My New Obsession

CivCity: Rome rocks my socks.

(But only after I updated the LSM page and learned all about walking through and sorting arrays in PHP and filled out the HR paperwork for my new freelance gig.)

That is all. Thanks for the game, Amy!

Grammar Geek

James: Which is right: "you or I" or "you or me"?
Me: In what context?
James: "Let me know if it is you or I."
Me: *pauses* "You or I" is right.
James: OK. It sounded right, but I wasn't sure.
Me: Yeah, it's "you or I," because it would be "me" if it were an object, but "is" is a linking verb, so the object would take the same...

*pause*

Me: I just totally geeked out on you, didn't I?
James: Yeah.

I Am A Geek.

I just made my own RSS feed for the Lakeshoremen website. Admittedly, not all by myself — with some help from a couple of websites that I've bookmarked for future reference. But now I know, and knowing's half the battle.

Now I just need to see if I can schedule a cron job to output this file every day. Or... I could just have it regenerate every time someone posts a news item. Somebody pin a medal on me — I'm fucking brilliant. ^_^

*squee*

Mac Junkie

I walked into Goodwill this weekend, and what did I see?

A first-generation iMac. Bondi Blue. Tray-loading CD. No keyboard or mouse, a little discolored and worn, missing the door cover to hide all the cableage. Price: $60. Plugged it in at the store, saw that it was running OS 8.6.

I went for it. *shakes head* I figured, WTF. My old legacy Mac is running at 275MHz, this iMac had a sticker claiming it was a 333, and I was pretty positive that all iMacs were G3s. My 6500 was merely a PowerPC.

I brought it home, plugged in my PC's USB mouse, and surfed around the Mac as best I could with no keyboard. I discovered that the OS had been a little lobotomized in the previous owner's zeal to clear off the hard drive, so I pulled out my old OS 8.5 CD and performed a clean install of the operating system. After all, the iMac has built-in ethernet, so I'll be able to download OS upgrades from the 'net, no problem. I'm pretty sure that Mac operating systems through OS9 are free downloads... and I may be able to procure a copy of OSX for a reasonable price somewhere online.

After a little online research (from my PC, that is, after retreiving my USB mouse), and after some serial number decoding, I learned that this is actually a Revision D iMac, apparently in Blueberry. (Coulda *sworn* that was Bondi Blue...) Processor speed 333MHz, bus speed 66MHz, 6GB hard drive, 15" screen, manufactured in August 1999 in Mexico.

Why, you ask, did I buy this relic? It's unexpandable, un-upgradable, and obsolete.

The answer? I just can't pass up a Mac at the thrift.

Really, the more reasonable explanation is that I haven't used my 6500 in months, just because it's so damn clunky. I can't install any modern web browsers on it, Gmail didn't work right in IE 5.5 last time I checked, and I have little reason to even power up the Mac anymore. I guess I thought that if I had a G3, I might be more inclined to at least check the layout of my websites on a Macintosh. Plus, I'm curious about OSX — the last time I used a Mac on a daily basis was right before the switchover from OS9 to OSX. Apparently, this iMac can run OS 10.3.9 with no problem, and maybe even OS 10.4 with a little tweaking. With its whopping however-many megs of RAM, though, I might be better off sticking with a "classic" OS.

I've gotten so used to Windows PCs now. I used to be a complete Mac-o-phile. Now, I don't know if I could do without my right mouse button and scroll wheel on a regular basis*. If I had over $1000 to blow on a computer, I'd probably end up spending it on a new flat-panel display and/or a dual-processor Windows-based something-or-other, rather than a Mac mini or a new iMac.

I just purchased a keyboard, puck mouse, and cover door on eBay. Total cost with shipping: $25. So, I blew $85 overall on an obsolete computer. Did I get hosed? Sure.

At least it looks kitschy.

*Yes, I know the Mighty Mouse has those capabilities. The question is, would I really want to spend $70 on a mouse after dropping a grand on a computer?

Branding

For the longest time, I used a simple blue square next to my name (in Avant Garde font) as a logo of sorts for myself. It was easy to recreate in various applications, like Word, but it still gave me some identity.

I'm jumping on the Photoshop bandwagon now, updating my cute little blue square into something a little fancier:

(The tagline may or may not change. I decided to go with the painfully truthful schtick for now.)

That was fun. Now to come up with some more thumbnails for the actual site.

Got The Bug Again

I think that the current incarnation of my portfolio website must hold the record for the longest-running web design I've ever created without redesigning.

That streak may be broken soon.

I've got the itch to redesign my site — especially since I've learned SO much more about stylesheets since I first designed my current portfolio site. I need to fix my freelance (aka "services") section to reflect what I'm truly comfortable freelancing, punch up the design a bit, and update the examples of my wares. Maybe remove the stuff from back in 1998 that doesn't look so hot compared to today's standards. I also need to make sure everything works in IE, Netscape (I guess), and Firefox. Everything doesn't right now.

I don't think I'll redo it in Flash, although I really should put some of that pricey (for me) Flash workshop to use. I get so much stupid blog traffic from Google, though, that I'd rather my portfolio site be indexable.

Sooo... I may be embarking on yet another project. Hopefully I'll actually finish this one, or at least have the decency to quit it before I get in too deep.

Update, 10:40pm: I hate it when I get the design bug. For inspiration, I go and look at sites like Cameron's, and then I wonder if I've really ever discovered my own design style at all. I never think my shit looks slick enough, no matter how much my husband assures me that it kicks ass. Damn.

Update, 10:45pm: I should totally make my own "blogroll" database. I could easily make one of those little popup windows and populate the current URL and add it to my own SQL database and even make little icons for my links later, if I wanted. And maybe even a "shoutbox" of my own, too, although I'd have to make sure I didn't leave any security issues out there. ...But I was talking about redesigning my *portfolio*, not tweaking my blog. Right...?

Making Things Difficult

So, I finally decided it's time to get off my ass and work on the LSM page again. Figured I'd start with installing phpBB, the standard generic PHP-based forum. Simple to configure, free... can't go wrong. Right?

Well, I came across a problem. LSM's hosting only allows one SQL database. That spot is currently being used by my home-grown content management system, which is kind of important. So... now I get to figure out how to write a forum FROM SCRATCH. Or at least steal appropriate someone's code.

I'd just gotten myself all excited over figuring out how I might make an alumni database work. Now this... this is a little more daunting. I don't doubt that it's possible, but I also don't doubt that it'll be buggy as hell. I just hate to disappoint. Shout-out to all web geeks: any help here? Where can I find my holy grail of forum code?

I guess the bright side is that my users a.) will be able to access the forum with their site login, and b.) will *have* to sign up if they want access to the member forums!

Update, 6/9/06: Thanks to Sheryl's and Dan's patient explanations, I now have a brand-spankin' new forum installed on the LSM site! Now all I have to do is write a post about how to sign up, how to play nice, etc; add a forum link to the main site; and email the board of directors so they can be my guinea pigs to test the thing. :-)

Database Wrapup

Tomorrow's going to be a mighty early morning. James and I are getting to work at 7:30am — half an hour early for me, a whole hour early for him — to put the finishing touches on the Loan Corrections database.

It's been nearly three months that we've been working on this database, and it's finally reached completion. For now. The next step is developing databases for other departments within the Loan Servicing umbrella. We have meetings scheduled with two out of three supervisors: one on Friday, one on Monday. After our preliminary meetings, we write synopses/proposals for each department's potential database and submit them to our supervisor, who will then submit them to his supervisor, who will then decide which department gets first dibs on us.

We haven't been promoted, per se, and we haven't gotten a change in pay or job description. We have been removed from the main brunt of Loan Corrections duties indefinitely, though, and are getting beaucoup experience. If they don't change our MRs (Major Responsibilities), we can just leave. By the time these other databases are complete (and after I've safely taken maternity leave sometime next year), we will have amassed enough experience to get a better job elsewhere. Then Loan Servicing will have a bunch of databases with no administrator, and Application Services will have to support even more products made by "rogue programmers" (their words).

That said... I probably shouldn't have indulged in that 90-minute nap today. It's going to be a challenge to go to bed early enough to wake up at the buttcrack of dawn tomorrow.

Revealing The Mystery

During the past couple of months, I've alluded to a new job function I've managed to acquire at work, but I haven't gone into detail. Now that I've been doing it for nine weeks, though, I think I'm good to let the cat out of the bag. It's really not much of a bag, to tell the truth, but I've been hesitant to jinx myself. :-)

It all started when our boss, Eric, was looking for someone to "volunteer" to do 1098 duty for tax season. See, people get statements of how much interest they've paid on their qualifying loans (usually mortgages), so they can claim it as a deduction. The job of sending duplicates and making corrections to these tax forms is big enough that two people need to be taken out of the normal job rotation to handle it.

I almost got volunteered (by my boss) to do 1098s, but he decided to sleep on it, and ended up choosing someone else for the job. (*whew*) While my boss was giving me the news, Scott (our trainer and my cubemate at the time) mentioned that, if Eric wanted to put me on something different, I knew how to program databases.

Flashback to a couple weeks prior. Some people from Application Services (the people who do most of the techie programming stuff) came to check out our workflow, and were absolutely aghast that we were logging in all of our requests for loan changes (our department's main function) in Excel. We were getting probably 200-300 requests a day, by email, fax, interoffice mail, and postal mail, and every one of them got logged into Excel, as proof that we received the request. Application Services suggested to our boss that we should be using a real database, like Access — a suggestion that a few team members had repeatedly made in the past, but one that now seemed like a really good idea, since bonafide codeheads suggested it.

Back to me and my boss in my cube, and Scott "outing" me as a geek. It didn't take Eric long to ask if I wanted to work on the Access database, and it took even less time for me to agree to it. My co-worker buddy, James, had already started on a database a few months before, on his own, and with Eric's permission. I told him what was up, and asked if I could use the basic database as a jumping-off point. He agreed, and I agreed that this was *our* project, especially since he'd started on it first, and since he knew Access much better than I.

(Funny story: Scott later said that he was in Eric's office after our cube meeting, and Eric said to him in a scandalous whisper, "I didn't know Diana was a geek!" Neither of them were sure whether it was something I was comfortable with, apparently. Being called a geek, I mean. I assured them both later that I'm quite secure in my geekiness.)

So, for two weeks, I did my normal job and worked on the database. Luckily, my spot in the rotation for those two weeks was boring and simple and I got done with it by Tuesday or Wednesday both weeks. By the end of those two weeks, James and I had laid out the structure of the database, gotten most of the forms working, and started thinking about what kinds of reporting we'd need to do. We weren't comfortable with it "going live" yet, though. Not nearly. I told Eric so when he popped his head into my cubicle and asked if it would be ready for April.

Of course, when he told us that we could both get off the rotation to work on the database only, we compromised and agreed to have the data entry portion ready to go in one week, by Monday, April 3rd. We've been off the rotation ever since.

I've gone from never having used Access in a real database situation (CS 100 doesn't count) to learning how to build union queries and establish relationships and implement multiple tables with foreign keys and enable referential integrity and all sorts of geekery that I had no idea how to do two months ago. (Actually, some of it I could have done in FileMaker Pro for Macintosh about six or seven years ago.)

As soon as we get our department's log stable and "finished" (as much as we'll ever believe it to be), we're going to be pressed into service for other departments who could use similar tracking databases. James and I have been agonizing over this, because neither of us get paid enough to be a Database Administrator, or even a programmer. This project we're doing because we enjoy using our brains and skills and getting paid for it. Any other projects would be moving into the realm of potentially being taken advantage of by management.

We talked to Eric today, and laid it out for him (nicely). We basically let him know that, if we're going to be creating databases for other departments, it wouldn't be fair for us to still be taking up space in his department, but not doing any actual loan corrections work. We told him that we want to have our job descriptions changed before we do work for any other departments, and that a change in pay grade would be mighty nice, too. We didn't have to be total dicks for him to get the point, which is good. He says he's going to go to his boss and see what her thoughts are regarding our positions.

It's really hard to stick to our guns when it comes to compensation, especially when we're both still stoked to be off the job rotation. We're waiting for someone to pinch us and wake us up, or for the other shoe to fall, or for some other dramatic cliche to happen.

At any rate, that's what I've been doing for the past two months. And it makes going back to PHP/MySQL both easier and harder in different ways. (Not IsNull() doesn't work so well in PHP, but leaving out the Then in my VB If-Then statements doesn't work so well, either. For the geeks out there.)

For once, I'm sated.

Geekery, Continued

Everything just seemed to fall into place.

We had talked to our department's trainer, and asked him if he thought we should train everyone on what we had of the database so far, or whether we should wait until the database is complete — god only knows when that will be. The trainer agreed that we should train our department ASAP, and fill them in on any additional updates as necessary.

We worked on borrowing a projector and a laptop, and making sure one of the nearby conference rooms had network access. Then, a supervisor from an IT-based department upstairs said that we could just use their training room, already equipped with a projector and laptop and room for eight people — exactly big enough to train half of our department at a crack. We booked the room for a week and a half in the future.

We continued to work on getting reports and statistics-gathering forms functional in the development copy (aka the test database). We met with our supervisor after he returned from vacation earlier this week, and got his reactions to the database and the reports we'd created for him. He gave us some suggestions for tweaking the reports, but said that we could go ahead with implementing the statistics-gathering from team members. Month-end is tomorrow, so the new method of gathering stats in the database would be implemented effective Monday. Just in time for training.

Everything was ready to import into the live database yesterday afternoon, and we did our update at 4:30pm yesterday. The import had only one minor glitch in one report, due to some previously-entered data that invalidated the referential integrity we'd set up between tables. We came in early this morning to fix the problem, rather than staying late yesterday. After correcting the data in the main log table, everything was fine. The database was essentially complete. Again, just in time for training.

Our first training session was at 9:30am today. I stood at the front and did the public speaking, while James sat at the laptop and did the demonstrating. Other supervisors in the loan area were invited to attend one of the two sessions, so that they might be able to see whether an Access database might benefit their department. One supervisor was in attendance for the first training session, and our own supervisor popped in for the first half of that session, making a full house.

The first session took just over an hour, including questions. That was a little longer than we'd counted on, as we'd scheduled the second session to start at 10:30am.

The second session actually ended up starting at 10:45am, and one more supervisor was in attendance, in addition to the supervisor of all Loan Servicing departments. (No pressure.) Our supervisor came in for the second part of the session this time. This session took almost exactly an hour.

Overall, we did well on our two scheduled training sessions... but we weren't done yet. Two team members who process payoff checks had asked if they could wait until 3:30pm to train, since the end of the month is a busy time for them. We agreed, and ended up having four people in an afternoon session: the two payoff ladies, one supervisor from yet another department, and one team member who had gotten caught in a 45-minute phone call during the 10:30 session and hadn't been able to attend. That session was a little awkward, being that there was such a small but diverse audience, but it seemed to be well-received nonetheless.

We didn't get much actual work done on the database today — combined a couple reports into one (thank jebus for union queries) and started working on calculations for another report — but, overall, considering all the training we did, I think we had a productive day.

The next potentially stressful issue? How to tell our supervisor that we want a change in job description before we work on databases for other departments. Neither myself nor James are terribly good at standing up for ourselves... but we need to stand firm. It would be easy for The Man to take advantage of our apparently rare and valuable skills. If they had to hire new people to replace us, though, any self-respecting Access database programmer or administrator would scoff at our current wage.

I hate being a self-serving jerk. Our boss is cool, though, so I think we should be able to get our point across in a non-threatening and un-jerk-like manner. We'll see.

Even if I do remain a mere Operations Associate... I love being able to do what I enjoy at work. This is why I went to college. I'm glad I wasn't just chasing rainbows.

Geekery In Motion

Dear Internet,

Today was a very special day. Today I got paid for being a geek ALL DAY LONG! My boss had asked me and a co-worker of mine to create a request log database, and today was the first full day I got to spend on the project. It didn't go very well in the morning, since my chosen geekery was Microsoft Access, which I haven't touched since CS100. I spent the first half of the day figuring out how Access works and deciphering the basic database my co-worker had set up. He couldn't work on it with me very much, as he was busy with "normal" work.

The second half of the day went better, though. My co-worker and I briefly talked over some of our options, and figured out a few key points about searching tables in Access. After that, I did some cosmetic and security-based tweaks, and learned how to tweak VB code a little. I took a class in Visual Basic back in college, but that was a long time ago, and nothing I did then really applies to Access. Google was my bitch friend, though, and was much more helpful than the Access help file.

Tomorrow, I'm going to learn how to do my very own search in Access, instead of using the default Find/Replace function. Google has already given me some clues, and tomorrow I'll finish my research and implement a nice FindRecord with an InputBox.

Yay for at-work geekery!



...should I get paid more for doing what I *like* to do? Hmm.

Unexpected Stress

I had been planning to work on the LSM site tonight.

I hadn't been planning to get an e-mail from Russ saying, "I tried a couple of times to add to the news section of the website and nothing posted."

*!?broken?!*
*OMG Stress*

I knew that something had happened on the server side, since I hadn't touched the code in... well, weeks or months. It took me a while to figure out why everything on the site was broken, but I finally discovered that it was due to someone at the nice webhosting company switching register_globals to off, effectively breaking all of my neato "Wow! All I have to do is stick the newsID onto the end of the URL, and it just goes!" code.

I freaked for a while, but after chilling out with a bowl of (low-carb) ice cream, I finally deciphered what php.net was trying to tell me. One line of code and a Dreamweaver search-and-replace later, everything is fixed.

Until some evil, malicious hacker blows on my house of cards, that is.

Back in the Swing

It has been a loooong time since I sat down and did any video editing.

So, I got a hair up my ass to try my hand at making an anime music video. Downloaded a bunch of free apps (and some not-so-free ones), ripped some DVD footage, imported it into Premiere, and sat down to edit.

OMG. I had forgotten a.) how much I love to edit video; and b.) how easily it can suck away several hours of your life.

Even for my little 1½ minute AMV, this is going to take some serious time. If I were returning to Media 100®, everything would come back to me in an instant. I mean, I was an assistant for Media 100® seminars for my second co-op, and I used the program for probably three academic classes after that. Alas, I am now using Premiere Pro, and I'm having to first remember the *process* of editing, remember how I would have done it in Media 100®, *then* figure out how to do it in Premiere. Luckily, it's making sense now.

Unluckily (depending on how you look at it), I'm still as detail-oriented and anal as I ever was — even more so, now that I don't have a deadline.

Aaron: When you decide to make an AMV, I'll do my damnedest to explain Premiere to you. I think I can make it make sense. We'll see...

I Done It.

The new Lakeshoremen.org is live.

I still have some stuff to add, like the photo database, a forum, and fixing whatever random bugs the membership finds as they tool around the site... but it's pretty much done.

Oh, and can I just say that Core FTP Lite would suck my ballzac, if I had one.

Thanks.

That Was Easier Than I Thought

I just spent 90 minutes to create a form with which the members of the Lakeshoremen will be able to correct any errors with their first name, last name, title, or e-mail address, and will be able to change their passwords.

I actually drew a flowchart.

And it helped.

...Actually, now that I think about it, there's one more step of password validation I should probably add, that I had ended up striking from the aforementioned flowchart: allowing only alphanumerics. The passwords can be 6 to 8 characters, and I'd rather not go through the bother of unescaping HTML to figure out the "real" length, and whatever the hell else would be involved. As it is, could somebody break it? (That was a question, not a request, btw.) Basically, is this a major security issue?

Apart from that, though — holy crap, I made something that really, really goes! I might actually get to work on the photo database before launch. It's on the "Nice To Have" list, while the password editing was on the "Gotta Have" list.

Comments and last-minute suggestions are welcome. The site goes live Friday night / Saturday morning, whether I think it's ready or not. I promised.

Brief Hiatus

There is a distinct possibility that I may be posting less over the next couple of weeks, as I really need to get the Lakeshoremen website ready for its October 1st launch date.

I thought it was all just busywork left, but I apparently still have some troubleshooting to do. I'm going to spend another evening on this particular problem of mine, then if I haven't figured out why my variables aren't talking to each other, I'll ask my geeky homies to get my back.

So, updates will be limited in the very near future, unless something really fascinating happens in the next couple weeks (and I wouldn't count that out entirely) or unless I really get a bug up my ass about something (again, don't rule that out either, as I do have a couple blog entries brewing in my head).

In that same vein: if you've e-mailed me recently and I haven't responded, don't worry. I still love you. You don't suck. I suck.

But, right now, I sleep.

OMFG SQL WTF BBQ

Dude. SOMEBODY please tell me what's wrong with this statement:

$query="UPDATE eventTable SET date='$ed_eventDate',
   eventTitle='$ed_eventTitle', location='$ed_location', 
   desc='$ed_desc' WHERE eventID=$ed_eventID";

I've been fighting with this one line for over an hour, trying to get the damn LSM calendar to update, and it keeps telling me I have a syntax error. I know it's gotta be something small and stupid, but fuck if I can tell what it is.

If you know what's wrong and you'd like to share, or if you might know but need to see the code around this to be sure, please share your infinite wisdom with me.

I'm getting that old frustrated "Come on, Diana, it's time for a break / No, I've almost got it, I don't want to stop now" feeling that I used to get when I was learning attempting to learn Macromedia Lingo back in the day. Except this time, I'm not going to stay up all night and watch Weird Al on MTV or Futurama on... whatever channel it was on. I'm going to go to bed instead.

Update, 8/24/2005 8:55pm: It was my variable names! I used "date" and "desc" as variables, and they're reserved words. Once I changed my variable names, the query worked in MyPHPAdmin. I'm still working on getting the actual page to update, as I have several variable names to correct...

PHP + MySQL = r00lz my world

Oh. Mah. Gawd.

OMFG. This is so, SO cool. I feel like an uber-nerd, but I've totally seen the light. After years of explanation and geekitude from Dan (and, more recently, from this tutorial), some support from Sheryl, and of course, an initial introduction from Jamie and from Colvey, I finally have created a functional MySQL database.

It's still pretty simple, and it's definitely not secure yet. But that's OK. I'm just testing my newfound skillz on my own stuff, then I'll worry about security measures to implement when I work on the actual LSM page. For now, though, all my craziness is over that little module in the index sidebar (visible only on the main index page and on the full listing of all entries) labeled, "Keeping Busy."

It's probably one of the simplest things I could have made, but it works. It even sorts the events in date order, and only shows events that happen after today. I'm damn proud of myself.

This has virtually unlimited possibilities. OMG. I should have *made* the opportunity to learn this *years* ago.

*shakes head*

I've got a lot of catching up to do.

It's All Me

Technorati: Tag: Atkins

Five posts from one blog match this tag. Yep, it's me. Just me.

WTF?! I'm cool with that, though. More traffic for me.

Even More Linky Love!

This one's a first: I've never been to this person's website before now, so it's not just a reciprocal link (i.e. 'thanks for linking to me'). Michelle must have found my site from *somewhere*, and thought it blogworthy enough to blogroll. That's my link, there, circled, right above the link to Dooce.

That's pretty cool.

Being in someone's blogroll is cool, I mean, not necessarily being listed next to Dooce. Although that's pretty cool, too.

Thanks, Michelle! I appreciate the shout-out. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. (Or maybe I'm just getting Aaron's cold.)

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

First, let me give credit for the photo that has been gracing the masthead this week. I *heart* Google image searches, although I do tend to swipe images without permission. (As my site isn't exactly commercial, though, and gets a grand total of 10 hits a day, I honestly don't feel too bad about it.) Anyway, thanks be to Jessa for posting this wonderful photo from her trip to Ye Olde Emerald Isle back in 2002, even though I'm a cowardly bastige and didn't ask her permission to use it. (OMFG, so jealous. Ireland is most definitely on the list of places I want to visit before I die.)

So, we all know that St. Patrick's Day is in commemoration of St. Patrick, who drove the snakes out of Ireland, right?

Yeah.

If you're interested in what it's *really* all about, here are some links for you:

+ St. Patrick's Day: Customs and History
+ Scotland Online: St. Patrick's Day
+ History of the Shamrock, Leprechaun, and Blarney Stone

read more...

A Non-LJ GIP (Gratuitous Icon Post)?

Well, it appears that Yahoo! has jumped on the avatar bandwagon. These apparently can be used with Yahoo! Messenger, as well. (Too bad I have no intention of getting online with any other messenger service—I use IM too rarely as it is.)

Hey, while I'm at it, here's another me (a la Candy Bar Doll) that I made back in, oh, December, and never bothered to post.

Interesting, isn't it, how all these cute girlie thingies have all sorts of skin and eye and hair color, but no option for build? Yeah, if I ever looked like this in real life, I'd be in the hospital for anemia or some shit.

More Linky Love!

I'm not much for Googling myself to see who has links to me, and the Technorati thing was pretty much just depressing, so I took the link off my sidebar. ('search for dianaschnuth.net: no results found.)

So, when I check out my stats, and find a website I regularly check out as a referrer, I'm always pretty stoked. Number Two on my Thanks For Giving Me A Linkback list goes to Chepooka. I'm a ways down on her page, but I'm happy to be on it at all. Anything that gets me traffic, and anyone who notices that I link to them (and, in this case, trackback to them as well), any of that deserves 'props' in my book.

So, thanks, Chepooka! I appreciate the love.

To Everyone Who E-mails Me Forwards

Edit: Also: when you forward me pictures at work, please make sure they?re work-safe. A picture of a half-naked cowboy with his johnson strategically hidden behind a saddlehorn, while intriguing, does NOT qualify as work-safe.

Dear Friends, Co-workers and Relatives,

I do appreciate your desire to share something funny and/or meaningful. However, I have been on the internet for possibly twice as long as you have, which has given me more time to read the various forwards that are *still* circulating. This has also given me the time and opportunity to cultivate my discerning taste for internet humor.

In the interest of ceasing to waste my time and yours, I offer these points for you to peruse at your leisure:

read more...

Yay, Traffic?

Can you tell when I posted my Ohayocon5 pics? Yeah.

Also interesting to note: I appear to have less traffic on the weekends. I guess y'all like to do fun things on the weekends instead of websurfing.

Looks like either a.) people are still finding my Ohayocon pics (I know people are still finding them via Google), or b.) maybe I got some more "regulars" after the Ohayocon post. Either way is fine with me.

Aargh!

OMGWTFBBQ! I just tried to type some HTML code into Movable Type too fast, and ended up hitting the keystrokes for [Back] and erasing my entire damn entry.

Too bad... it was pretty good. About how I'm too impatient to sit down and write real blog entries. I can't complain about lack of potential content, cause I've got plenty. It's just making myself sit down and blog about it.

That said, I'm done for the evening.

Linky Love!

Seriocomic has put me on their list o' "Linky Love." And I didn't even ask. How cool is that?

Thanks, Mike!

Recent Referrers

People have made it here to my little site from:

• Googling "kris heath" ohio (I wonder if they found Kris's song?)
  
• Googling GLASSMEN DCI 2005 (Too bad they came up with Topless Drumcorps instead of the Glassmen's 2005 repertoire)
  
• A Technorati search for www.kottke.org (which yielded forth my rantings on stereographs)
  
• A Yahoo search for dianaschnuth.net (huh? why?)
  
• Googling Larry King Live December 2004 Gordon Hinkley and Larry King, Gordon B. Hinkley, and one search on AOL for transcript of gordon b hinckley at larry king live december 2004
  
• Googling acidfox productions
  
• Googling churchgoes scott peterson christian
  
• Somebody's own stats page from New Zealand (probably Mike Hudson's, as his is the only .nz blog I frequent)
  
• A few comments I made on Blurbomat, [daily dose of imagery], and a Trackback I posted to adot's notblog*.

It looks like most of my hits are friends jumping on to see if I've updated, with the occasional stranger making a ten-minute stay with multiple page views. The person looking for Kris stayed on my site for over a half hour, and it looks like Sheryl probably left my page open in the background at work for nearly 45 minutes. :-)

I think I'm having too much fun with my counter.

Go Firefox Go!

Fellow Firefox users: I have a belated Christmas present for you!

BoingBoing has posted an article telling us how to speed up your web browsing experience. I've implemented it, and it seems to work.

However, there is a caveat detailed on adot's notblog—apparently, this could potentially cause problems with certain servers, and won't appreciably speed up your load time unless you have an appropriate combination of bandwidth and processing power.

So, remember what you did, in case you need to undo it later. But for now, it's pretty sweet.

Why Do All Computers Hate Me?

Goddamned XP is smarter than me.

I just lost all my mp3's. Somehow.

I mean, I know enough about computers to know that they're still there, physically. The computer just doesn't know how to find them. I guess that's what I get for playing around with my Shared Documents without really knowing what I'm doing.

I even tried doing a system restore, to no avail.

And, to make things even better, our internet appears to be down. Neither my nor Aaron's computer can get online. I can see Aaron's computer, though, and play mp3's from it (since mine are currently MIA).

Guess I'll just hook up the old computer *again* and transfer all my mp3's *again*.

I am seriously annoyed right now.

*sneer*

Edit, 10:12pm:
Shortly after I wrote the above entry, I hooked up the old computer (again) and started re-transferring my mp3 collection to the new computer. In the meantime, I lit a candle and read a book and calmed myself down.

I have now recovered all of my music, read Wil Wheaton's book Just A Geek in its entirety (almost—I still have the appendices to finish), and made the basement smell like a freshly-baked double-chocolate muffin.

*contented sigh*

The Dell Is In Effect

After a long evening of transferring files from the old 'puter to the new, my refurbished Dell Dimension 3000 is humming happily (and quietly) beneath my desk.

I still need to rescue my bookmarks from the old computer, though, and reinstall all my programs, and other new-computer-type things.

For now, though, I'm going to bed.

I'm Popular...?

Well, I just banned a dozen IP addresses in the same subnet (is that what it's called? the first two numbers are the same) from commenting on my blog. I'm going to see if that puts a stop to the spamming that just started this weekend.

If it doesn't, everybody be prepared to plug in your e-mail address next time you comment on a post. Don't worry, MT encodes your e-mail so it can't be harvested by spiders or bots or what-have-you. Goodness knows I can't afford to have you guys stop commenting at all... my poor self-esteem couldn't handle the strain. I'll put a note in the comments area if I institute required fields.

So, yay for the fact that my blog has finally been targeted by a spam-bot. That means *someone* knows I'm out there, besides you diligent few. Boo for spam-bots.

Now Taking Requests

I know I should probably wrap up the detail work on this site before I start bemoaning my sparse readership (again). After all, the website archives aren't on this server yet, and my CSS and PHP still have some glitches to smooth out.

Still, though, I find myself posting my link in other blogs' comments, and signing up on all those blog tracking sites, and wanting strangers to think my site is as cool as I think theirs is. Are. Whatever.

But, in all actuality, I created this site: a.) to keep in touch with my out-of-town and sometimes out-of-touch friends; b.) to encourage myself to continue writing and journaling; and c.) to give myself a continuing web design challenge. So, I ask you, the readership, what you'd like to read:

1. More day-to-day shit (e.g. 'my job sucks' or 'my computer crashed')
2. More links to news stories (e.g. the new Willy Wonka movie, Viktor Yuschenko's face, or the death penalty)
3. More philosophical and sociopolitical thoughts and ideas and rants
4. More pictures and picture galleries (daily or weekly, even, if I have that many good ones?)
5. More links to linkworthy blogs and rants
6. Your content's just fine as it is! Why do you always worry about shit so much?

Leave some love in the comments section.

OMG I Want.

Oh, Sheryl? Doesn't this bring back memories? Heh.

Why Does My Computer Hate Me?

I've been finishing my Mom's Christmas present this evening—I'm not sure what I think of how it turned out, but I'm sure she'll love it. She may even cry. Anyway, suffice to say for now that Photoshop was involved in creating said gift, as was a trip to Big Lots. (I love Big Lots.)

So, we all know how much my current computer loves to run multiple RAM-hogging applications. Surprisingly, the 'puter made it through the end of the project, taking long minutes to save my 50MB Photoshop file after each major change, during which I was surfing on Aaron's computer. (Tuckle Rori > DaisyDo > Moxie Design Studios > Chepooka) But the gift is now complete, so I had thought it would be safe to surf on my own damn computer.

Not so.

I closed out everything except Firefox and WinAmp, because I wanted to surf to some tunes. I Googled shoutcast christmas to find some holiday spirit, and located the SomaFM Christmas feed, which was rocking my balls for about a song and a half.

Then the fucking computer froze.

You lasted through a 100MB Photoshop file, but freeze when I want to listen to music and click on a link at the same time? And I didn't even click—I just moused over the damn link! WTF?

As soon as Christmas Eve hits, you are so out of here.

(I'm never installing anything major in my own computer ever again.)

Hannukah For Dummies

What is Hanukah? (from Hanefesh.com):

The Jews observe the Festival of Lights for eight days, in honor of the historic victory of the Maccabbees and the miracle of the oil.

The Hebrew word Chanukah means "dedication." In the 2nd century BCE, the Syrian-Greek regime of Antiochus sought to pull Jews away from Judaism, with the hopes of assimilating them into Hellenism -- Greek culture. Antiochus outlawed aspects of Jewish observance -- including the study of Torah -- which began to decay the foundation of Jewish life and practice. During this period, many of the Jews began to assimilate into Greek culture, taking on Greek names and marrying non-Jews.

In response, a band of Jewish settlers took to the hills of Judea in open revolt against this threat to Jewish life. Led by Matitiyahu, and later his son Judah the Maccabee ("The Hammer"), this small band of pious Jews led guerrilla warfare against the Syrian army.

Antiochus sent thousands of well-armed troops to crush the rebellion -- but the Maccabees succeeded in driving the foreigners from their land.

Jewish fighters entered Jerusalem in December, 164 BCE. The Holy Temple was in shambles, defiled and desecrated by foreign soldiers. They cleansed the Temple and re-dedicated it on the 25th day of the Jewish month of Kislev. When it came time to re-light the Menorah, they searched the entire Temple, but only one small jar of oil bearing the pure seal of the High Priest could be found. Miraculously, the small jar of oil burned for eight days, until a new supply of oil could be brought.

From then on, Jews have observed a holiday for eight days in honor of this historic victory and the miracle of the oil.

Today, the observance of Chanukah features the lighting of a special Chanukah menorah with eight branches (plus a helper candle), adding one new candle each night. Other customs include spinning the dreidel (a top with Hebrew letters on the sides), eating "oily" foods like potato latkes (pancakes) and sufganiyot (jelly donuts), and giving Chanukah gifts & coins) to children.

read more...

Crazy Day

Just for shits and giggles, I signed up on all those blogariffic sites out there: blo.gs, weblogs.com, BlogStreet, Blogrolling, syndic8.com, and updated my Technorati profile. I also set MT to accept trackback pings and to ping a few of the sites I signed up on, to let them know I updated. So, to anyone who finds my humble site or feed through one of those sites, welcome. I'm not always terribly interesting... but neither are the other friends and strangers whose blogs I frequent myself, so I'm in good company.

I'm not particularly motivated to do anything this evening. Work really drained me today. The stress I felt today was reminiscent of my days back in Lockbox:

24 September 2002: Just Another Day...

Hey, for once I worked an 8-hour day! Yeah, we were doing so well that we actually took a one-hour lunch and everything. Just for reference, yesterday I worked a 14-hour day. Seriously. My co-worker and almost-supervisor, Loni, worked an hour and a half more than me, since she came in at 6am. Damn, that sucked. Makes the normal 8-hour day seem like a luxury instead of a burden.

Being one of three people manning the Loan Corrections Team Line (aka 'working the phones') wasn't horrible, although I had twice as many calls as usual. And doing loan changes wasn't all that bad, either, although I had several requests that I had to call people about and wait around for answers. But all those things together made for one damn hectic day. I felt like I was going in six different directions all day—I'd hang up the phone from one call, go to start a loan change, get another call, have to do research for that call, finally get back to that loan change I'd started, then get another call, then finally finish that first loan change, then have to call someone about a detail of the next loan change... Yeesh. My desk has at this moment about seven different stacks of paper of varying heights and degrees of importance.

That really sucked away any sort of energy, creative or otherwise, that I might have had in reserve for my Me Time this evening.

So... that's today.

Remind me: why did I syndicate this again?

Movable Type 3.1 Upgrade Successful

Well, everything seems to have gone smoothly with the MT upgrade. I tried putzing with the "dynamic page generation," but all it seemed to do was b0rk my one category page (although it did reduce the rebuild time). So, I'm not using the dynamic page generation yet... not until I do a little more research and find out what the big hype is all about.

I do know that there's a lot about this whole thing that I haven't been utilizing to its fullest extent, even with the old version of MT. For instance, I'd wanted to include a different sidebar (see right) with each category index page—say, photography links for my Photography category, and low-carb links for my Atkins category, and links to concert tours and reviews and such for my Reviews category. It seems that, while MT still doesn't support what I'd wanted to do, there is a plug-in that can do this for me. So, I'll probably mess with that sometime tomorrow.

There's plenty of other blog things for me to research in the future, too, like pinging for trackbacks and such. I just can't think of any mainstream blog tracker thingy that would give a shit if little ol' me had an update. :-/ Do people really just surf off of places like blo.gs or weblogs.com?

Since I switched to PHP, and deleted all my HTML-based individual archives, I've also been having some visitors get 404 Not Found messages. D'oh! So, I need to go into my HostRocket Control Panel and make a custom 404 Error page saying to try changing the .htm to a .php to view the page. Awfully ghetto of me, but... *shrug*

Anyway, fun times ahead. Prepare to see more happy categorized entries from Yours Truly. @whee!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, how about that? I managed to whip together a Thanksgiving theme just in time. The most time-consuming part was locating appropriate images online for the background. Props go out to About.com for the pumpkins and the gourd, and to the Google Image Search for finding me the other gourd image.

In other site-related news, I imported entries from April 2004 last night. Now you can read about such exciting ventures as... well... us buying home improvement supplies from Home Depot? My review of Kill Bill Volume 2? Some random couple "parking" on my street? Yeah. Hit the archives for more exciting archived goodness.

I'm also contemplating upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 sometime in the near future, mainly to see what kind of category support it has. (I've been assigning categories to all of my entries, but have only been actively using the photography category.) So, if the site goes all wonky sometime in the next few days, you'll know why.

Let's hear it for four-day weekends. Word.

I *heart* Stylesheets

Did I happen to mention that, with my all-CSS layout, a minor full-site redesign (color changes, slight positional tweaking) would take considerably less time?

How about one evening?

Everything looks the same right now, but you will all get a Happy Hannukah surprise in a couple few weeks. (Hannukah, Chanukkah, however you Romanize it... I'm taking my spelling straight from the Jew myself.)

I'm also planning a Christmas theme, maybe a Yule theme before that (Dec 21), and afterward... Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's, Independence Day, blah blah blah. And, in case you were wondering how I'm managing all this (which I'm sure you were), I'm writing new stylesheets for each holiday theme, then writing some PHP code to plug in the right stylesheet on the right date. There's only a few things—like those fancy horizontal rules—that I'll still have to change out manually, if I get a bug up my ass about it.

And, of course, I'll include posts giving the history and significance of the holiday and of the symbolism I've incorporated into my design. I'm also going to make a valiant attempt to actually do some real research into each holiday for which I design, and not offend anyone by my ignorance. For example, for my Hannukah theme, I wanted to use a real Hannukah quotable in the masthead—but I didn't want to use the name of God, 1.) because Jews don't write the Name of God, and 2.) because I'm agnostic-bordering-on-atheist myself, and don't want to give prospective visitors the wrong idea (that is, that I'm proselytizing). So, I did a decent amount of researching and looking around online, and ended up quoting only part of the prayer said after the candles of the menorah (hannukia, whatever) are lit.

Not that Sheryl would be offended if I put every single Name of God I could find up on my webpage. Elohim! ELOHIM! (Mormons call Him that too, by the way. We—well, they, I guess—also know the Four-Letter Name, and also don't write or pronounce it.)

You'll all get a Diana-style crash course in Hannukah and Judaism (sp?) in another few weeks, complete with quotables from the inimitable Sheryl and many lovely links.

I like my new Hannukah theme better than this yellowy-green thing I've got now. I can't wait to switch it out...!

Still Tweaking...

I've got my Backlog going on, but it's not very pretty yet. I can't figure out how to change the separator from a dash to a colon, like in the current tune. And, even so, it's still pretty long for my sidebar width. I may see if there's some way I can make it only read the title, then link to Amazon for the artist. That would be sweet.

Er, wait. I figured it out. Let's hear it for figuring out how to cut-and-paste the correct lines of code, and to change them appropriately. Now I just have to see if I can make it remember and display my backlog while I'm not listening to WinAmp.

I kind of wanted to play with this more, but I want to check out the Nightline about the Clinton Presidential Library. Sounds interesting.

Edit, 11:30pm: I just did something pretty damn cool, IMHO. No, I didn't manage to make my web page remember my backlog after I quit WinAmp—that would involve more programming than I know or care to get into at this particular point in time, as I think I'd have to export the songs to a file or database.

No, I made it so that my backlog 1.) doesn't show blank lines when I haven't played five songs yet, and b.) isn't quite as ugly and wrapped around funny. Next I'm on, mouse over one of the song titles in my backlog. It should pop up with "search for U2 on Amazon," assuming it was U2 I was listening to, and the link searches for the artist on Amazon. w00t!

Maybe I *should* try studying Computer Science sometime, maybe get a certificate like Amy... I'm really getting off on this coding thing. I'd forgotten that a.) I know enough logic to do basic programming, and b.) I enjoy it.

I Made It Go!

Holy fucking shit. I learned myself enough PHP to make the Currently Hearing plugin work.

Almost.

I'm still working on making the archives pages display it properly, as they're in a different directory. Any ideas, web gurus?

Oh, and something else that's entirely supercool: HostRocket allows PHP parsing for HTML file extensions. I just had to add a line into my mime-type list in my HostRocket control panel, and whoosh! My stupid archives.htm page is suddenly PHP-ified.

I'm going to go scour the HostRocket FAQ page now and see if I can find a solution to my little PHP nested directory issue.

I'm stoked!

Edit: Yeeeeeah! I just wrote my first Else statement in PHP! And it works! Check it: if you're on the main index or on the main archive list, then you're in the public_html directory, and the sidebar displays my Currently Hearing info. If you're in another directory—say, reading an individual entry or posting a comment—you're in a different directory that's not public_html, and you see my driving tunes.

I am such a geek. But I'm OK with that. Next step: PHP-ifying (and possibly MySQL-ifying) the rest of my site so I don't have to rebuild MT so often...

I Made A Pretty

Check it out—I made a Favorites Icon! If you're using Firefox, check the address bar. If you're using IE, check out the bookmark for my site (that I'm sure you have at the top of your list).

If you can't see it... it looks something like this:  

Heh. I'm so geeked by the smallest things. Go me.

A Successful Blog?

Call me egotistical, but according to D. Keith Robinson, I'd like to think that this new blog of mine will be A Successful Blog. Ideally, anyway.

Incidentally, Keith's website is where I inadvertently stole my anti-tagline from. Just like I (somewhat less inadvertently) appropriated some of Dooce's design elements. Imitation is the highest form of flattery... right?

After all, I believe it was Picasso who said, "Good artists copy; great artists steal." —I'm not sure what that makes me, then.

Blogworthy?

Now that my page looks kind of like a "real" blog, I find myself torn between writing more and writing better. Ideally, I'd like to do both. Realistically, I know that if I want to put out high-quality entries like The Elite Members Of The Online Blogosphere (and their groupies know who they are), I would need to sit down and spend quality time on each and every entry. I would basically be writing mini-essays for actual publication, while trying to keep my informal style intact.

It's harder than it seems. For me, anyway.

On the other hand—shit, no one new is reading this thing. My entire audience consists of Aaron, Amy, Sheryl, Eric, Beth, Dan, and sometimes Amanda, Donna, Kristen, Ellie from SomethingNormal, or a random wanderer following a link from my sig or my old Bosstones page (which, remarkably, still gets hits after at least two years of stagnation).

There's nobody here to impress. Y'all know me too well. *smirk*

So, once I get used to being all loose and laid-back while typing in a new interface, I'm hoping I'll be back to my normal blogging self—albeit with a narrower column of text, a different color scheme, and a new backend.

Huh-huh, she said, "back end." Cool.

P.S. - All of my August 2004 LJ entries are now imported into MT. w00t!

Almost Functional

Well, this evening was spent messing with MT. And messing, and messing, and messing... until I realized that my problem lay in some simple configuration settings. Once MT knew where to generate my files, my MT tags magically started working; and once I realized how to make templates work, and how to recompile the site to show my changes, everything started coming together.

This is still going to take a lot of work and tweaking—and reformatting of generic templates when the need arises. If you choose to preview your comment, you'll see what I mean... ;-)

Hello World

This is just me testing Movable Type, and my ability to insert MT tags into my own HTML. Interesting, isn't it, how I've come full-circle: hard-core codehead to reluctant wysiwyg (Claris Homepage) to all-out wysiwyg (Dreamweaver) to reluctant code-head. Heh.

If You Can't Beat 'Em...

Well, I figured out how to adapt around all the little goobers in my CSS compatibility enough to make something that looks presentable in both browsers. Please look around and let me know what you think. Is the jumpy background too overwhelming? If it is, I can try to tweak it into something that might be smaller, both visually and byte-wise, although I'm not sure how the design would hold together without the large photo element. Might still be OK.

If the general consensus on the design is A-OK, then I'll make an attempt to figure out these Movable Type templates and plug them into this nifty design I've created. Once I figure out the proprietary tags, it doesn't sound like it'll be any harder than connecting ClarisWorks to FileMaker back in the day. And, hell, maybe it'll get me on the road to doing some real database stuff. I have MT running under MySQL, after all.

OK, guys. Let me know what you think. I'm outta here for tonight. Soon. Really.

edit: Might help if I gave you the new link.

"Real" Web Hosting: Check.

Well, I done it. I bought a domain name and pointed it toward my sparkly new web hosting service. I have also maxxed out credit card #2 with said web hosting, and made an emergency online 'oh-shit-did-I-just-go-overlimit?' payment. I am totally done charging shit until I get both cards back to about 50% paid-off. Why do I keep doing this shit? I'm really pissing myself off with this.

But I digress. Web hosting.

As much as I would love to set up MT right now, I'm getting a little tired and am having trouble following the installation instructions. How should I know where I want to install Movable Type? You're the experts—where would you put it?!
*deep breath*

I'm just really anxious to get my shit going, even though my navigation isn't quite up to par yet. I think I need to try a couple different templates for horizontal navigation, and maybe set it up so it doesn't look like crap with a space there, in case I can't get rid of it. Kind of like my issue with the fixed background—it looks in both IE and Firefox, even though it looks totally different.

I wish I had more quality brain-time in the evenings. I've still got a good hour of awakeness, but my brain is done. All I'm good for at this point is some TV, a shower, a chapter or two of Lord of the Rings, and hitting the sack. Blah.

I am so addicted.

I had thought to have a computer-free day today. After purchasing web hosting, downloading MT, and almost getting it installed yesterday, I had seriously thought I could stay away from my hopeless addiction to the intarweb. I had planned to do some yoga, put away some clothes, water my plants, et cetera, et cetera. Instead, here I am, basking in the glow of my Compaq FS740 17-incher, watching my old-skool copy of WS_FTP95 (straight from the 1999-2000 ResNet CD!) zip all the Movable Type files to their new home.

Er, no, I'll take that back. I am actually now configuring MT. So far, so good... Now I just need to set up a template, and test this puppy out.

Then comes the daunting task of importing all my old entries.

Manually.

*gulp*

Layout (Almost) Complete

Thanks to the lovely folks at the CSS Forum, I now have my basic layout set up as I had wanted. I still need to design my very first masthead, figure out my site structure and navigation (i.e. pare this sucker down), and finish my background image to my satisfaction. Then, and only then, will I be prepared to shell out some coin for "real" webhosting. And, after that, I will refamiliarize myself with installing perl scripts on a remote server (which actually shouldn't be too hard—I mean, if I could install a guestbook script back in the day, I can certainly install and configure Movable Type six years later).

Questions, though: Amy, I know you use Firefox. When you scroll my test page, does the "transparent" background kind of jump? I think it's just a video RAM issue on my box, but I can't be positive. It does the same thing in Netscape 7.2 (which I downloaded for testing purposes only). The only reason it doesn't do it in IE6 is that Explorer is fubar and doesn't display the background properly... but I kind of like the funky effect it gives, so I'm keeping it, even though it's not what I was going for. Oh, and incidentally... Firefox is now my default browser.

Overall, I believe I am pleased. Any comments on the layout: good, bad, ugly? I'll get the masthead up as soon as I get it designed. ;-)

Getting Closer...

Well, it looks like there will in fact be some degree of image trickery in the new layout. But it's looking better, anyway, especially in Firefox. Turns out IE6 doesn't actually support the full version of CSS1, and barely supports the CSS1 core. So, all the little stylesheet tricks and fun things that work fine in other browsers look like toasted crap in IE6. (I haven't tested on Netscape yet—seems that I uninstalled Netscape 6 from my computer. Imagine that.)

I wish I knew someone who used Movable Type. I know y'all are LJ junkies, or have your own other thing going on, so I can't go to any of you for bugs/issues/how-to-install. Yes, I know, they have tech support and plenty of docs, but it just feels better to have a real human being to ask when you need help. If I can't use my own layout with MT, I want to know now so I can give it up. Guess I should check the docs soon.

Once I'm completely ready to implement, I'm going to buy a new domain and get some real hosting at HostRocket. I know Schavitz has been going through them for years and has had little to no complaint. Upon comparing their services with others, like LiquidWeb, they seem to have more of what I want for a lesser price. Not by much, but anything is enough.

Oh, no... I've turned into one of those people who blogs about their blog. Shit.

CSS Is Driving Me Insane

Interesting evening. The original plan had been:
1.) do yoga while watching local news
2.) eat dinner during national news
3.) brush teeth, practice mellophone
4.) water plants, indoors and out
5.) put clean clothes away and other minor straightening-up
6.) play with new website

The actual plan became:
1.) super-hungry. ate dinner during local news.
2.) watched half of national news, then fell asleep.
3.) came downstairs at 7:15pm. turned on computer.
4.) messed with website for two hours.

Finally got it to look almost right in Explorer, but (as Amy will notice) it looks totally fubar in Firefox. ARRGH! WTF?! I enjoy a good intellectual puzzle, don't get me wrong, but I am getting seriously peeved at this.

After all this tweaking, I just hope I can make Movable Type work with it OK without resorting to using one of their templates. Good gravy.

Redesign Update

If you're interested, the results of an evening of CSS research is here. It's still not done, and I still have a few issues to overcome (mainly dealing with the height of various elements in various resolutions), but it's getting there.

I tested in IE 6 and Mozilla Firefox, but haven't downloaded any other browsers to test on. The page also looks funky on any resolution other than 1024x768 (remember those resolution issues I mentioned?). I'll continue to add to it and tweak it and keep you all posted. If you find something that doesn't work at all, throw me a comment, yo.

Working in a vacuum

I was never very good at working alone without peer feedback. So, I present for your commenting pleasure, the redesign work-in-progress. It still needs lots of detail work, but this is the general layout I'm thinking of starting with. I know I'm violating some cardinal rule of a website redesign by letting you see it way, waaaay before it's ready for prime-time, but I'd like some comments. And, hell, it's not like I have a really huge reader base, anyway. We're all friends here.

FYI, this is a jpeg of a Photoshop comp, originally 1024px wide. The main content area is arranged so that users with 800x600 resolution can still see the entirety of the content. I'm planning to go whole-hog CSS this time, so the partially-opaque backgrounds will actually be DIVs with an opacity setting, not some trickery of background images. The flower background (and likely the color scheme and masthead) will change as the mood strikes me, although whatever image is there will remain fixed as the page scrolls. I'm defenestrating the iFrames. (Look it up.)

I'm not positive I'll be keeping the TagBoard, as I'm hoping to upgrade web hosting and move to some sort of publishing software that allows comments. However, if I do keep it, you'll all be glad to know that I'm working on upgrading to TagBoard Advanced. I doubt it'll be around for the new design, though.

Comments from the peanut gallery are welcome and appreciated.

Ready for a Redesign

Yep, I think I'm ready to embark on my website redesign. Maybe if I had a real website with real content, I could get recognized in the "blogging community"... or some shit like that. I mean, shit, look at Dooce. She writes about her new baby, and breastfeeding, and getting fired from her job because of her website, and wrapping pasta around her dog's snout because it's funny. We're both intelligent ex-Mormon women with a good sense of humor and a decent amount of web design skill, IMO. If I spent some quality time on my new site, got it to look all spiffy, maybe spent another few minutes actually composing blog articles rather than just being satisfied with my stream-of-consciousness posts?maybe then I could get some new readership. Or at least feel better about myself.

Next weekend: Mom's visit and our trip to Dayton. Visit Grandpa and Grandma Cook and Amy.
Weekend after: Michigan Ren Fest (maybe)
Labor Day weekend: Taste of Cleveland (maybe)
Following weekend: Saginaires / Northern Aurora alumni picnic & Black Swamp w/ Amy
Weekend after that: Gravity Games in Cleveland Saturday & parade on Sunday

Gotta staff the phones tomorrow. Blech. I don't mind it so much, except that I have some stuff from last week to wrap up, and new stuff to learn for this week, and it's just about impossible while answering phone calls all day.

Redesign Step 1: Figuring Out What I Like

So, my computer is happy once more, and I have completed my tour of neat websites.

As with many things, sometimes I just like a website's design without really thinking of specifically why I like said design. So, to make myself pay attention, I made a list of likes and dislikes as I websurfed the elite list, so I can integrate some specific ideas into my redesign.

My likes (and I apologize for not writing in layman's terms):
+ a:hover / mouseOver background change on links
+ neat “ 's in blockquote backgrounds
+ little "about" blurbs in the sidebar
+ photographic mastheads with logomarks
+ cute little icons in front of post titles
+ kitsch. 50's pics. retro fonts.
+ having the latest blog entry right up front
+ the 'currently hearing' plugin
+ white (negative) space and an obvious focal point
+ partially opaque backgrounds for text
+ 5px borders on photos
+ logos with truncated letters (i.e. with the bottoms cut off)
+ simple, understated color palettes

My dislikes (or, things that seem chichéd or annoying):
+ centered layouts with patterned backgrounds on the sides
+ cute little icons in front of post titles
+ folder tabs
+ distressed-style graphics
+ overly large header graphics
+ cluttered teeny type
+ boxes with 45° cut-out corners

These are not, obviously, comprehensive lists of everything I like about every cool website, and I'm sure my likes and dislikes will change with time. They always do. After all, I once practically wet myself seeing this on an Apple Cinema Display, and now I just yawn and wonder if he'll ever update his style.

On a similar note, I had an interesting conversation with one of my co-workers today. My partner in the duty rotation had mentioned that he'd been to college, so I asked what his degree was in. This opened up a floodgate of information—for which I was thankful, because it made me feel a little less... well, like a professional failure, to be blunt. Anyway, this guy graduated business college with an MIS degree, had a couple potentially super-cool second interviews, instead got a shitty job in his field away from home, quit and came back to NW Ohio. He ended up getting a temp gig at Sky to pay the bills (sounding familiar?), and accepted a permanent job when it was offered him, despite the fact that he would still be working outside of his field. Now he's biding his time at Sky until he gets married in a month, and until his almost-wife gets her Master's. Then he says he's planning to go back to school (if it'll help) and hopefully start a business with one particular friend/colleague of his.

He also shared with me that, after almost two years of not using his degree, he's experiencing some... how did he put it? "Confidence issues." I can completely relate to that. That's actually one of the reasons I want to go in with Aaron sometime soon and get a video capture card for his computer—so I can edit video again. I've pretty much given up on catching up to the Flash wave. Director was fun to know, but no one uses it anymore. I can still design, though, and I hope I can still edit. I want to practice, and find out.

I shared with my co-worker that the main reason I'm not out job-hunting right now is that I'm waiting to become vested with my ESOP and Profit-Sharing conributions. My two-year anniversary is coming up in October, and then I'll be 20% vested, I think. I'm not fully vested until I've been with the company for five years. But, considering how much Sky dumped into my 401(k) last quarter that isn't really mine yet, I've got a pretty good incentive to stay on for another three years and some-odd months.

I just hope I can stay professionally competitive until then...

Damn Computer

PC froze up last night while I was installing the latest version of Quicktime. Stupid Quicktime. Anyway, this evening when I tried to start said computer, my Norton Antivirus wouldn't load, and Windows told me my registry was messed up. So, it looks like it reverted to an earlier save point—er, sorry, restore point—because a bunch of my shit reverted to its old settings. And Norton's drivers still aren't loading up.

So, just to be safe, I ran SpyBot, which came up with all the usual suspects: tracking cookies from Advertising.com, Gator, and what-have-you, but no real spyware. And since Norton isn't working right now, I'm running Pandascan—and I'll be damned. Just as I was typing this, it found something. One infected file. Damn.

Well, anyway, once my computer is feeling better, I may write about this weekend in Grand Haven. Until then... maybe I'll take some time away from my illin' computer and do some Yoga For Dummies or something.

Homework Assignment

OK, I'm completely serious about this, so don't post something silly without posting something serious, too.

I've been going through this list of well-designed websites, deciding what I admire and what I feel to be cliché. (I must have some amount of good taste, since I already frequent over half a dozen of the sites.) Anyway, one of the things I'd like to incorporate into my redesign (whenever it happens) is an About Me blurb. Not necessarily the full-page kind, as I've tried that multiple times and it just don't work. More of something concise and amusing, like:

Diana Schnuth is a web designer and photographer in Toledo OH, making her actual living in the world of finance.

So, my homework assignment to you is to write one or two brief sentences about me that would explain who I am, and what I'm about, to any complete strangers who might confusedly stumble upon my site.

May the power of The Pink Pig be with you! Now go!

Design Dilemmas

I'm contemplating embarking on a major website redesign. Not just a "the.details" redesign—a revamping of all the Diana Network of websites. I'm contemplating actually paying for my web hosting, and getting a decent amount of storage space. Perhaps an ASP-enabled server (so I can at least put pre-made scripts on it, even if I can't make myself learn ASP alone). Hopefully at least PHP and SQL and Perl. Perhaps even abandoning LiveJournal altogether and trying out one of these other packages like Movable Type or WordPress or Textpattern.

Thing is, now that I give the idea some serious thought, I'm not sure how much control I would have over my design and coding if I use blogging software. My goal is to have a more dynamic page with more flexible design elements—"skinnable" is close to what I'm thinking, although I'm not sure if I could think of more than one or two site designs at once. But, anyway, having started as a hard-coder of HTML, it's hard to give away all control of my coding, CSS or HTML or javascript or what-have-you. Even in Dreamweaver, I have to go in and fix code sometimes to get it the way I want.

And then there's the Trendy Factor™. I don't want my site to look exactly like everyone else's site, spiffy and acclaimed though they may be. Unfortunately, however, my iFrames aren't very searchable or trackable or navigable, though I once thought they were the proverbial shiznit. I want a clean, easy-to-update site with highly customizable design elements. I don't necessarily want bleeding-edge web tech, nor do I want a rubber-stamp MT page with dashed lines around the blockquotes and a pretty patterned background behind my main content panel. I want a classic yet fun and moderately untraditional page that looks like I designed it.

When do I find my style? The one that I like as much as I like the styles of others? The closest I ever got was the Saginaires Alumni page, and even that's beginning to look stale to me. It's like it's almost done, but not quite out of the draft stage. It's missing something vital, some important detail elements.

Now, before I get a rash of "shut up—you design great websites!" comments (which, admittedly, I wouldn't mind reading for an ego boost), I'll concede that I do have some good ideas every now and then. I just can't seem to make them combine into a solid final cohesive product with which I can be satisfied.

Maybe I'll design a spiffy-looking new website with more dynamic and engaging content. We'll see.

Unproductive Evening

Spent all day at work chomping at the bit to get home and work on web page / drum corps stuff. Got home, ate dinner, messed with my computer a little, got bored, went upstairs and read on the couch, fell asleep for an hour, woke up with the cat asleep on me, then watched American Chopper and 20/20 (with the cat still sleeping on me).

I'm only just now getting down to researching more on RSS feeds and planning to create one for my alumni site, even though it's rarely updated. WTF. It's purely for my own benefit—I don't expect anyone to actually take advantage of the Saginaires Alumni Association syndication.

I'm tired but not sleepy. :-/  Blah.

website update

Why won't my LJ client upload my entry?! Gah. Must resort to posting from the LJ website.

Anyway, just so y'all know...
- my LJ is now integrated into the.details
- my gardening section is now up
- the photos from the U-Haul moving debacle aftermath are posted

And here's a little something for Sheryl.

Thank you, Sheryl!

Ye Olde Frankenstein PC is back up and running, thanks to a working power supply donated by Sheryl. I installed the new power supply with little to no difficulty, and was delighted to hear that lovely little "beep" when I hit the power button. Then I spent even longer hooking up the PC to my little network of crap (gotta make sure the Mac is all finished being connected before cramming the PC under the desk, which means hooking up the external CD burner and the monitor switchbox, gotta feed both PC and Mac keyboard cables through and figure out where they live when not in use, etc, etc). Then I got to pick up where I left off back in freakin' January when my computer had its little blowout, which was figuring out why Norton LiveUpdate wouldn't update my virus defs. Amongst all those things, I spent all evening with my computer and didn't even get the stuff done that I wanted to do with it (time-sensitive alumni web page updates).

So, now that I've downloaded a nice LJ client for my PC, and updating my personal page is no longer a chore, the question arises: do I keep blogging on LJ, or do I return to manually updating the.details? I intend to do some updates to it, anyway: changing the header graphic and menu system, adding a few sections (like gardening... I'm a dork), maybe even changing the color palette (oh the horror!). Can I get some feedback from my loyal readership? Blog here, or blog there?

It's way past my bedtime. Lemme know what y'all think.

P.S. - Amy's coming to visit this weekend! Schnarf!
P.P.S. - How I've missed having a speedy computer. I like my Mac, but I also like not having to wait for shit to load.

T-minus four days and counting

We have almost everything packed, the U-Haul is reserved, and Aaron's picking up the key to the house on Friday. Time to let everybody know The Moving Day Schedule.

9:00am - Aaron picks up the U-Haul
9:30am - Moving commences as fellow movers arrive
after loading - Aaron and Diana take the crew out to lunch at Easystreet (our treat)
after lunch - Return to Grove Street and line up vehicles for the Schnuth Caravan up to Toledo
upon arrival - Unload at 4651 Ventura

Unfortunately, we're not positive what time the whole operation will be over, but we're guessing sometime in the mid- to late afternoon. So far, the moving crew looks like myself and Aaron, Kris Fries (and possibly his wife Kathy), Kris Heath, Mark Sheets, and Eric Fertel. Jason Garza may be making an appearance after lunch.

I'm kind of frustrated that I don't have Dreamweaver for my Mac, and/or that I haven't gotten myself a new power supply for the other computer yet. I have grand ideas for a slight redesign of "the details" page, but it would require that great search-and-replace function in Dreamweaver, so I wouldn't have to open up every damn file in the whole site and see what styles everything was set at. For the web geeks: yes, I do have stylesheets set up, and yes, they are a linked file and not individually applied within the page. Yes, I will pretty much just be writing a new stylesheet and making new graphics. Still, though, I have become a creature of habit and I prefer my WYSIWYG program to hardcoding, despite the fact that I once prided myself on my ability to code HTML. (That was long before the days of Dreamweaver and its Adobe analog, however, back when WYSIWYG programs were awkward and clunky and required code-tweaking, anyway, to output properly.)

Anyway, as much as I enjoy my LiveJournal, I think I'm going to begin updating my actual page again, as soon as the PC is back up. I may keep the blog section on LJ, and just add updates to the page, though. I'm looking at, first, a new and cleaner design. Second, I'll be updating long-unused sections, like the Reviews, Photos and Bio. Third, I'll be adding new sections, like an Atkins Diet factsheet with reviews of low-carb foods and links to Schnuth-approved recipes.

All this... as soon as I get myself a new power supply.

LiveJournal can be a damn pain.

So, let me share with you the epic saga of today's LJ post. I've been using my Mac today, since my PC is still incommunicado. After finishing up reformatting and reconfiguring everything to work for me for the time being, I attempted to open a browser window and post all about it to my LJ. O silly me, thinking it could be just that simple.

No, LiveJournal decided to refresh the webpage after me entering a few sentences of text... then again after I tried to re-enter about half a sentence. So I said, fuck it. I'm downloading one of those clients for my Mac. No biggie. Downloaded the Phoenix client, which is the only one that works with "Classic Macs" (that is, pre- OS X). It's a StuffIt file, of course... but my version of StuffIt Expander apparently won't recognize it, for whatever bizarre reason.

So, off I go to locate the latest version of StuffIt Expander that will work with OS 8.x, and I discover that my version is about three version numbers outdated. (Yikes.) I download version 7.whatever, which takes 20 minutes for a 9MB file. *sigh*

After a few restarts—and discovering that my Mac freezes after it's been asleep—I've finally installed the new StuffIt, unstuffed the Phoenix LJ client, located the folder in which it was expanded (hiding under a window on the desktop), and fired this bad boy up.

As much as I hate to admit it, I may just have to rework my personal webpage to incorporate LJ as my main blog. This is kind of spiffy. Of course, that's assuming I ever either a.) get my PC to power up again, and/or b.) get a copy of Dreamweaver for my Mac and just edit my site from the 6500.

I'm glad I have two passable computers for just this reason. I do still use Aaron's computer for some things, but having my own that I can tinker with makes me happy. —Hmm. I mean, one that I can tinker with that *does* what I want it to do. And powers up. And doesn't die in the middle of an icestorm. And doesn't make me sad. And doesn't make me whore out to my friends for tech support. Which I don't want to do. Which makes me want to fix it myself. Which makes me more frustrated. Et cetera.

Aaron and I bought a digital camera off of a coworker of his for 75 bucks. It's a Fuji FinePix 2400, with 2.1 megapixels of digital goodness. The max resolution is 1600x1200, or somewhere around there. Not bad. If my Mac had USB, I could hook it up and download pics to the 6500. As it is, we can hook it up to Aaron's Dell and have XP automatically recognize it as new hardware, which is keen. Sure, it's a little outdated, but it's just what we wanted in a digital camera. We can take photos for the web and for eBay, and take it on trips to have a point-and-shoot along.

Oh, yeah, one more thing. We went to see our realtor on Saturday afternoon. She seems really nice, and we're going to go check out houses next Saturday. w00t.

Wish me luck with the PC. I don't know what to do with it, besides spring for a new freaking power supply and hope that's the problem. Any advice would be cheerfully accepted (without directly propositioning anyone to help). Peace out.

I love my job... right.

My boss kind of pissed me off today. Me and my coworker both.

See, last week, my boss Tom was on vacation. My coworker Deb and I ended up having a question about the databases we work with, and since Tom wasn't available, we asked the database guru, Rick. We'd only met him once or twice, in the company of Tom, but we knew he was the programming guy mainly responsible for the CIP (Client Information Program) database.

Turns out that Rick is so much better at explaining things that Tom is. Tom has been known to talk around a subject for 15 minutes and leave you no clearer on the subject. Rick, however, not only explained the process of updating the database, but also brought us back to his area and showed us the SQL databases that are the meat and potatoes of the front-end we work with.

So, naturally, when we came up with a few questions today, even though our immediate supervisor had returned from his vacation, we opted to ask the guy that we knew could answer our questions succinctly and thoroughly. We didn't even consider asking Tom, because we doubted he'd be able to help. Turns out, though, that Tom came to get us for our Friday meeting as Rick was leaving from discussing our database issues. Of course, Tom asked why Rick was in our office, and then made sure to tell us as we were entering our meeting, "In the future, when you have questions, make sure you ask me first."

OK, will do... next time I want a completely unsubstantiated answer.

I liken the situation to asking a scientific question of your local clergy vs. asking Stephen Hawking. Not that Rick is that much of a genius—he's just your average forty-something, well-mannered, friendly and intelligent IT guy. But you know what I mean.

Does anybody know what's wrong with my computer? There's no fuse that we can find, which is weird. The fuse wouldn't be on the motherboard, would it? How do I know if my power supply is hosed? Gyarr!

Aaron keeps telling me that enough is wrong with my computer, with it randomly freezing at startup and during normal use, and now this power issue, that maybe I should just pay the damn bench fee somewhere and get it looked at. I think I'd be embarrassed on some level, though... "Yeah, I put in the new motherboard and processor... —I did what? What did I fuck up? Oh, um, I mean, my friend put in the motherboard..."

Damn livejournal...

Silly me, wanting to change to Rich Text mode in the middle of an entry. No, I didn't want to keep that entry or anything. Gyarr.

So, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted... Where the hell is the goddamn fuse?! I cracked open the computer, and the fuse is not where Aaron said it would be. I can't seem to find it. Hopefully, he'll be able to help me locate it this weekend, and we can go buy a new one at Wal-Mart or Ace Hardware or something. I hope it's not actually the power supply itself, because that would suck. It doesn't smell like burnt computer, though, so that's good.

Although I did discover why you're supposed to keep all the nice plates closing up the back of your computer. :-) Lotsa cobwebs. Jinkies.

I read something on CNN.com today which would explain some of my personality quirks. Scientists have found a relationship between teen depression and a small hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotion and motivation. It's possible that adolescent depression could actually shrink the hippocampus, they say. Maybe that would explain my reticence to get up in the morning, eh? —Oh, well. It was a good try, anyway.

And here's a funny for ya: Maybe your parents or grandparents were involved in social or veterans' clubs like the VFW, the Federation of Eagles (Fraternal Order of Eagles?), the Moose Lodge, or similar clubs. But have you ever heard of... The Fraternal Order of Orioles?! One of their local "nests" opened an account with Sky recently... which is probably more than I should tell you. Now I have to kill you.

Stupid computer

So, here I am, using this LiveJournal I signed up for. Why, you might ask? Well, because my computer blew a fuse during last night's windstorm / power funkiness. I haven't opened it up to make sure, but that's gotta be it.

I'm currently on Aaron's kick-ass Dell instead of my slower Power Mac, FYI.

I just didn't want anyone to think I'd forgotten to post, ya know. So, here I am. On LiveJournal.

I had fun overachieving at work today, for once. There's a bi-weekly report we have to compile for the banking centers, and up until now we've had to do it by hand. Print out individual reports, add up each entry, type it into a spreadsheet. We all maintained that there was an easier way, that Programming should be able to make it just go. And, this time, we thought we were golden. It still didn't go into Excel, but at least all I had to do was type numbers straight from one to the other.

Then I found out—after I'd completed the spreadsheet—that the report I'd used may not be completely accurate, and that we may have to do it by hand again. Gah! So, while my boss was waiting to hear the word from Programming, I got a jump on doing the manual report. It wasn't until late this afternoon that my boss got back with me and confirmed that, yes, we'd need to do the report by hand again this time. When I pointed out that I'd already gotten half of it done anyway, he said, "Staying ahead of the game, huh?" I told him I try.

But, yeah. So rarely do I get to make brownie points at work that this little incident made me awfully damned proud of myself.

Hopefully this LiveJournal thing won't be a necessary part of my blogging for long, but I'm glad to know it's here when I need it. :-)