I’ve done pretty much all I intend to do to fix the wacky way Internet Explorer displays things. For some incomprehensible reason, it insisted on putting my sidebar at the bottom of the page. This, even though there was a style sheet included specifically to address IE’s, um, grosser idiosyncracies. I’ve managed to bring it up to the top, though it’s on the left-hand side instead of the right. I can’t say that I care enough to fix it, as it’s at least displaying it in the proper vicinity. It also isn’t putting a nifty mouse-over border around images, but again, I just don’t care. Most images are clickable if you want to view larger versions. If you use IE, you’ll just have to take it on faith, as you won’t get any border indicating their click-worthiness.
All I can say is, please, please, please take a minute to try out Firefox. It’s a thing of beauty, it’s free, it’s not made by ‘droids in Redmond, and most importantly, it follows directions without sassing back, damnit!
It cracks me up when Harriet sits like this. She reminds me of an old man slouched in a Lazy Boy, watching tv and drinking a beer. She–formerly known as The Dog Who Does Not Drool–had another slinger fest last night while I was eating a salad. I cannot imagine that mere romaine, radicchio, cucumbers, scallions, or tomatoes were responsible for the waterworks. And, I cannot imagine that the lemon juice and kosher salt I dressed it with were, either. It’s official: my dog is a freak. But, she’s a Boxer, so we already knew that.
Is this week over yet? The wind last night was unbelievable. It made the electricity flicker off and on all night, which meant I overslept because my alarm clock lost it’s mind. Yuck. Traffic is bad enough at 5:30am. By 7am, it’s bumper-to-bumper all the way to Bloomington. I ended up going the back way, to avoid the Hwy 46 wind tunnel, but traffic was still heavy.
But! Guess what I heard this morning, as I was getting into my car? Geese. Lots and lots of geese. The wee geesies are returning, so that’s something to be cheerful about. I think.
Oh, and before I forget, if you’re looking for that perfect gift for the man in your life, why not an heirloom quality mink penis cosy? I hear it’s what all the best dressed men will be wearing this Spring. Surely, my sources cannot be wrong.
In the far less bizarre world of template news (because, you know there had to be some) I have tarted up (or should that be dressed down?) the gallery. The lurking shadow man is gone, as is the ass-ugly grid pattern on the top left. The stripey bits are gone, too, and I’ve changed the fonts to mirror the blog font family. About the only things left that bug me are the upper navigation buttons (I’m just not enjoying the rounded, shadowed look) and the lack of a banner image. I may play around with adding an image to the header, but will probably not get too motivated to de-fancify the buttons. That sounds too much like work to me.
I haven’t paid too much attention to the Olympics coverage so far, partly because I’ve been busy with other things and partly because there hasn’t been much of interest to me so far. Men’s figure skating is on right now, though, and oh wow. Japan was allowed one men’s skater and good lord was he ever amazing. He fell and screwed up his score, but even so, he was absolutely breathtaking to watch. Just beautiful.
I think I’m done fiddling with the blog template. Finally! It’s very nearly exactly what I had in mind, which is Good Enough. Coppermine is not being so accommodating, though, so I’ve got some more tweaking to do there. I need to delve into the help fora to find info on customizing headers. That dude lurking at the top right has got to go, and the grid pattern and stripes are ugly, too. So, no more unscheduled blog ugliness (ya-hoo!), but if you go to the gallery and are struck blind by the hideousness, I apologize in advance (boo-hoo!). I suppose I could take it off-line while I tweak, but with my luck, I’d forget to re-set it. Yes, I suck, that way. I suck in other ways, too, but we won’t speak of that right now.
Malaprop o’ the day: “Heresy Kisses.” Have y’all tried the peanut butter ones, yet?
Okaythen!
My apologies for doing unspeakable things to my various templates, but I’m just not happy with them. I switched the gallery template back the clunky grey whatsit over the weekend, and today I tweaked the blog template so that it is at least somewhere in the same color realm. In the process, I managed to delete my header php file, which made all sorts of ugly happen. Eeep! Now that I’ve got it back to where it is, at the very least, unb0rken, I’m thinking I may swap out the grey frame with plain ol’ white. The grey, while better than the stock color that came with the template, is not really very elegant. I also tweaked the sidebar, because the stock one lumped all the blogroll links into one stream. I like being able to have them divided out into categories, so I did a little Frankensteining to massage everything into a format I can live with.
But hey, I now know more than I ever wanted to about both style sheets and php (including how to tweak Coppermine so that the image captions are left justified, instead of centered). Aren’t I a lucky duck?
My apologies for being lazy and letting multiple days go by without posting. I’ve been busy, though, you see. I finally managed to get all the text information from the old website moved to the new gallery. Wheee! And, I’ve deleted all the old files. Now the only things left are some miscellaneous photo directories, and the main index, gallery, blog, and writing page. Talk about a tedious pain in the behindermost. Of course, now that I’ve deleted everything, I’m sure to find that I’ve missed redirecting a whole bunch of image files, which will leave big, gaping holes wherever I’ve linked to them.
We’re suppose to go to a diversity workshop (more like a presentation, I’m betting, which I’m sure will involve the dreaded Power Point. Oh, how I loathe Power Point.). It came down from on-high that everyone is supposed to attend, which means it’ll be packed and hot and airless. I’m so not looking forward to it. Not to cast asparagus upon diversity awareness, mind you. I think the world could use a metric assload of it right now.
Speaking of work, there’s something immensely gratifying about pulling your hair out trying to assign subjects and a call number for a book that nearly defies categorization, then checking the shelf-list to find that you placed it in Just the Right Spot.
Have y’all seen this video?
Holy crap! I’m funny about my T-shirts. I like them folded into nice, small, rectangular parcels. It’s not that easy to get them uniform and tidy, though, so I’m going to have to give this trick a try.
And, while I’m sharing links, remember the rock star feet website? The one with photos of Nick Cave’s shoes? Well, brace yourselves, for Il Mustache lives and breathes. Lordy! I know I’ve said before that–Nocturama aside–Mr. Cave can do no wrong, but now I’m not so sure.
Okaythen!
Here’s some more crepuscular ray action. This was taken on January 31, on Woodyard right after the Smith-Curry Pike intersection (for those playing along at home). The photo is pretty bad, but it illustrates another form crepuscular rays can take. I have a ~40 minute commute, and the entire ride home I kept being teased by gorgeous cloud-sun views. I was unable to get any good shots though. Either I was unable to find a good spot to pull over, or the clouds shifted and the picture-perfect moment was lost. Hmph.
This really is not the place to visit if you’re looking for porn. I’m just sayin’. Surely, based on the descriptive text below the link to my blog, the searcher would’ve been able to figure out that they are un-freaking-likely to actually *find* nudie photos of girls with big tits here? Surely?
In a mad fit of obsessive compulsiveness, I cleaned the microwave last night. This morning, when I went to heat up water for tea, I nearly dropped my mug. The whiteness of the clean microwave was blinding! So that’s what it looks like under all the gunk? Who knew?!
Today’s daytime teevee observation (really, I do have a job, only today is MLK Day, so I’m off work): I wish Delta Burke would get a hobby. She’s hawking some sort of medication delivery service. Apparently, she’s been “living with diabetes” and is really excited about having her syringes, etc. delivered to her door. And, who wouldn’t be? It’s just that I object to that phrase, “living with X.” It makes X sound like some sort of mutant roommate. “Hi, I’m Delta Burke, and this is my platonic life partner, Diabetes.”
I finally finished moving all my image files from Blogger to my domain. Boy, was that ever a pain in the behindermost! I would recommend to any Blogger users that, if you think it’s possible that you might ever, in your wildest dreams, want to skip town, have your images hosted at your own domain or by some disinterested third party (I unreservedly recommend Flickr). Otherwise, you will regret it.
I also added categories to all my posts. That was a time consuming pain in the arse, as well. One thing I learned is that I do in inordinate amount of crankypantsing. It’s by far the largest category, though that’s partly due to it being a bit of a catch-all.
That’s all for now. I think I may have a wee cocktail[1]. And, perhaps, do some arting.
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[1] If that’s not an obscene word, I’m the Pope.
Like suddenly deciding to jump ship and migrate from Blogger to WordPress, I dove into setting up a Coppermine image gallery on my website. There aren’t any ready made templates that I’m 100% happy with, and the one I chose doesn’t go with the look of the website or the blog–not at all–but it’ll do.
I don’t know what I’m going to do integration-wise. That’s a headache I’m putting off until tomorrow. For now, though, the gallery is up and running parallel to the website, with content duplicated both places. (Except for the photo portion, which I’ll upload at a later date.)
Why, you ask? Because, though HTML coding isn’t difficult, it’s a tedious pain in the arse to update the site as it’s currently set up. Coppermine has a similar functionality to Flickr, which makes uploading and sorting easy peasy. It also includes a bunch of Flickr-y bells and whistles, like viewed stats and individual image comments.
Here’s a strange thing. The images from the previous post were uploaded to Flickr, so I figured I’d just link to those files, instead of uploading duplicates to my website. But, I noticed something odd. Apparently, some of the “medium” size images that Flickr provides have a larger file size than the original images. WTF? How can they shrink a file, but make it larger? I’ve done a spot check, and it doesn’t happen with all images. Why it would happen with any of them is a mystery to me.
We are moved. There will be no further updates at the Blogspot address. The sudden uber-ugliness of the old blog is not something I can live with. It is hideous. Do not gaze upon it lest you be turned to stone.
All the links in the headers on the main website have been updated. Now, I just need to sort out the aforementioned minor formatting issues and reinstall the images that have been lost. Whew!
red paper boat 
