So I played some ultimate last night. Pretty awesome. That game is so stinking fun. I often feel like I’m dying when I play. But I think that means I’m trying hard so it’s a good feeling.
I still don’t dive for the disc. I almost dove. Close. I can tell you that watching highlights from the nationals right before I played would of made me dive for it. Those guys are super good. We’ve got at least one full team. Gotta recruit about 7 more regulars and we will be able to really get serious.
Here’s what some people who know how to play look like doing it. Highlights from Nationals
I finally got around to getting two plugins to work properly. I long time ago I had a nice Ajax plugin installed that would glide comments out right under the post without taking the user away from the home page. I really like it. Check it out on this post.
If you notice my sidebar there is a new section on it called Stats. The bar graph displayed shows the number of posts for the last 30 weeks and the number of comments. The posts are indicated by the height of the bar and the comments are indicated by the opacity of the bar. The light red colored bar on the right is the current week.
Inline Ajax Plugin
SparkStats Plugin
Working on the demonstration site for the company meeting these past few days I ran into a hang up. When I embedded the flash banner in the page, it worked fine. But the CSS menu I had above it, was now hidden behind it. So while the menu still worked, you couldn’t see it enough to use it.
Adding this line of code to the html fixed it in IE 7.
param name="wmode" value="transparent"
The problem stems from DHTML objects always displaying on top of XML objects. Or something like that.
In case I forget.
There is a much more in depth and complicated solution I ran across for other browsers that has to do with using an iframe.
I didn’t need it to work anywhere but IE 7.
Recently I’ve developed a irritated right eye. I’m not sure why. One idea I have is that it’s because I’ve been staring at a LCD all day and drinking coffee - my eye gets dehydrated. Another is that I don’t get enough sleep - my eye gets dehydrated from not having enough time to bath in my cool refreshingly moist eyelids at night. Another idea is that I don’t blink enough. But only on the right side.
Spreadsheets
Google Spreadsheets is a high quality web app. I love being able to pull up the same document anywhere and not even having to think far enough in advance to know that I’d need it on more than one computer. Do I suffer for my lack of forethought? No, not with Google Spreadsheets.
I need to get a little more creative with my formula usage. Right now I’m too static to be implemented long term.
The news of a Presentation App is impressive. I’m not very excited about it since I don’t make many presentations. Being able to share them at a URL like many of the other Google apps would be neat to see.
- Band of Horses
- Pop Riveter
- Feist
- Camera Obscura
- Low
- Destroyer
Code
I don’t really fancy myself a programmer because I don’t have a very thorough understanding of any object oriented language. Over the weekend and into yesterday (Tuesday, April 17th) I managed to hack out 4 pages of a website. I learned SO MUCH! Why CSS menu’s are hidden by Flash and how to fix it in IE 7. Amazing CSS techniques on Image Mapping additional info pop-ups. My grasp of inherited properties increased. Gradient backgrounds without images. (Looks bad, heh.) Div naming pit-falls. And generally just what it is to crank out a websites code. Granted it is a very simple site. But it was a challenge and while I wasn’t surprised I could do it, I’m glad I was able to figure out exactly how in such a short term.
I’m going to see The Arcade Fire in Atlanta, GA on May 1st. It’s really exciting just to think about seeing them live. Guess what? I was browsing around last.fm’s pages for The National, another favorite band, and I noticed someone make a comment that they are seeing The National with Arcade Fire. I thought, “No. Can’t be. Are they touring together?” So I went to The National’s website and checked out their tour dates. HOLY COW! The National is supporting Arcade Fire for about 5 shows. Their first night on the tour is May 1st!!! When I decided to go to Atlanta for a show I had no idea it would be for hands down the best show I’ve ever been too. Now to try and get tickets on the ground floor instead of the balcony. Hmm…
I went to see My Brightest Diamond open for The Decemberists on Sunday. Nice show! I would of much rather seen a show with them headlining, but they played a good 5 songs.
I got called yesterday by a friends younger sister. She had the sad task of calling everyone in his phone contacts to let them know he had passed away two days before. He was 23. Got pneumonia, was sick for two weeks, and died. Crazy. Now I know at least two families that needed that WT.
Had an awesome time making the banner images for the internal pages of the global web site. It’s really hard to switch gears from designing banners to editing code. Helps to go to sleep in between.
Learning Python has really been put on hold by getting a job. That’s not a bad thing. Just one of those things to deal with. I’ll have to figure out a time to do some personal skill development on the weekends.
I also would like to find some time to exercise. Or make some.
Yesterday I had to continually yell and talk and make noise in my car so as to not fall asleep. That was interesting. I prefer getting a good nights rest. When I came outside to my car to leave I noticed that my car door locks didn’t all unlock as they usually do. I thought, “Oh man, dead battery.” Sure enough. I sat there for a few minutes getting sweaty and then made my way back towards the office to ask for a jump and noticed someone leaving work and asked them instead. They had the cables and jumped me no problem. This morning again the battery was less than powerful and not to a new mistake just not enough recharge from the ride home yesterday I suppose. Irritating.
I’ve got to go to a meeting and discuss global brand messaging.
So first I have to explain the title of this post. I did research today to find out how to use UTF-8 special character codes. Curious if they worked on the fly in WordPress I just made one up. Conveniently it worked and provided the second word/character for my title. BAM!
“I threw up on your bed.”
Writing a style guide is quite a task. I noticed a few references today mentioning that people leading that task for larger ‘papes tend to retire after finishing the guide. Or retire so they can finish it. Hopefully this wont be quite so involved and long strung. (Heh, long strung, I like that.) I was reading ALA’s guide and was mondo impressed when they mentioned that it’s important not to dumb down stuff too much on there since web professionals read the site. However, not to go over board. For example they mentioned that just because a CSS programmer knows all 317 CSS workarounds doesn’t necessarily mean they have heard of Edward Tufte. I was so glad I knew who Tufte was. Because I certainly don’t know 317 CSS anythings.
I’m starting to get a slight understanding of typography issues associated with the web. Typography is such a massive topic it seemed to me at first glance, certainly worth sinking my teeth into, but only it in little pieces at first. I’m amazed at how quickly some of it is making sense. I don’t like the construct of those last sentences. Another time.
I got one of these mini optical mice for my lappy. It’s tiny.
One gripe I have about using this leg top putter is that the little touch pad is forever experiencing an ID10t error because I bump it with my thumbs. I’m hoping as I get used to typing on it I’ll lighten up on the accidental touch pad cursor moves. Nothing kills a train of thought quite like jumping three sentences and randomly inserting characters. I enjoy the portability however.
I still use ‘though’ far to much in just about anything I write. I’ve done better this round but it was conscious.
