Today is my mom’s birthday, so Happy Birthday Mom! You are wonderful, loving, fun to be with and a great mom. I am really lucky to have you. And so are Kevin, Max and Brian.\
Some of my other loves, in random order (cuz I can’t pick my fave):
I don’t normally talk about work, but I’m making an exception because this one was a lot of fun. It’s officially in beta now, and I can talk about it. Yay!! The new My AOL launched its first beta today, and I worked on it! I got to play with everyone’s favorite new javascript toy: XMLHTTPRequest, and did most of the CSS and a good deal of the markup. It was a fun project to spend a couple weeks on, and there’s a lot of potential for cool stuff with it.\
It is still very beta (in the traditional sense of the word). It’s a little slow in Safari for some reason that we haven’t been able to track down, and there’s a really funny jumping icon thing in Firefox that, again, we haven’t been able to figure out (it jumps the exact width of a scrollbar, but no scrollbar shows up, so it’s double-weird).\
Play around with it, try adding your own feed, and see how it goes. There are a couple odd things about how it chooses which feeds to grab, and which RSS fields to display (for example, if you have both summary and content:encoded, it will only use summary), and if you have multiple feeds in your HTML, it will choose the first if they all have the same link. Hey, it’s a beta.\
There’s lots of cool stuff coming in subsequent releases, so stay tuned!
I finished the latest Harry Potter book and am sad to say that I was disappointed. I have no qualms about any of the plot points, so this isn’t bitterness talking. It just seems that the book is 3/4 filler of back story without any action or moving the story forward. Kev said that it is a “fourth act” book. While I think all Potter fans should read it, don’t expect too much from it.\
In other news, CBS has agreed to air four episodes of Veronica Mars!
At our last CSS Working Group meeting, I volunteered to ask the design community what y’all want as far as backgrounds and borders go. We spent some time talking about the CSS3 Backgrounds & Borders module and we need some feedback (because none of us are designers).\
If you’re a designer, is this what you want? Is there anything missing from the module that should be there? Is there anything there that shouldn’t be?\
Some ideas to get you going:
Last weekend Kevin and I snuck off without the kids and went to the beach. Oh baby, do I love the beach. Just ask my sister-in-law, Monica. She probably still thinks I am crazy after she saw my reaction to the one and only family trip we took to the beach. Huh.\
We weren’t there for very long, only 46 hours. We didn’t want to wear out the grandma who was watching Max and Brian. The time there was beautiful and relaxing and perfect. Except that Kevin has a broken foot so he can’t drive, can’t walk, and can’t get near the sand. We had this trip planned for weeks and already paid for the room, so we went anyway. He was a good sport about me leaving him in the dust in search of sand, waves, and boardwalk fun.\
Max makes us watch lots of cooking and food shows. (Who knew that my mini-gourmet husband would produce a mini mini-foodie?) We have been watching lots of shows about summertime and seaside treats featuring caramel corn, cotton candy, fudge, salt water taffy, and frozen custard. By the time we got to Bethany Beach our mouths were watering for it all. I also indulged in shellfish for all my meals, which Kevin is allergic to.\
The peanut butter fudge I bought made me miss my mom terribly (she likes peanut butter fudge). So I called her. While on a romantic vacation with my husband. So sue me.\
I spent my time either on beach reading or on the boardwalk shopping and in search of treats. Kevin spent his time reading on the porch. Since it was a really comfy porch with an ocean view and access to cookies and lemonade, I didn’t feel guilty about leaving him alone. I think the only time we were together was for our meals and when we were in the room. Wow, overall it sounds like Kevin had a crappy time, huh?\
The B&B itself was really nice. It was furnished with antiques. There was even a copy of Madame X by John SInger Sergeant in the hallway outside of our room. For family members, that is the famous painting I called “the black lady” that was in our living room while I was growing up. I felt really at home there. 🙂 I love the B&B experience. It was so homey and lovely and I liked talking to the other guests. Kevin and I were by far the youngest ones there. I am not sure if that was because B&Bs attract an older crowd or because this one was kind of expensive.\
It was great and we are so going back again sometime. Can’t wait! Who wants to come with us?
I’ve upgraded almost all the blogs in the Lawver Blogging Network (didn’t know I had one of those, did you) to the new beta version of Movable Type. So far, it’s awesome. New interface, especially for plugins. The new icons are much nicer than the old ones, and the interface seems a lot snappier. I like that you can do almost anything to one of your blogs from the main screen, and well, it’s just better, OK?\
The only problem so far is that MarsEdit is saying I have a bad password, when I know it isn’t. Not sure what that’s about, but I’m sure it will get fixed shortly. Ok, there’s another problem too: The FlickrPhotoset plugin no longer works, which is sad, because I love that plugin. Now, I’ll have to start using GetXML to get my list of photosets too (that’s how I get the recent photos).\
I’d been flirting with WordPress for a project at work, and I just hit a brick wall. It’s not that WordPress is bad. It’s not. It’s very good, but you have to know too much PHP in order to tweak it. So, it’s back to MT, and talking folks into buying a license for it.\
The power of MT comes not from its technology, but from the template system. I love the fact that I’m not locked into a programming language to use it. I can have my templates spit out PHP, Tcl, or anything else. With most of the other blogging gigs out there, you’re stuck with PHP whether you like it or not (and I’m ambivalent at the moment… I never have enough time to spend getting to know it).\
If you see anything funky, please let me know.\
Update – A Couple Tips:
Here’s an unfortunate India story for you.\
Our first day of work in India, someone had forgotten to tell the driver that we needed to be picked up, so we took a cab. The cab let us off across the street from the office, which meant we had to run for our lives across the chaotic three lanes (approximate… they do not believe in lanes in Bangalore) of traffic. Wait, that’s six lanes because it was three lanes going each way. There was a grassy median in the middle of the street offering some sanctuary to the poor bastards (those bastards being us) who couldn’t run fast enough to make it across all six lanes during one red light (which maybe Carl Lewis could do, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else do it).\
You had to wait for a red light before trying to make the dash, and the red lights are short. We waited for the left-hand turning people to go, the right turn folks, and then had about 15 seconds to cross the three lanes before the go-straight folks took off in a rush of dust, fumes, and most importantly, heavy machinery. I almost didn’t make it. In order to dodge the first intrepid motor rickshaw that was about to run me down, I jumped onto the sidewalk…\
And right into a pothole. I rolled my ankle inward, so I could see the bottom of my shoe when I looked down. I stumbled, caught myself and then swore. It didn’t hurt all that much, but it was definitely weird. It had that wooden feeling of a freshly sprained ankle. It didn’t swell up, and the bruising was minimal, but it felt sprained all week.\
I spent the next week putting two or three extra socks on it, and walking carefully. By the end of the week, it didn’t hurt too bad, but still felt weird, and I had a noticeable limp. Then I came home. The first week, it started hurting. The second, my limp got worse, as did the pain. I went to see the doctor who ordered x-rays. This morning, I went to the same practice that fixed my ACL five years ago, and they said that definitely something is weird. I have an inflamed tendon that’s pulling a bone out of place (and that really hurts. On top of that, I have (before now undiagnosed) plantar fasciitis which is just now coming out because it’s being aggravated by this other thing. And, all of that is aggravating me.\
So, to sum up: I’m stuck in a boot that I can’t take off except when I’m driving, which I’m supposed to limit, for four weeks. If I’m not all better in four weeks, I spent four more weeks in the boot. After that, if it’s not better, I get to have surgery. Have a happy summer everyone!
There has been a lot of talk lately about Scientology. Most of that is probably to do with Tom Cruise talking nonstop about it. Then of course the media had to make it an even bigger story by talking nonstop about Tom Cruise talking nonstop about it. What I don’t get is what is the big deal? The teachings of Scientology are a little odd, but frankly aren’t all religions? I don’t want anyone to start bashing Scientology, but I seriously don’t get why people are freaked out by it. Tom Cruise most definitely shouldn’t have called out Brooke Shields by name, in my opinion, but if he is against something like mood altering drugs, I have no problem with him speaking out. (And I am on some.) Other religions don’t belive in blood transfusions and some don’t believe in partaking in modern medicine at all. I know they are secretive about things, but again, so are many other religions. Is this “freak out” just because this is a 20th C religion? A lot of people call it a cult. Why is that? Again, wouldn’t most religions be considered cults then? So, if any of you know why the media is making such a big deal about this, I would love to hear it.\
P.S.- Watch Veronica Mars on Wednesdays at 9pm on UPN.
While I’m waiting for someone to get out of the file I need, I’ll just bang this out while I’m thinking about it. Album first songs. I know it’s almost dead now, what with the single-ification of everything. But, there’s something special about the first song on an album. It creates your expectations for the rest of the album, sets the mood, lays out the tablecloth and silverware… you know.\
I’ve been listening to a lot more rock lately… and there are some really good first songs out there. Like:
Before Jen started blogging here, every post was written by me (or, in one or two cases when Brian was born, by Heather). I was talking to someone yesterday about Jen posting here, and they were surprised. This is someone who reads this site through a feed reader… and then it clicked. Oops.\
I didn’t think it through. Now we’ve got multiple authors here. I compensated for this on the main site by making our posts different colors (Jen’s are orange, mine are blue). In the feed, I wouldn’t do that, and honestly didn’t think about it. So, as of this post, you should get the right author of each post in the feed, so you can see who the author is. If that doesn’t work, let me know (sorry if it makes all the posts in the feed unread, but it had to happen sooner or later).