Veronica Mars was renewed for season 3! Let’s do the dance of happy, happy, joy, joy:\
It’s just a jump to the left\
And then a step to the right\
With your hands on your hips\
You bring your knees in tight\
But it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane,\
Let’s do the renew dance again!\
If you people don’t start watching though… Well, then you’re all dead to me. Especially you young, hip, cool ones in the targeted demographic!
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Yippee-Skippy, Howdee da Doooo!
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Oy!
Kevin just told me he isn’t going to take me out for dinner on my birthday like I wanted. I guess I said “no” one too many times. Heh. I am so going to ask my daddy to take me out instead, since he is coming to town tomorrow. Ha, take that, Kev!\
(Kevin is going to Scotland on Saturday, so he isn’t simply snubbing me.)\
This works out well enough for me though, since I am over having birthdays anyway. I’ll get my dad to take me out and then head back to my house for cake. Yay cake! -
I’m 31 going on 2!
I told Kevin “no” the other day, for what I think was the first time ever since we’ve been married. Turns out, he misstated some of the info, so my no was moot. I am really close to telling him no about something else and just now I told him no again. None of these issues or questions are really important, but it is interesting that they are all happening in the same week. I think I may be drunk on the power. Mwuhahaha!
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Mother’s Day
I had the best Mother’s Day ever yesterday. Kevin got up with the kids, without any begging, prompting, or hinting from me. When I finally woke up, at the glorious hour of 9:30, he made me a plate of strawberries and cool whip to snack on while he whipped up a fabulous mushroom and cheese omelet. Then I opened presents and goofed off pleasantly with the boys. My in-laws gave me flowers and a scented candle. Isn’t that nice? It was such a nice morning, makes me actually look forward to next year’s. Big thanks to Kevin, Max, Brian, and the Lawvers.
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The Strawberry Stealer
I made a lovely plate of strawberries and cool whip for Jen this morning (I also made her an omelette and toast, and got up with the kids at 6:15 this morning). Brian, ever the sneaker, decided that he’d like to share and promptly took over at the wheel. Jen caught the crime in progress. See for yourself (you’ll need Quicktime to see it… you probably already have it).
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Bad mommy
Brian’s birthday is being celebrated on Wednesday and I still don’t have definite plans yet. Got any good ideas for me?
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Green!! House!! Widget!!!
In other news, the two dashboard widgets I built last year and never got to release are up on the new AOL Greenhouse. When I get some more time, I might build some more. They’re not really polished (remember, I’m not a designer), but they work. If someone wants to give me a swanky design for either, I’d appreciate it. Cindy?
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Cool
Just as it started raining, my iTunes playlist turned to “I’m only happy when it rains.”
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Bloggin’
Now that the TV-season is over, whatever will we chat about? And no, don’t say baseball.\
In super happy news, Kevin came home at a decent time last night. Whooo. It’s like crazy-time is over! YAY!\
In other, almost desperate news, there is only one Diet Dr Pepper in the house! Eeeep. -
AIM Pages
We’ve launched!! Hooray!! You can go check it out for yourself over here. If you want to create a profile, you can do that too. All you need is an AIM screen name (and who doesn’t have one of those?) to get started.\
This project has been more fun than anything else I’ve done in my \~11 years at AOL. It was full of huge technical challenges, was a great place for us to try out new things, and the team was probably the best I’ve ever worked with. From product management to QA to Operations and the rest of the developers, everyone pitched in, went the extra mile, pushed themselves to find the best (or at least the one that worked) solution, and kept a good sense of humor about it all.\
I started on this thing as a “consultant” and wasn’t supposed to write any code. I ended up:- joining the team responsible for it
- writing a site’s worth of documentation
- creating a microformat
- coming up with a set of rules for writing CSS to accomodate modules, themes and user styles
- writing almost a dozen modules (only some of which are actually live)
- helping with dozens more, writing a bunch of themes, and making sure that over 60 themes were ready for launch.
- spent late nights and weekends at the office debugging javascript
- worked on convincing developers, management and design that web standards are the way to go
- and discovered several one-line crashers for Internet Explorer (and one or two ways to make Firefox REALLY unhappy as well).\
It’s not done, not by a long shot. There are still dozens of bugs and hundreds of features still to come. But, it’s a start. It’s all kinds of fun, not just for end users, but for developers too. One of my “secret” goals at the beginning of this project was to make module development easy enough that even “normals” could do it. And just this morning, sitting around a big conference table, there were three product managers talking about their modules. And my other secret goals? Here they are: - Get more people to learn the “right” way to write CSS.
- Help microformats go mainstream.
- Show the outside world that AOL can do innovative stuff, and that we support Open Source (we’re using the hell out of Dojo).
- Show the outside world, and the internal development community, that using web standards don’t limit you. They help you. Creating modules for our product is so much easier than creating them for live.com, dashboard or Google Homepage. Why? Because microformats are “just” HTML.\
There you go. Go play. And while you’re at it, check out my profile.\
Oh, and for all you Digg folks, I Am Alpha is not AIM Pages.