Ultranormal

  • So Ends the Vacation, Not With a Bang, But Crushed Ice!

    I took most of last week, and today off from work. Did we go anywhere? Nope. Did we do anything exciting? Not really. It was mostly to catch up on all the house stuff that got put on the back shelf while I’ve been either out of town or working ridiculous hours. Oh yeah, and I took a couple naps too.\
    Although we didn’t go anywhere, we did get a bunch of stuff done:

    • I bought a new vacuum cleaner, put it together and we “vacuumed the hell out of everything”.
    • The boys and I cleaned up all the toys and stuff on the main floor and put everything away.
    • We cleaned up the basement (again, all the toys put away, and I think we vacuumed).
    • Donated a bunch of baby stuff to Goodwill
    • Recycled two computers and a broken monitor
    • Got the oven fixed (woo-hoo, I’m makin’ brownies!)
    • Got the ice maker fixed
    • Made a lot of progress with ruby on rails
    • Spent a lot of time with Brian just playing. I love this age. Both of my kids skipped the “terrible twos”, and I’m very happy about it. Brian is fun to be around, happy and loves to play games. He chases us around the house, tries to tickle us (I have to get him saying, “tickle, tickle, tickle” recorded), and then will sit and cuddle much longer than Max ever would. The kid’s a real joy to be around.
    • Took the boys to Dairy Queen
    • And, I let my e-mail pile up. I checked it once a day through web mail, but unless it felt “life threatening”, I didn’t respond, and I didn’t even open most of it. On Thursday, I pried open the laptop and downloaded most of it so it wouldn’t pile up on the server, but I still have almost ~~400~~ 500 unread messages on the server, and about that many sitting on the laptop. Tomorrow morning is going to be fun.\
      It’s back to work tomorrow.

  • Progress on Rails

    I’ve been playing with Ruby on Rails (I wrote about my initial adventure already) in the basement while watching Big Brother and tonight, I’ve actually made real progress!!\
    Maybe it’s being on vacation and not compulsively checking mail every five minutes, but I got the login stuff working, and I can actually create real records, submit them and then see them! I’ll work on updating them tomorrow night, and then on to the second model.\
    When I get closer to being sure that I’ve got something I’ll actually launch, I’ll spill more details, but I think it could be a lot of fun. It’s built around something that’s really popular, but totally underserved by both large companies and the startups considered to be in the whole “Web 2.0” thing. Hopefully, it’ll fill a niche that’s not been filled yet, and I won’t make a mess of it. So far, so good.\
    Maybe this would go smoother if I actually learned Ruby…

  • Not Another Teen Show

    Kevin edited the actual Veronica Mars promo into my post below to make it even easier and more tempting for you to watch. Isn’t he fabulous? What a nice husband.\
    And now that you’ve all seen the promo, and I know you all have, you can believe me when I say: THIS ISN’T A MELODRAMATIC TEENY-BOPPER SHOW like Dawson’s Creek or 90210. I seriously think that having the lead character in high school (now she’s in college), made pimping this show that much harder. The masses have written it off without even seeing it. But you can become one of the enlightened! Say no to mass-ly writing-off this show. Watch it for yourself this Fall on Tuesdays on the new network, The CW.\
    P.S. Hee, I got Tim interested through the promo. And his wife watches the show, so she should have been the one to talk him into watching it. Go internet!

  • PayPal Seeks DOM Nerd for Unobtrusive Servitude

    I got an e-mail from Steve Ganz asking if anyone knew any javascript wizard who need a job. I met Steve at SXSW and he’s swell (he’s also on the microformats discussion list, which is also a +1 in my book). He’s looking for a javascript expert to help take PayPal out of the 90’s and into today (his words, not mine).\
    If you’re interested, go bug him. And none of you guys who work with me better leave, or I’ll hunt you down.

  • Veronica Mars

    Yes, it’s that time again. Time to start pimping the awesomely awesome Veronica Mars. Here is the great promo that was shown at Comic Con a few weeks ago. It really shows what the episodes are like, unlike most commercials made by Evil Promo Bastards. (You can spare a minute, right? It’s not like you’re working hard right now. And I promise I won’t tell anyone that you took this quick break.) Clicky clicky clicky so you can lookie lookie lookie or, just watchie watchie:

  • Orcagirl Reels In The Shots

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    One of my other new favorite Flickrers, Orcagirl takes spectacular (and frequent) pictures of killer whales. They’re not always this dramatic, but they’re always worth looking at. It’s like getting a slideshow from National Geographic every day. Enjoy!

  • Child Scripts Making Child Scripts!

    I’ve been wrestling with a bug in one of my modules for AIM Pages for_ever_, and just found a fix today. I created this well-intentioned module called code snippet that allows you to paste in markup and it’ll get inserted into the DOM. This is really just a stopgap to allow people to add stuff that a module doesn’t exist for yet. I never should have written it. Do you know how bad DOM support is in IE? It’s awful!\
    The big problem is that people wanted/needed to insert script elements with inline script using the code snippet module, and I couldn’t figure out a good way to do it (ok, any way, good or otherwise). Just adding them to the DOM using innerHTML doesn’t work. IE won’t allow you to create a new script element and set the text content to the code.\
    Today, I stumbled on a message board post that hints at the answer. What’s the answer?\
    Create a new script element, and set the text property to the script content and then append it to the body. Voila, actual evaluated javascript! Here’s an example:

    <code>var b=document.getElementsByTagName("body")[0];
var txt="function doIt(msg) {alert(msg)}";
var scr=document.createElement("script");
scr.setAttribute("type","text/javascript");
scr.text=txt;
b.appendChild(scr);</code>

    Enjoy! Oh, and the fixed version of the module isn’t live yet. I’m letting the QA guys look at it first before I unleash it on an unsuspecting world.

  • Truly Semantic Classes and Ids

    Just a little thought before leaving for work. How funny would it be if we used truly semantic classes and ids in our XHTML? Instead of pretending it’s a “container” or “event-holder” or whatever other text we use to try to fool ourselves into semantic meaning, what if we were truly honest about the role that element was playing? For example:

    • im-no-css-jedi
    • because-multiple-background-isnt-implemented
    • ie-wont-clear-this-damn-thing
    • i-can-hang-another-background-off-this
    • bottomless-pit-for-my-dom-wickedness
    • should-have-been-a-list
    • because-ive-never-heard-of-fieldset
    • must-have-rounded-corners\
      I think it’ll catch on. Got more?

  • Howdy

    This morning while I went out, the dishes didn’t get washed.\
    Then later, when I came home and collapsed on the couch exhausted, the dishes still didn’t get washed.\
    And now, while I am goofing off by typing this, THE DISHES STILL AREN’T WASHED.

  • Why My Site Has Been Down

    I love Dreamhost a lot and usually highly recommend them to everyone, but recently, they’ve had some real problems keeping everything up and running around here. I was glad to see them blog about the trouble and what they’re doing to fix it. I love transparency.