Final vote bleg!

For those who’ve asked: bleg = blog + beg

Well, the Lunarpages WordPress Theme Design Contest final vote is upon us at last. I currently have two designs in the final vote, but I would like Translucent Dream (what I view as my best design) to win, so here I am — blegging.

Please please PLEASE go vote for me! (Please?) :mrgreen:

(It’s the 3rd one listed.)

Voting will run until July 7th and the winners will be announced July 8th!

When the ‘right way’ is the biggest PITA

This is one of those times when doing things “the right way” also happens to be the biggest pain in the ass…

I spent the last 2 hours messing around with a layout that I created a few weeks ago. I thought, “No problem, I’ll slice it up and throw the pieces in some DIVs and start on a new SharePoint layout.”

In the words of the immortal Vizzini … “You’d like to think that, wouldn’t you?!”

The problem I was having was that the left and right borders (background images) of the “main” div wouldn’t tile because I didn’t (couldn’t) set a height. So I looked ALL over the web, read up on every ‘clearfix‘ known to man, hundreds of X/HTML and CSS help boards, (and accidentally ran across this air tools site, not sure why it was in the search results!) and then FINALLY stumbled across this article on A List Apart. (and considering how long I spent looking for it, it’s titled appropriately! LOL!)

See? I *knew* it could be done, and remembered reading the article, but could not for the life of me remember where I saw it!!

And so now that my pretty layout is behaving, all I need to do is spending the next 3 weeks beating SharePoint into submission.

Weekend and upcoming NOLA trip

We’ll be heading down to Montgomery this weekend. Jim’s brother is on leave from Afghanistan and flew in sometime last night. We’ll be visiting with him a while and will be bringing Jessie back home with us. In a way I feel sorry for her mother … she’s been really lonely without her. She depends on Jessie for companionship and entertainment, and has no idea how to function without her. (Honestly makes me wonder how she lived BEFORE Jessie was born!)

Jim and I have enjoyed our “quiet time” together. Both of us recently have been stressed from work and other matters and needed some time to reconnect … these two weeks have given us just that. I’m indebted to Jim’s mom for allowing Jessie to stay down there with her and her cousins.

I know Jessie enjoys staying with them, so that’s always a bonus!

I came home one night this week and Jim had already prepared dinner and bought a gallon of my favorite brew. What a man, what a man, what a mighty good man. :mrgreen:

Our trip to New Orleans will be coming up soon. I’m really looking forward to seeing the Big Easy again and seeing where Jim grew up. I’m also looking forward to meeting up with my Cotillion sisters who live down that way. (OMG, which reminds me … I still need to order my tiara! LOL!!)

I see a shopping trip in the near future!

Jim’s really been looking forward to this trip and has been working out to try to lose some weight before the reunion. Exercising, taking bodybuilding supplements and vitamin supplements, I’m proud of him he’s done really well. Me … not so much. I haven’t been able to get my weight quite down as low as I’d like … being on the amitriptyline is setting me back. I’m hesitant to ask my doctor about being switched to another migraine preventive. This work is working the best out of all I’ve tried so far, but the gain in appetite has been a real bitch to deal with. ;P

Oh well, I’m still relatively healthy so I can’t complain too much … right?

Sometimes it helps

I know I drive some of my clients crazy when I do this, but sometimes it helps that I’m “extremely detail-oriented” (that’s PC for anal-retentive bitch). I had a client email me earlier this week with a laundry list of changes that she wanted made to her organization’s site. (quick history: this client is notorious for requesting large or extensive site changes and needing them literally “tomorrow”)

The list was broken up into several PDFs containing screenshots of the website and what I interpreted were change requests … or, at least some of them I could interpret. There was one PDF, not too huge, about 15 pages … mostly containing links. The problem wasn’t that I had a problem removing them, it was that it was never made clear in any of the documentation that the client wanted old links, bad links, etc. removed. One would assume that they would want them removed, but considering that my personal history in dealing with this client is that they are notorious for wanting content removed and not an hour later wanting it restored. I’m serious. They have no concept whatsoever for budgeting and planning ahead and request most everything at the very last minute.

Many times, I have wanted to reach through the phone and strangle one of these people!

So anyways, rather than spend the next few days going back and forth by email, I printed out every page of every PDF that they sent me, requested clarification for every (what I would assume was a) request and scanned them into a PDF and mailed it back to the client. My co-workers found this funny and I joked about feeling like “being an asshole” … but an email I received a few minutes ago confirmed what my intuition had already told me — indeed they did not want large chunks of their website content deleted.

Gee, what a surprise.

So most people think I’m a real pain the ass when it comes to my job, but experience has taught me this: get everything in writing and make sure it is absolutely CLEAR on exactly what’s to be done with the content I’m handling.

Humpday Hilarities

Today’s funny comes courtesy of my mother:

Post Turtle

While suturing a cut on the hand of a 75 year old Texas rancher, whose hand was caught in a gate while working cattle, the doctor struck up a conversation with the old man. Eventually the topic got around to Obama and his bid to be our President.

The old rancher said, “Well, ya know, Obama is a ‘post turtle’.” Not being familiar with the term, the doctor asked him what a ‘post turtle’ was. The old rancher said, “When you’re driving down a country road and you come across a fence post with a turtle balanced on top, that’s a ‘post turtle’.”

The old rancher saw a puzzled look on the doctor’s face, so he continued to explain. “You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he is up there, and you just wonder what kind of a person put him up there.”

Stop this rollercoaster, I want off!

The past month has been an emotional rollercoaster from Hell. I finally got my car back this weekend. Jim and I rode over to Perfect Reflections, who did the body work. The car looks great, and as far as I can see you can’t tell that it was ever damaged! I’m very pleased with their work, and highly recommend them to anyone who needs body or restoration work!

We still haven’t settled with the other insurance company. We’ve had some disagreements over the paperwork, then lawyers were involved, so right now we’re kind of in a holding pattern until we can see a new set of paperwork.

Oh the joy … :roll:

Jim and I have been on each other’s nerves a lot lately and decided to get out for a bit yesterday. We finally saw Ironman — I liked this movie VERY much! Seemed a bit short though, am hoping the DVD release has extras, you know, deleted scenes, and the like. Downey Jr. looked great and I enjoyed the soundtrack. (I’ll probably be buying a copy of it too!)

We also trekked around various parts of Birmingham over the weekend. We had dinner Friday night at Cajun Steamer, and dinner last night at El Carreton. (If you’re ever in the north Jefferson area, look ‘em up! VERY tasty Mexican food!!!) We stopped by Best Buy, Jim needed an HDMI cable for the tv upstairs. I perused the Asian films for an old kung fu movie I’ve been trying to find. Having no luck, I decided to check the music aisles … and a good thing too, seeing the small section of Lordi CDs reminded me that I accidentally cracked mine and so I picked up a new copy of The Arockalypse. Even better — it was a special edition! 3 extra tracks (one which is my FAVE Lordi song!) and a DVD of goodies.

Bonus! :mrgreen:

Jim’s watching the race and I’m sitting here looking at the folder full of stuff I bookmarked to post on or about … I think I’ll put ‘em off until tomorrow. I’ve been enjoying my “time off” and Jim and I have needed the “together time” to work out various things.

Mental note: I *so* owe Jim’s mom big time for keeping Jessie all this time … we’ve badly needed a “break”!

Humpday Hilarities

These two funny bits come courtesy of Cookie:

Sportsmanship……

At one point during a game, the coach called one of his 9-year-old baseball players aside and asked, “Do you understand what cooperation is? What a team is?” The little boy nodded in the affirmative.

“Do you understand that what matters is whether we win or lose together as a team?” The little boy nodded yes.

“So,” the coach continued, “I’m sure you know, when an out is called, you shouldn’t argue, curse, attack the umpire, or call him a pecker-head. Do you understand all that?” Again the little boy nodded.

He continued, “And when I take you out of the game so another boy gets a chance to play, it’s not good sportsmanship to call your coach ‘a dumb ass’ is it?” Again the little boy nodded.

“Good,” said the coach. “Now go over there and explain all that to your grandmother.”

Real Classified Ads

FREE YORKSHIRE TERRIER.
8 years old. Hateful little bastard. Bites!

FREE PUPPIES:
1/2 Cocker Spaniel, 1/2 sneaky neighbor’s dog.

FREE PUPPIES..
Mother, AKC German Shepherd.
Father, Super Dog…able to leap tall fences in a single bound.

FOUND DIRTY WHITE DOG.
Looks like a rat . Been out a while.
Better be a big reward.

COWS, CALVES: NEVER BRED.
Also 1 gay bull for sale.

NORDIC TRACK
$300 Hardly used, call Chubby.

GEORGIA PEACHES
California grown - 89 cents lb.

! JOINING NUDIST COLONY!
Must sell washer and dryer $300.

WEDDING DRESS FOR SALE.
Worn once by mistake . Call Stephanie.

And the best one:

FOR SALE BY OWNER:
Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, 45 volumes. Excellent condition..
$1,000 or best offer. No longer needed,
Got married last month.
Wife knows everything.

And this one comes courtesy of my mother:

A teacher in Elmira , New York asked her 6th grade class how many of them were Obama fans. Not really knowing what an Obama fan is, but wanting to be liked by the teacher, all the kids raised their hands except for Little Johnny. The teacher asked Little Johnny why he has decided to be different..

Little Johnny says, ‘Because I’m not an Obama fan.’ The teacher says, ‘Why aren’t you an Obama fan?’ Johnny says, ‘Because I’m a Republican.’ The teacher asks him why he’s a Republican. Little Johnny answered, ‘Well, my mom’s a Republican and my dad’s a Republican, so I’m a Republican’ The teacher asks, ‘If your mom was a moron and your dad was an idiot, what would that make you?’

With a big smile, Little Johnny replies, ‘That would make me an Obama fan.’

Firefox 3: So far, so good!

An hour into the Download Day launch, the Mozilla servers were heavily overloaded and many people (myself included) could not get through. There was a quick apology posted by Melissa over on the Mozilla Blog with the promise that things will go live soon and the download day will start with the site’s go-live. That’s all well and good, BUT with a little help from Read Write Web I was able to snag the download and install the latest and greatest in a matter of seconds.

(No worries, Mozzie. I’ll be downloading several times tonight from home to count towards the download goal!)

Hooray, it installed!

I really like the changes I’m seeing. I’m now reading over the Power User’s Guide over on LifeHacker and Deb Richardson’s Field Guide to Firefox 3. The overall extension support seems pretty good too. Out of all of my extensions, only a handful are not yet FF3-ready.

So those of you who’ve been counting down the hours like I have … what’s your take on the new ‘Fox so far?

Firefox 3 Download Day

Tomorrow, June 17th is the release date for Firefox 3 to the general public. Mozilla has set a lofty goal for itself — they are trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours.

Sounds neat, right? Well, I plan on participating … how ’bout you? To participate, all you’ll need to do is just download Firefox 3 tomorrow within the first 24 hours of its release.

Download Day website and info: www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

Mobile links

One of the things I hadn’t thought of looking into backing up on my Helio Ocean was my bookmarks. Sure, I have my custom bookmarks for Opera Mini stored on their server, but the ones to my native Helio browser are gone. I had quite a few that I can’t seem to find at the moment. So, in the meantime, I thought I’d pop a few in a post so I can surf back here and recover them later.

Note: feel free to add your own via the Comments box below!

• 30 Boxes: http://m.30boxes.com/
• ABC News: http://wireless.go.com/wireless/abcnews/index
• CNN: http://m.cnn.com/
• eBay: http://wap2.bonfiremedia.com/
• ESPN: http://mobileapp.espn.go.com/wireless/espn/redesign/index
• Facebook: http://m.facebook.com/
• FedEx: https://www.fedex.com/mobi/
• Fox News: http://foxnews.mobi/
• Foxmarks: http://my.foxmarks.com/mobile/
• Google Mobile Apps: http://www.google.com/m/products?hl=en
• Google Search: (”soft” mobile gateway) http://google.com/gwt/n
• Helio Magazine: http://www.heliomag.com/mobile/
• Heliocity: (mobile downloads & more) https://downloads.heliocity.net/
• HelloTxt: http://m.hellotxt.com/
• Live Search: http://m.live.com/
• MapQuest: http://wap.mapquest.com/
• MSN: http://home.mobile.msn.com/en-us/default.aspx
• MySpace: http://mobile.myspace.com/
• National Weather Service: (set your location) http://cell.weather.gov/ and http://mobile.srh.weather.gov/
• Remember the Milk: http://m.rememberthemilk.com/
• The Washington Post: http://mobile.washingtonpost.com/
• The Weather Channel: (change location for yours!) http://weather.mobi/xhtml/cc/BHM
• USA Today: http://m.usatoday.com/
• Wunderground: (beware of ads!!!!) http://mobile.wunderground.com/
• Yahoo!: http://wap.oa.yahoo.com/
• YouTube: http://m.youtube.com/
• Animal Planet: http://m.animalplanet.com/

Also: you can view the mobile version of any Tumblr blog by adding /mobile to the end of the the URL.

Example: http://nitallica.tumblr.com/mobile

Sources: MyOpera, Heliocity & Heliocity Forums, Great Mobile Sites Directory

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