jtnt://life/unedited

Three French Hens

Got a call from my dad last night. He laid down some pretty serious shit.

The first thing, that he has some weird pain in his leg is relatively small, is hopefully nothing to worry about. It's a little more worrisome than a normal leg pain someone might have given that ten years ago he stuck a sickle into his lower-leg, between the two bones, nicking an artery. They didn't discover the nicked artery party until after he had spent a week in dire pain. This also happened to be the morning after I attended the prom with my girlfriend who was still in high school while I was not. But frankly, that's a different story - but there is a story there.

The second thing, that he and my mother were driving to Georgia tonight to back my aunt up while she told her deadbeat, abusive husband she wanted a divorce - and this time was actually serving papers - was a bit more shocking. Apparently, she had brought divorce up before but he had threatened her and their two sons in any number of ways.

I don't really have much to say about this, since I was never really close to my aunt or her family - aside from Thanksgivings and Christmas at my grandparents' house. I think about it more from my father's point of view - that this is all happening to his sister. Then I turn it on myself and know that I would be doing the exact same thing if Cay or Leigh needed me like this. It's strangely comforthing in that it reaffirms my connection to my sisters.

The third thing was that a lump was found in my grandmother's throat. She's had a cigarette in her hand for probably close to 60 years, so that's not entirely surprising. A week after the first lump was spotted, a second one showed up. They're waiting on test results to see if they are malignant, but regardless they will have to be surgically removed. If they aren't, they will continue to grow and suffocate her. That's not pretty. And major surgery, which I would assume this would be, is always dicey with someone who is over 80 years old.

All this makes me think about things I wouldn't have normally. I like that.

Where do PDAs go when they die?

I've added to my collection of dead PDAs - although my first Palm IIIx that died I threw away in a cleaning/purging frenzy. I usually maintain that purging is good, but I still regret throwing that out just for history's sake. I can see myself wanting to bring that out in 20 years just to see what things used to be like. I guess the Visor is pretty close, but that cheap, grey plastic on the IIIx is classic.

Anyway, I pulled the trigger today and replaced my severely handicapped Visor, which I bought as a refurb off eBay, with a brand-new Palm m515. I can't wait for the color screen! I can't wait for it to actually turn on when I need it to!

I was going to get a refurbished Handspring Treo 90, but I test drove a co-worker's, and there was no graffiti pad. You had to use the built-in mini-keyboard. That was a deal breaker. If I could have tried it out for a day or two to see how that was I would have, but I wasn't about to blow $250 on yet another PDA with which I was disappointed. Plus, I got a free mini-keyboard and leather case for the m515 anyway. Seemed like a no-brainer to me.

Pass It On

I get a certain amount of pleasure from sending people I know links that I think will interest them. It's like the technological version of reading a book and sending it to someone whom you'd think would like it. I don't find it any less personal or thoughtful than that either. Indeed, by virtue of the fact that I actually send these links sets it head and shoulders above sending someone a book. Sending someone a book would presume that I actually had time to read it myself.

Sh*thouse Open

I just got back from a three-day party/golf tournament put on by my good friend Martin Gravely down in Richmond. I am almost too tired to stay upright at my desk right now. After 2 rounds of golf (I shot a personal best 90 one day and won the "Long Drive" contest - with a, um, towering 212 yard shot - the other), 3 nights of drinking, and too many cigarettes to want to count, I'm running real low on gas.

This was the eighth annual SHO and my fourth. I - and at least a few others - look forward to this week-end like it's Christmas. It's become another 3-day holiday week-end between Memorial Day and Labor Day for many of us. There is only one other 3-day stretch that I look forward to as much as the SHO, and it's another golf tournament week-end we put on down on the Outer Banks each year. Anyone that thinks golf is boring should tag along for the SHO one year.

The SHO party was dominated by two things this year. Live music - a first for the SHO - and kids. The funniest moment that I can remember came when Scott "Birdie Machine" McKnight, Drew Roever, and I were sitting inside talking with the TV on drag racing or something we weren't watching. Some kids - none older than ten years old - were running around and came through the room. They stopped and asked what we were watching. McKnight turned to them and dryly stated, "Porn." I can't imagine what he would have said if one of them asked what that was. I kind of wish they had.

No porn, but here are some pictures of the good time had by all.

webstandards.meetup.com

Ok, so there is a Web Standards meetup.com group - of course. I've listed myself as a host in DC. Anyone else out there? Let's get it on!

Phish.com Redesign

Version 3 of Phish.com was released recently. Done in tidy and valid XHTML 1.0 and CSS. What is cool is that though I am an avid follower of Phish and their music/culture, I found out about this from zeldman.com, a site I visit daily to discover the latest in web development news. The mixing of my passions is cool to me.

Are there people out there as passionate about both Phish and web technology as I am? I want to find you. Are you in the DC Metro area? That would be even cooler.

I was talking today with Tony of simiandesign.com - a new acquaintance via a job opening at my company (BTW, Tony is smart, passionate, experienced, and unemployed. Your company should hire him.) - about the fact that web developers in the DC Metro area are a very fragmented group. We don't get together. We don't fraternize. We do our work in isolation for our particular companies. There is no networking. Not even a meetup.com interest group. There should be. Maybe there will be soon...

I work in a small company. There is only one other developer. We have 4 designers, but they are pure graphic designers, with little interest in web technology let alone things like the web standards movement or the like.

I need to find others like me. I need to get together with other developers face to face (email groups just don't do it for me). I need to see what others are doing, explore experiemental technologies, learn about new stuff - and do so with others. There have got to be others in DC that share this desire.

Is there anybody out there?

Holy lightning!

We are having the most intense lightning storm I have ever experienced in my life. Really close. Really long, sharp blasts. For the first time I am actually scared for my own safety and the safety of this very computer, so I'm shutting down and unplugging the thing. That won't help, of course, if a tree falls on it. Better it than me. Nighty night. Gulp.

A blog about nothing. (For no one.)

I've got to start writing down the ideas I come up with for topics to write about on this thing. Over the last three days I have thought of no fewer than five really suitable things to bring up here, but now all I have is this nothingness of a post to show for it. And this ain't the good Seinfeld sort of nothing.

Tweaked out

I'm doing some CSS tweaks (some not so tweaky). If you see anything strange, try not to gawk.

Blogsnob

I'm trying out this blogsnob thing in an effort to let the world know about my site. We'll see.

Ethics - "Plagiarizing" code

I am building a site which must validate as XHTML compliant. This site also uses dropdown menus for navigation. The code I had been using for dropdown menus does not work when using a proper XHTML DOCTYPE - the menus appear in the top left of the browser window. (Take the DOCTYPE out altogether or put in an HTML 3.2 one, and they work perfectly.)

After much research, testing, and experiementing the only code that I found to both work for my purposes and also validate was code written for the cingular.com site.

I altered the design of these menus, but the basic underlying functionality was straight from the Cingular site. Being a scrupulous and generally ethical person, I decided that I needed to investigate whether I could use this code from a legal standpoint. So, I wrote the team leader of the cingular.com develpment team, one Brandy Fortune - the media diva herself - and asked her to investigate what it would take to get permission to use these menus.

She responded that she thought that since, a) there was no copyright statement in the code, b) the code is pretty much open source, and c) I was willing to give credit to the original developers that I should feel fairly safe in using the code.

I agreed, but felt the need to get a professional legal opinion. My friend Rob was the first to respond:

iPod Imbulse Buys

I was given a new 15gb iPod in celebration of 5 years at Erickson Barnett (formerly, eDesign). It is by far the coolest thing I own. And even though it was free to me, it has been the genesis of more than one impulse buy. The latest evidence of this:

• iTrip
• PowerPodAuto

The iTrip is, as the site says, "the coolest iPod accessory in the world." It transmits whatever your iPod is playing over a customizeable radio station freequency. To listen to the iPod, just tune a nearby radio (like the one in your car) to that frequency and you have wireless audio. Ships July 21st.

The PowerPodAuto is more of a utilitarian buy. Now that I have grown as attached to the iPod as to my own thumbs, my greatest fear is being in the car and having the iPod's batteries die. I will live in fear no longer.

D is for "Damn I missed that silly chord again!"

I still haven't figured out why I have such a hard time getting my fingers to the D chord on my guitar. It's been a problem for me since I started playing guitar 7 months ago. It's mostly getting that third finger on the second string that I mess up on.

It's painfully easy, I know. So let me clarify mysel. I can easily hit D in a two-step fingering process - and I've gotten pretty good at doing this fairly quickly - where my first two fingers go and then my third is placed. What seems to be the problem is getting that third finger placed without its predecessors' guidance. Some people would say the other problem I have with that third finger on my left hand is that there's no ring on it yet. ;-)

I've been trying to do really quick chord progressions to and from D to force my fingers to hit it as fast as possible. I'm hoping that this will take the thinking out of it and let my fingers do the walking, so to speak.

Get an AIM name!

If you own a computer connected to the Internet, if you have an email address then you should also have an AOL Instant Messenger account.

This morning - and into the afternoon - three friends and I exchanged well over 25 emails in planning a dinner and round of golf in a couple weeks. We also exchanged many sharp jabs - and let's be honest, insults - at each other. The emails were so quick and so funny tears honestly came to my eyes once. But regardless of how much fun the exchange was, I can only bet that it would have been much funnier and more heated (not to mention quicker!) if it was done in an IM chat.

BTW, I'm nicholasebagency if you need me.

Thanks to mediadiva

I can't get too much further into this blog without thanking mediadiva for the basis of the stylesheet used at jtnt://life/unedited. I plan on bastardizing, watering down, and in general doing a disservice to Brandy's fine work more in the coming weeks. Look forward to awful color combinations, errors, and inconsistent navigation in the coming weeks!

jtnt://snapshots

I finally converted my old, hideous picture gallery from a hodge-podge of PhotoShop and iTunes automatically generated pages to a full-fledge image gallery system. I've added a link to the "Links Here" section to it for future reference.

The system I used, ironically enough, is called Gallery. After some very minor initial setup hiccups (all operator error, I think), I had it up and running in no time.

The slickest part of this whole app is the numerous ways you can upload pictures into albums. Upload them individually, all in a zip file, or my favorite (especially for the initial setup) - feed the system a url to an images directory and it will automagically fetch them for you! After getting your pictures into albums (which can be nested multiple times), you can rotate the images, move the albums, move pictures within and to other albums, and on and on. This thing is so powerful, it can even detect whether your pictures need to be rotated upon upload and do that for you!

The one thing I think could be done better the workflow for adding an album. When you create an album it creates an untitled one and places it in a generic album directory (e.g. /album02/) on the server. It should ask you the name and directory name you want to use when creating the new album. I think this would probably also make it a bit easier to comprehend for the novice user.

And as the developer admits, the fact that there is no easy way to change the appearance in a major way without delving into the php code is a big problem. I plan on hacking it up and making it match this blog in my copious spare time.

cssKnowledge { holes: tons }

I've spent the better part of today wrestling with the layout of a page that in theory should probably be much easier to build than it was. A simple two-column fixed-width layout (navigation is left 1/3, content is right 2/3). That part was not what caused me trouble. I used a bastardization of the zeldman.com stylesheet to reliably draw the first two columns. And the two additional columns that appear within the original content section of the page provided little trouble - although a bit more than the first two columns, I'll admit.

Where I ran into serious problems was creating lists in these two nested content columns. More specifically, it was getting the lists to be indented properly (under already indented headings which were themselves indented under another heading). When I would add some margin-left space on the ul tag, the silly thing would actually move left (in some browsers) - the exact opposite behavior I expected. I never did any hardcore box model tests, but I would up putting margin-left values on the li tag instead, and that did the trick.

I think what was going on was that when I set a value for margin-left it actually took out the built-in margin that an unordered list is given, and the margin I was giving it (20px) was actually less than this default vaue. If anyone would like to comment and clue me in to the true cause of this behavior, I'll give you a dollar.

Frankly, I did so many tests and ran the page through browsercam so many times, I don't exactly remember what was going on. I was in "build it and get it to do what you want it to do" mode, not "test it and figure out the root of the problem mode," even though the latter would certainly save me time next time around. With three major sites due in the next 1-3 weeks, I need immediate gratification. (And I won't even go into what a mess the css file is now. No organization whatsoever.)

I'm don't know yet what I learned from this 8-hour exercise down Frustration Lane today, but I hope to soon. All I really found out is that even though I have been able to accomplish really cool things using just CSS for layout over the last few weeks - and indeed I've made great strides along the way - there are serious holes in my understanding of how things interact with each other.

Missing

My girlfriend, Daniela, has been in Italy for just over a week visiting her parents. I am not the type who misses people too often. I know that I will see them again soon, and since I'm an introvert I usually relish any extended, continuous periods of being on my own. But I really miss Daniela.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that I was at one point going to be over there with her, but the flight was just too expensive. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I have never been so far away, and the unknown of where she is scares me a bit. Or maybe it's that I must really admit that at heart I'm a softy, and I really do just miss being around her.

I have the number at her parents' place, but it seems that either I'm an idiot or I don't have an international calling plan, because none of my attempts to dial the number have been successful. She's called me a couple times and left me messages. I've started checking the weather in Bologna (the closest big city to Villa Verucchio that I know of) in an attempt to sort of share her experience. Current conditions: 81 degrees, 39% humidity, winds at 13mph. Sounds perfect, although she'd probably want it to be hotter.

All I know is that it's gonna be great when she gets back.

It's raining, it's pouring...

What else is new, huh? But in my opinion, there's really nothing more boring to talk about than the weather.

j who?

jdyno, silly. Like dynomite!