jtnt://life/unedited

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.
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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.

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

jdyno, silly. Like dynomite!