all things me

Getting the domain working has made me blog-crazy.

I did against my nature and applied/reported my site to a blog list. I’m always saying that no one reads my blog but then again, I don’t know how I’d react if someone did. On the other hand, it’d be nice to get comments on some of the entries that have something to say.

Now I’ll just wait and see. A brown paperbag ready.

The RSS feed links are at the bottom, by the way. (in the application I wrote I know zilch about those but I dug the urls from the depths of source code)

The small boy sniffs the air. His narrow eyes, shiny as those of a rodent, slide sideways to Dr. Lecter’s lunch. He speaks with the piercing voice of a competitive sibling:
“Hey, Mister. Hey, Mister.” He’s not going to stop.
“What is it?”
“Is that one of those special meals?”
“It is not.”
“What’ve you got in there, then?” The child turned his face up to Dr. Lecter in a full wheedle. “Gimme a bite?”
(…)
“Mooooaaaahm, can I have some of his samwich?”
The baby in Mother’s lap awoke an began to cry. Mother dipped a finger into the back of its diaper, came up negative, and gave the baby a pacifier.
(…)
she called to Dr. Lecter. “Would you pass it down to me? If you’re offering it to my child, I want to see it. No offense, but he’s got a tricky tummy.”
(…)
He passed his Fauchon box down to Mother.
“Hey, nice bread,” she said, poking it with her diaper finger.
— Hannibal by Thomas Harris

Ughhhhh, poor Hannibal.

*sweeping with a big broom* I’m deleting the Movable Type install. Instead, I’m installing a nightly build of WP to play with. So exciting!

The domain is working to the right direction!!!
*does a little dance*

Is ‘all things me’ a stupid name for a blog?

I texted my aunt asking that she’d pass on happy birthday wishes to my godson (her son, obv.). I also told her that the gift would be arriving next week because I went to the post office yesterday evening after the mail had already been picked up for the day. She replied telling that my godson had enthusiastically asked how soon is ‘next week’. Gee… I hope he isn’t too disappointed: I only got him a little Bionicle dude. It did have a very cool disk launcher with a glow in the dark disk, though.

Word of the Day Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia — fear of long words (The Phobia List)

This morning in the bus a girl sat next to me and after a while she picked up a powder compact from her bag, pawed all over her face for quite a while, and put the powder back in her bag. After a while, she picked up the powder from her bag, pawed all over her face again, and put the powder back in her bag. After a while, she picked up the powder, pawed all over, and put the powder back. (At this point I was biting my lip so I wouldn’t laugh.) Then she went on putting the rest of the make-up. Good thing she didn’t put any more powder (she did apply blush though, had me fooled for a second) cause I may have injured my lip badly…

I bought a new dictionary today: The Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathon Green. Am I an Obsessive-complusive dictionary collector?

First of all, Happy Mulder’s Birthday!! He’s 43 today. Chris Carter, whose b’day it really is, is 48.

Now that I’m going crazy with formatting my code snippets and doing tiny icons to appear in the bottom right corner of the snippet box, I’m going to post a summary on the layout trick I learned in an article at A List Apart. The basic structure of a page is

<div id="wrapper">
  <div id="container">
    <div id="content">
    </div>
  </div>
  <div id="sidebar"></div>
  <div id="clear">&nbsp;</div>
</div>
<div id="footer"></div>

I.e. container, sidebar and clear-div go inside the wrapper. Clear-div makes sure the footer doesn’t clash with the menu.
Then, in the css part you specify

#container {
  width: 100%;
  float: left;
  margin-right: –menu widthpx;
}
#content{
  margin-right: menu widthpx;
}
#sidebar {
  width: menu widthpx;
  float: right;
}
#clear{
  height: 0;
  clear: both;
}

This places the menu on the right hand side.

I installed ScriptyGoddess’s Next/Previous link for archive pages. Also put a little PHP logo in the bottom right corner of the Php code bits I have. If I ever have anything else (I’ve been meaning to put a CSS thing), I’ll do logos for them too. Also, the red bits are the ones you (definitely) have to change.

Bah, this article got me excited that YES it’s possible to assign two classes to an element. Well, in the comments it said that IE doesn’t handle it well. Have to test that out though.

[edit @ 23:18] Now I’m going to install Service Pack 2 (Durand’s recommendation, I’m holding you responsible if something happens!!! ). Wish me luck. Good bye cruel world!! *dramatic exit* [/edit]
[edit] I didn’t [/edit]

For a long time I’ve wondered what ATF stands for — I think I’ve seen black cars labeled ATF on South Park and heard it all around (on tv, that is). Finally, reading the Hannibal, it dawned on me. Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. Another mystery has been DEA, which Hannibal was friendly to shed light upon as well. DEA stands for Drug Enforcement Agency.

If you have acronym or abbreviation related annoyances, the Acroym Server might be the place to go. Or you could read the Hannibal Omnibus.

Acronyms of the Day ATF — Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
DEA — Drug Enforcement Agency

[edit: evening of Oct 11th] This must be the weirdest thing. The right hand side menu jumped all the way to the bottom in IE because I had ITALICS in my text. Well, not “just” italics but they dared to go on 2 lines! That and align=”justify” don’t play well together apparently *shakes head* I removed the align=”justify” for the time being [/edit]

I can’t stand group projects. In a group I can’t be an oppressing dictator who has a complete control over the outcome (by myself, I can, and I am). I can, at best, check that the text isn’t horribly spelled and commas all over the place but I can’t go erasing things saying “no no, that’s silly”. That makes me feel so vulnerable. My grade is in the hands of other people — what a thought. I do know that other people have better ideas and the more there is people the more points of view there are and thus the work’s better. Still, that doesn’t make me feel any more at ease.

I offered to make the slide show for our database project. This way I know it’s going to be good. No, I’m not that self-confident. What I am is a perfectionist-freak. The others said, “I don’t have a Power Point”, “I don’t know how to do that stuff, I haven’t taken the basics course yet. I can do that when I’m almost graduating”, or “we can whip up a few transparencies in class before our turn”…

I do get along with people and at work it’s great to have others working on the same project, but work isn’t graded. When my FUTURE depends on the work I’m doing and I have to allow others meddle… that makes my heart skip a few beats.