Three till Seven

Note: This was a dream of mine. I have this warning here because some visitors have thought my life had just gone to pot, when really they were only reading one of my crazy dreams. :)

I was spending the night at a friend’s house. Her home was like some community thing, where the only part she and her mom owned was a little closet-sized area. The rest of it, including the big living room where we hung out, belonged to a group. It was a sleepover, and there were a lot of other girls there, though none of them was my friend outside of the dream. I asked the one holding the sleepover if she had any Now-n-Later candies; she did, and I ate a green one.

I was back at home and Mom made breakfast for me; it consisted of a large plate full of broccoli and a waffle. I scraped the broccoli off into a little bowl but it wouldn’t all fit, so I spilled some and then scooped it up into a cereal bowl. On the waffle, I spread barbeque sauce and honey mustard. I got too much honey mustard on it and had to scoop up big double-handfuls of it to put back in the jar. Mom came over to pester me, so I smeared honey mustard on her shirt front.

The dream shifted and I was in some upstairs workout room in my high school with a bunch of little kids. A little boy was singing. It was like I had just woken up; I was in my pajamas. I weaved my way through the kids, who were sitting in little chairs, and went into a different room with stairs going down. I realized I forgot something so I went back to where my overnight bag was; I got out a UK sweatshirt and went downstairs.

On the way down the stairs, my band director was coming up. He talked to me for a bit and wanted to see my UK shirt. My old friends were there, like they hadn’t graduated with me. I realized that my jeans were unbuttoned and unzipped, and I tried discreetly to zip them up.

My old friends were going to stay and play with the band for the basketball game, and I had planned to leave very quickly, but instead I decided to stay and play, since I hadn’t played my sax in a long time. My saxophone was suddenly with me, along with the appropriate music.

I’m back in Lexington and moved into my new apartment. It’s a small place with just a living room/bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, but it’s clean and I’m happy with it. Jess and Ike helped me move in on Sunday; many thanks to them, they were a big help. Especially Jessica because she kept remembering little things I’d never have thought of, like to bring along a mop and vacuum cleaner, and was just, as usual, very helpful. Monday was a long and boring day because 1) Jess was at home and 2) I didn’t want to bother anyone else in the area because it was a holiday so I figured they’d be busy. I was the only dork sitting around in my apartment all day, reading Xenocide. That night, however, Jess and I watched Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and watched fireworks from her aunt’s backyard. Her aunt entertained us by telling tales about one of Jessica’s cousins that involved a lot of alcohol and a camping trip.

Yesterday was my first day back at work; it went fine. I met two new people who have been hired, though one guy was in my CS 215 class with me this past spring. The guys and I had a movie night last night at Ike’s house to see The Empire Strikes Back. Today I found out that I can only work 30 hours a week, but that’s still more than I was working earlier this summer or spring, so I’m okay with it. Todd and I have plans for getting me some internet access in my apartment (which will be his apartment at the end of the month when I move out), which would be hella nice. I’m currently at the public library which is only a few blocks away, but I can’t exactly sit around in my jammies like a bum and listen to Dave Matthews Band at fifty decibels. (I’m actually just pulling that figure out of my ass, based upon the table on Wikipedia.)

Jess and I want to make a trip to Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari in Santa Claus, Indiana sometime this month. I’m excited, naturally, but it also brings about the annoyance of swimsuit shopping. We checked at Target a couple days ago but didn’t find anything we liked, though the prices were good. Maybe there’ll be some sales at the mall worth checking out.

Oh oh oh, the most exciting news, even more exciting than renting an apartment for the first time: I’m now the proud owner of a cell phone. Specifically, a Motorola V551. I need to mail in my rebate ASAP; possibly this weekend. I’ll have to leave myself a note. I also need to get my mom a birthday gift and mail that as well.

I swapped it so that the Lemon-Lime skin is the default, and I’ll have you know that it looks good in Firefox 1.0, Netscape 7.1, and IE 6.0. A major breakthrough considering my layouts usually look horrible in IE. The appearance is all possible because of some JavaScript that inserts a stylesheet and a few images in key places if it detects the browser is IE or Opera. It’s a shame IE doesn’t understand CSS2 pseudoclasses, which is what I use to put the rounded end caps on this main area.

I met with Dr. Jaromczyk today for a couple of hours to help with one of his web site projects. I’ve volunteered to work two hours on it on Monday and Tuesday as well so that the site can get closer to being done. He can’t pay me because his grant has run out, but said that when it’s renewed we can talk about reimbursement. *shrug*

I just sent a mail to James requesting his cell number so the two of us can hang out some, and now I’m going to give Jess a call and see if she wants to come with me to the mall to buy Mom a gift.

(Bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer came down on her head… This song has been stuck in my head all day!)

I’m feeling annoyed because of work. I was working more on the ebuy site today, converting a section that was displayed using tables to where it would use div layers instead. I was to keep the rest of the page looking the same. Well, there was a great deal of unnecessary CSS and code involved, so I wiped it out and started over, trying to reconstruct the look of things. I spent a good while making sure the page looked good from 800×600 on up, but it turns out that 800×600 isn’t a worry for my boss at all, which is annoying. Trying to make my version of the page match the original was probably the biggest annoyance, though, because I had to make it match exactly, even the stupid parts (e.g. in the original some links are the default colors because the CSS wasn’t configured properly, other links underline in one paragraph but not in the next, et cetera). I would have tried to fix those but each time before when I would try to adjust the page to be how I thought my boss wanted it, she’d complain. I ended up thinking, fine, if you want it to match exactly, I can do that. And so the fonts are all absolute sizes that are barely readable (seriously, they’re slightly taller than an eyelash is thick), the colors that were left undefined in the original are undefined in mine, and so on. Of course when I showed this to my boss, she wanted me to fix the undefined colors, saying that one of our other workers must have been editing her stylesheet. *rolls eyes* And since we’re worried about how it looks in the big-name browsers, I had to tweak and create new stylesheets and throw Javascript around like all hell to make Opera, Firefox, IE, and Safari display the page the same. Pretty much, though, I design for “Internet Explorer” and “everything else,” because IE is freakin’ weird and has to be different from all the other browsers people use. Then there was the whole deal with getting an attractive layout at 800×600 and then an attractive layout for 1024×768+, involving more JS and more stylesheets. I have seven stylesheets and three chunks of Javascript that are stuffed in, so far.

I have more coding to look forward to tonight (sarcasm!) because I promised Dr. Jaromczyk I’d help out more on the Liver Cancer site. An hour this evening and an hour tomorrow evening, and then I’m through until he can pay me again. I’ll only be too glad–I need some free time this summer, damnit. Speaking of free time, I need to give Jess a call this evening and see if we’re still on for Holiday World this weekend.

I enjoyed this past weekend at my cousin’s. Julia has learned several new words, including “wow,” “uh-oh,” and “hi.” My cousin Carla and her fiancé came over, too, so I got to see about six packs of photos of Ireland from their trip. Steve, the fiancé, is one funny guy. He’s a sarcastic Jewish doctor that kept me laughing pretty much the whole time he was there.

Ooh, I’m excited about the new Harry Potter book, which I think I heard comes out this Friday, but I’ll have plenty of reading to keep me occupied until then. I borrowed several books from my cousin, including Insomnia by Stephen King, Four Past Midnight by Stephen King (in which I’m reading The Sun Dog as a brief interlude between the books of the Ender’s Game series), Shadow of the Giant by Orson Card, and Children of the Mind by Orson Card. I finished Xenocide the other day, and once I finish The Sun Dog, I’ll get started on Children of the Mind.

I put up a very simple, plain skin (called Wide) just now for Robbie’s benefit because he complained that my layouts were too narrow. Try loading a page where the main area is shorter than the nav area and you’ll see a neat trick. If you have JavaScript enabled, that is. The main area will run to catch up and be the same height as the nav area, thanks to Project Seven’s equal column height script.

Note: If you enjoy this article, you might also check out the Geeky Stuff section.

For many years (most of my web designing history, really), I maintained all my pages myself with only an HTML editor and scp for uploading. I saw many other sites that used tools like WordPress, MovableType, and Drupal to organize their pages but I never saw the benefit of such things for entire sites, only blogs. It’s only recently that I decided to try WordPress and to use its Pages feature to control all of my site and not just my writings and journal. So far, it’s been a great change.

Benefits

• I can update everything from anywhere.

  If I take a notion to change my autobiography while I’m visiting relatives, I don’t have to mess around with saving any files to edit them, uploading them, and then remembering to update my copy on my computer when I get back home. I can just log into WordPress and fire away. My whole site is at my fingertips for any changes I want to make.

• Consistency.

  Even though I used PHP when I was maintaining all my pages by hand and so layout changes were a breeze, some people don’t have PHP or any similar programming language at their command, and so a CMS would be a perfect choice in order to keep all the pages looking the same.

• Community.

  I mean two things by this: one is the community that forms around your whole site when feedback is allowed and displayed on almost every page (a feature that I know WordPress offers pretty easily), and the other is the community that supports and expands your CMS of choice. There are a ton of plugins, themes, hacks, and tools made just for WordPress that are easy to implement, thus allowing me to have some nifty features on my site without having to write them myself.

• Organization.

  It’s great when I can change the name of a category and have all the links throughout my site that point to that category be updated immediately. It’s also nice when I can have archives of old posts, and then have those archives linked to on every page. I edit one thing and everything related to that thing is updated to reflect my changes, and I don’t have to tell it to do so. Having such things taken care of by the CMS allows me to focus on the content and appearance of my site, which is what I care about.

Drawbacks

Those benefits above make up for the few drawbacks that I’ve seen:

• Less control over individual pages.

  All pages are treated the same, which is usually a good thing because you want a uniform look and feel to the site. If I want a particular page to look or act differently, however, this is a problem. I can make a stand-alone page and merely link to it, but then what happens if I want a few things on that stand-alone page to be like the rest of my pages, such as its design? I can’t very well just write out the same HTML and CSS that configures the look of the page, because I support skins and my visitors might be using a different skin. So I could write out a skinning tool just for that one page, but then what if I update the navigation on my other pages? I’d have to go back and keep this one stand-alone page up-to-date, and that becomes a hassle. That’s why I moved away from maintaining all pages by hand in the first place: I don’t want to deal with the logistics of how a site is set up, but instead what it’s made of and how it appears.

• If one thing goes down, it all might fail.

  I used WordPress a few years ago to maintain a blog but dropped it like a hot potato because, one day, I went to my blog and all I found was an error message. Something about MySQL and PHP, I think, but I never could fix the problem. It might’ve been a problem with my database or with WordPress itself, but whatever went wrong caused the whole page to not display. None of my blog archives or categories were available, either. With all your pages being stand-alone pages, if one page has a problem, it’s a very isolated problem and it shouldn’t affect the rest of your site. A few visitors may be inconvenienced when they’re trying to read the history of Harold, your pet hamster, and find the page is down, but they can still read your political commentary, so it’s all good. If the main system of your CMS goes down, for whatever reason, then visitors can neither read your pet’s history nor your opinions.

The modem from Alltel came today, though I still don’t have internet at my apartment. I got everything hooked up and talked to a guy from the ISP, who happens to be a friend of Todd’s, and all the physical things are in place but I have to have something else done on Alltel’s end. I’ve an IP address and everything, but I can’t ping anybody or connect to any sites via my browser. Todd and Steve (the guy from Alltel) will be probably be over tonight, so we’ll see if I don’t have ‘net access from home very soon.

I spent my weekend shopping and reading Harry Potter, which I finished last night. I was in tears by the end of it, and though I really enjoyed it overall, it was very sad. One of my favorite characters was killed by another of my favorite characters! Terrible. I can’t believe the one person is gone, dang it. Jess hasn’t read it yet and won’t get her copy until Wednesday, so I’ve not been able to discuss it with her. I’ve instead been combing FictionAlley Park for interesting commentary. Several people have been irked by the relationships developed in this book; say what? I even read one person say that Rowling was being “cliche” when a certain couple got together. I don’t know how that one’s supposed to work, considering she’s the author of the entire series… Anyway, I greatly enjoyed reading the whole cave scene; very creepy. The murderer that was the revealed at the end… wow. Quite shocked, here. I’ll have to reread the whole series now, just so I can see how I now view this person. However, first I must finish The Sun Dog (I still haven’t finished that thing, and I’ve only got about thirty pages left!) and Children of the Mind.

As for the shopping, I bought some clothes at various places, which was nice but not the highlight of my shopping extravaganza: I got a butterfly chair and one of those backrest things. You know, they’re like half a chair, with only a back and arms; you set them on your bed or the floor and voila! instant chairyness. I got the butterfly chair for only $15, freaking fifteen dollars, when I was expecting it to be around $30 and I wouldn’t have bought it. The backrest was $20, which was the same I’d seen at Target, Linens-N-Things (your store is nice, Trin, but Bed Bath and Beyond is cheaper!), and Wal-Mart, so I was okay with paying that. It’s been quite handy for reading in bed, I tell you. The chair will be nice to have this fall in the dorm. Jess, Ashlee and I are supposed to go Wednesday to buy decorative (and practical!) stuff for our dorm, since the three of us will be rooming together. I’m excited.

I’m going to hang out with Jess after I get done here. We’re going to be doing laundry, baby! I haven’t washed anything since last week, so I’m running out of socks and jeans. Maybe we’ll watch a movie or go out to eat while stuff’s in the wash; I haven’t had dinner yet.

I only worked until two today, which was nice. I had to go back to the apartment to wait for UPS to deliver that modem, since they said they’d be there between two and five. I got my six hours in at work by going in at 8 (normal for me, anyway) and skipping lunch, so I won’t even have extra time to make up.

I’ve been working on a site design for a local auto repair shop in my home town because they’re desperately in need of one. Their current page (seriously: it only has one page) has my default browser colors with their address and phone number. It could definitely use some sprucing up. I’m trying out two different ideas: one is red and gray and pretty standard looking, with an upper banner and a sidebar for navigation, and the other is a little more creative. It’s blue, tan, and a pale olive green with a few boxes, some rounded, for the navigation and content. As soon as I get internet access at home, I’ll finish those off and get them uploaded so that both you guys and the owner of the auto shop can see them and give opinions.

I went to the post office earlier to mail a check to Lora (postage money for mailing my forgotten alarm clock) and to send out a scholarship application, and darned if I didn’t realize too late that the provided envelope for the scholarship had sealed itself shut. The people inside the mail room had already closed their window, so I’ll have to make another trip back there to get that application mailed. At least it’s due sometime in August, so I don’t have to rush about it.

Google Moon is a nifty tool for viewing the surface of the moon. I suggest you zoom in all the way. :D

Note: If you enjoy this article, you might also check out the Geeky Stuff section.

A very simple photo gallery tool. It displays a set of thumbnail images (made by you) and then each individual image when clicked.

Requirements

• You need PHP support on your server. An easy way to test this is to stick <?php phpinfo(); ?> into a .php file, upload that file to your server, and load it in your browser. If you get a huge table with information about your PHP setup, then you know you have PHP support. If you get a blank page, then you don’t have PHP. :(
• Knowing some CSS would allow you to further customize the look of the page, but it isn’t required.

Try It and Get It

• View a sample gallery
• Download .zip file (11K)
• Download .tar.gz file (8.5K)

Features

• Loads of variables that you can edit to customize the behaviour and look of your gallery.
• Acts intelligently if you throw garbage at it. Example: if the visitor tries passing a bad argument (letters, numbers less than zero, numbers larger than the number of photos in your gallery, etc.) in the URL, the gallery loads either the main page, the first image, or the last image, depending.
• Generates valid XHTML 1.0 Strict code that is neat to look at (try viewing the source of the sample gallery). Valid CSS comes by default, too.
• Comes with a simple design (graphics and CSS included) so that you can get your gallery going immediately–just supply the photos and thumbnails!
• Many things are determined automatically, such as image sizes and names, so you don’t have to spend time changing unnecessary variables.
• Choose between plain text navigation, images, or both.

Source Code

If you don’t want to install the gallery, you might still be interested in viewing the source code.

I just returned from a walk around downtown Lexington. I visited Victorian Square, which is a collection of little stores, to window shop and possibly buy a belated birthday gift for Mom. I didn’t find anything I thought she would like, though, so I’ll have to continue my search. I’m considering a couple of out-of-the-way bookstores near here that might have some books on cacti that she doesn’t already own. Not that I know which books she owns or doesn’t. I found Super Troopers at a used CD/DVD place and picked up a copy for my brother, though I like the movie, too, because he’s been asking me to get it. I’m now drinking water like a horse because I was silly and didn’t bring a bottle on my long jaunt.

Tomorrow will be more exciting, hopefully, because Todd, Chris, and I are going to eastern KY to shoot guns all day. According to Todd, we’ll be firing a 30-06 rifle, a 270, a high-point 380 pistol, and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun. Fun stuff!

This coming weekend will be action-packed, folks. I’ll be moving out of my apartment on Friday after work, hopefully with Ike and maybe Jessica’s help, and moving out is always hectic. Then that night, Jess, her parents, and I are driving to Indiana to stay for a couple of nights. We’ll visit Holiday World and Splashin’ Safari, then meander through Louisville on our way back.

I’ve got to check up on my student loan status because a bill came from UK and I owe about $700 that was covered by a loan last year. I thought I renewed that bloody thing, but perhaps not. Mom’s checking an old statement for me and getting an address so I can fix this. I could afford to pay the $700, but I’d rather keep that in the bank.