Three till Seven

I’ve been working on IDEA Lab and the LXer redesign this morning while waiting for class time to roll around. I wonder if he’ll be reviewing in physics today; it would make sense since our final is this Thursday. I know we’ll be listening to more boring speechs in Public Speaking. They wouldn’t be all that boring except the speeches we’re doing currently are just revised versions of a previous speech that we gave only a week ago. Dull as dish water.

Todd and I are going to my cousins’ for dinner tonight so I can see them again and so he can meet more of my family. I haven’t been able to visit many relatives recently due to my class and work load, which is one reason I’m so glad I’ll be back at Lexmark soon. I’ll have my evenings free again! Sure, I’ll get home later, but when I do get home, I won’t have freakin’ homework to look forward to.

Speaking of ol’ Todd and myself, we’re talking of going to an aquarium next weekend. Shark Week has been on the Discovery channel and we got all psyched about the idea of seeing lots of sea life in one place, so we’re gonna go. Ooh, I hope I get to pet some slimy-slick creature.

I need to get my Antec case sent out today. I’ve been going ’round with NewEgg because for a while they didn’t respond to my emails. Uh, hello? How does any serious company run things like that? So I sent them a new, irate email saying I want my questions answered, dang it. They responded and I’ll also get a $15 credit for shipping costs to send their stupid broken product back to them.

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

Custom shapes can be very useful for making multiple objects that look the same. For example, say you want several photos to all be cut out of the same shape, like this:

Creating a Custom Shape

1. Create a blank 200 pixels x 200 pixels image. Select the Rounded Rectangle Tool and set its radius to 30 px.
   
2. Draw a rounded rectangle that takes up the whole image.
   
3. Choose the Rectangle Tool and select the Add to Shape Area button.
   
4. Draw just any old rectangles in the top right and bottom left corners. This will add the areas to the path.
   
5. In the Path window, choose the path of the shape you’ve just constructed. Go to the Edit menu and choose ‘Define Custom Shape…’. Give the shape a name and click ‘Ok’.
   

Using the Shape

1. Open another image.
   
2. Duplicate the background layer and delete the original. You will be left with ‘Background copy’.
3. Choose the Custom Shape Tool and select your shape from the drop-down menu on the right.
   
4. Draw your shape from the top left corner to the bottom right. It will be created in a new layer above your regular image–this is fine.
   
5. In the Layers Dialog, grab the shape and drag it down onto the layer that has your image.
   
6. Now you can delete the shape layer, leaving only your image layer.
   
7. Voila! Now you have your image with the custom rounded edges that you designed.
   

I noticed the telltale bumps of poison ivy on my left foot about a month and a half ago, but stupid me didn’t really care. It didn’t itch, surprisingly, and I always had something better to do than buy some calamine lotion and doctor it. That is, until I noticed the same bumps appearing on the lower part of my palms. On both hands. And the sides of my fingers. And this is sounding really gross, I know, and it is, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not as bad as you’re probably thinking. Don’t picture yellow ooze-coated lumps the size of M&M’s, but instead lumps about the size of sesame seeds that have no ooze whatsoever. …Wow, that’s still pretty gross. However, I was duly horrified by this and you’ll be happy to know that I’ve bought some of that Calagel stuff and have been applying it frequently to both my left foot and both my hands. My dad assures me that poison ivy can’t spread by the bumps, but only by the oil itself, so I guess I just picked this up at the same time I got it on my foot and it’s only now manifesting in bump form.

Now that I have you all appropriately disgusted, I’ll go on to say that I’m spending the weekend at my parents’ house. It’s been pleasantly relaxing so far, as I’ve just watched some Boston Legal with Mom (awesome, awesome show–Alan Shore is one sexy lawyer) and fiddled online. (You know me, always fiddling.) I have been plagued by the idea of IDEA Lab (pun intended), because it feels like I’ll never have my work for them complete. I thought I made it clear that after the summer I would no longer be working there, because I’d be back at Lexmark. There was apparently some confusion, so my work load went from a thing or two sent via email every few days to long lists of changes and problems sent daily. My boss is now sufficiently happy with it, but there was a problem in IE (as in the whole site looked wonky, but he thinks it’s a cache problem as it looked fine earlier on and I haven’t made any big layout changes). Then of course I have to actually deploy it. This involves backing up their current stuff and then being extra, extra careful with deploying just layout changes, and not copying my old copy of the content over the stuff that’s been kept updated all along in their live version. It’s all very frustrating as I thought I had finished with things on Wednesday.

My LXer redesign has also been stressing me a bit, but only because I want those guys to have the new layout ASAP, and I feel like a bum not getting to work on it this weekend. Why can I not work on it? Because my dad is a crazy zealot, dear sweet man that he is, and refuses to let me install IE (via IEs 4 Linux–a real lifesaver for the Linux-friendly web developer) on any of our boxes. I can work on the 508-compliance bit of the layout, though, so I’ll probably do that.

Then of course there’s also the stress of final grades. My physics final actually went really well yesterday but that doesn’t stop me from worrying whether I got a B (as I hope) or a C (as I fear) in the class. I already know I got an A in public speaking because I stopped by the guy’s office and picked up a copy of my final grade sheet. While I was there, he also told me that the persuasive speech I gave yesterday was “the best speech of the semester,” which tickled me so much I had to go send my parents and Todd an email saying as much. I’m a sucker for academic praise.

My landlady annoys me something terrible. I just got a voice mail from her that was about five minutes long (the voice mail system actually cut her off due to the length) because she’s an older lady and loves to talk your ear off about what the other tenants are doing to upset her and how she just can’t get ahold of anyone to do maintenance on the building and they’re all busy people, too, and that’s why I’ve been living there for three months and only now got a screen door. This woman has been nothing but incompetent and sluggish about repairs on the place. Let’s see…

1. Broken screen door for the first three months. Her voice mail was to tell me (well, partially to tell me–she tends to ramble) that someone came and installed a new door. I was promised this door near weekly for the past three months, mind.
2. Cracked window panes on several windows. That repair is still in the works.
3. An inside door that refuses to latch.
4. A lock that cannot be unlocked with a key.

Now I’ve been told since moving in at the beginning of May that these things would be fixed. Hell, the first time I looked the place over in freakin’ April, I was told they would be fixed before I moved in. She has a written record of all this crap, and likes to tell me that it’ll get fixed, but I so have my doubts. I hope to God that when my lease ends, Todd and I will find an equally nice place elsewhere with a reliable, competent landlord. This lady is ridiculous.

My first day back at Lexmark yesterday went fine. I spent most of it listening to others talk, running around, and getting stuff set up, such as my ID card and my computer. I still can’t do much because I’m not fully in the system yet, but hopefully that’ll be cleared up by the end of the week and I can get down to work. So far I’ve been cleaning things up with my project from last time: a Rails program to display and compare data about various printers. There’s real data for me to stuff in the database now, so I’ve got to make sure the system works well with the actual stuff as opposed to just my made-up test data. Beyond that, I’ll be reading up on database design and normalization again in order to rewrite an existing application for more data comparison. It’s done in PHP with MySQL currently but I’m thinking Rails would be better, if I can easily port the PHP chart-creating app that’s tied in with it. That’ll be the hairy part.

Todd and I ran by the mall earlier to pick him up some new clothes for work. He’s tired of paying high prices at the dry cleaner (~$6 per shirt! ha!), so he wanted some nice clothes that he could put in the washer. It’s fun getting to pick out clothes for a guy when he admits he knows jack about what looks good. I hooked him up with some pretty polos and khakis, so he’ll be looking stylin’ at work.

Tomorrow the girls and I will be having movie + dinner night and we’re going to use up some of the massive amounts of food that Mom sent me back with. The menu so far is some of my parents’ corn, green beans, and tomatoes, plus probably chicken to work in some protein. I love corn on the cob. Does anyone else have experience with cooking it? I know when Ashlee made it last time, she boiled those ears for about an hour. My mom’s response to that when I told her was shock; she gets the water boiling and then drops them in for about three minutes. When I told Jess this, she was shocked and leaned more toward Ashlee’s method. What do you guys do?

Holy crap, I got a B in Physics II! I was so excited to see that, as were my parents and Todd of course. I made C’s on the first tests, A’s on the homework, and maybe a C or B on the third test. I made a C in the first physics course and I figured that’s what I’d get in this one, so I was quite tickled to get a B in there. I checked my grade report online like a mad woman over the weekend, but it only got posted yesterday.

I just finished watching Revolution OS with Jess and I’m now fiddling online while Todd behind me watches Steve play some zombie game. Todd thinks we should get ol’ Ashlee to play the game, and this is because he is a cruel man who also happens to understand comedy. You see, Ashlee is butt-scared of zombies. I can slouch, walk all stiff-legged from the hips, and make a moany sound while going toward her and she’ll commence to screaming and telling me to stop. This is probably cruel and unusual punishment, but damnit, it’s funny.

Plans, plans… I don’t really have many except for work and hanging out after work. Well, now that school’s over, I can at least make plans to do things socially. Wow, I don’t have to come home, kiss Todd, and then immediately start on physics or my next speech. Kind of liberating. Here’s what’s coming up for me:

• Walking Bear, Greg and Hannah’s dog, who you know is a chow from the name. It’s like some kind of unwritten law that chows have to be named Bear and, at least here in the south, ‘bear’ is pronounced ‘bar’. Todd’s supposed to be walking her while they’re out of town but he’ll be out of town himself Saturday.
• A trip to an aquarium with Todd because we both like sea life.
• Dinner at my cousins’ house.
• Shopping trip with the girls for back-to-school clothes (those poor gals!).
• Swimming trip with the girls, because I need to work on my lobster look.

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

So you’ve got some Rails application and you need to store information from the users across their interactions with the app. Here’s a simple, straightforward way to do that.

In your controller:

if params[:option]
  @option = session[:option] = params[:option]
elsif session[:option]
  @option = session[:option]
else
  @option = ‘default value’
end

This checks to see if ‘option’ was passed via a parameter in the URI (e.g. /view?option=jim) or from a form. If it is, then we want to save that option in both the session, so we can access it later, as well as in a variable specifically for use in our view.

However, if params[:option] is nil but we still have it in session[:option] from some previous interaction, then we’ll set our variable @option for use in our view from the session copy.

If all else fails, then we know the user hasn’t tried to set this option in any way, and we can give it some default value.

Now, in our view:

<%= form_tag :action => 'view' %>
<label for=”option”>Choose:</label>
<%= text_field_tag ‘option’, @option, :size => 10 %>
<%= submit_tag ‘Change’ %>
</form>


This provides a simple form for our user to set the value of this option, and if the value is already set from a previous interaction with this form, then it shows up in the text field.

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

XGL/Compiz video comparison with OS X Spaces and Vista Aero. Watch those and see which one pwnz which one. I hope getting XGL and Compiz isn’t difficult on my new Ubuntu system.

I wanted to do a dark layout that looked all web 2.0-y, so I worked on one this morning and came up with Black and Rosy. The roses started out as a photo of the ones Todd got me for our five-month anniversary, and I worked with them in both Illustrator and Photoshop. I’ve only checked the layout in Firefox and Opera, so let me know how IE mutilates it, please. :( Available themes are listed in the sidebar.

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

My case came! Freakin’ Newegg got on the ball and sent my replacement case, then Todd got my system put together and I’m installing Ubuntu 6.06 right now. It’s 61% done, and I’m so excited… Eee!