BeMused

When we first moved to the area some seven years ago, my wife suggested I join the YMCA Indian Guides (now called Adventure Guides) program. Basically it’s a way for dads to spend more time with their kids, and they get together with other dads and their kids. It’s a good time, and for the last 6 years or so I’ve been participating, first with my son Cody, and now my daughter Sarah and I are in the program.

This past weekend we had what’s called a “lock-in”; basically we go to some place, usually a sports complex, and we’re allowed the run of the place after it has closed. We swim, shoot pool, play basketball, dodge ball, etc., with the kids, and then we set up sleeping bags and campout inside the place.

We had a great time, naturally. I played more basketball Saturday night than I have in 5 years. As a result I was very sore the next morning, and sleeping on a gym floor did not help at all. I also hadn’t expected to be playing basketball, so I was wearing my normal jeans and hiking boots. Hiking boots are, quite simply, not the best thing to play basketball in. At one point I was chasing the ball and after catching it had to stop quickly so I wouldn’t go out of bounds. My shoe wasn’t tied as tight as it could’ve been, and my foot slid inside the boot. It pulled the toenail of my big toe back. Wonderful, exquisite pain. As of this morning, my toenail is a beautiful shade of purple. I’m hoping not to lose it.

I also had yesterday off, being Presidents Day and all. I wanted to get out of the house and do something fun. Instead my wife said “Want to go look at kitchen faucets?”. I groaned inside. I knew she’d find one, and I knew she’d have me install it. I have a unique talent, which extends from home repair to computer scripts and programs: I can take any simple thing, whether it is a simple home project or installing a new script on a website, and have it take four times longer than it should to get it installed and/or working. I showed you that with my previous post (which is now working, thanks to my friend and co-worker Steve. The guy’s a genius when it comes to Javascript). This faucet job took me four hours. FOUR HOURS. But it’s installed and working, with no leaks, so guess the end result is what matters.

But I’ll tell you something; after playing hard Saturday, sleeping on a gym floor Saturday night, and then laying on the kitchen floor all afternoon on Monday, with my torso twisted in weird directions trying to get various nuts loose, I am Sore, with a capital S.

This is another geekish post, which will probably just annoy Treva s’more.

It never fails…I always have problems getting scripts or plug-ins or similar items installed properly. It should be a simple thing, but I always make it a lot harder than it is. Previously I’ve had problems getting the WPG2 plug-in working. Recently, I have struggled with the Super Archive plugin and the IE/PNG transparency fix, neither of which I was successful with.

Currently, I’m attempting the lightbox script. It’s a nice, elegant way to display your photos without necessarily having to leave the page and go into a different gallery program, though I guess it’d be possible to set that up as well.

My point is I never get these types of scripts to work without a lot of blood, sweat, swearing and tears of frustration. I’m not dumb…I know these scripts aren’t hard to figure out. Whenever I ask for help (usually from my brother), he has it fixed in two seconds, and I can tell he’s probably just shaking his head thinking “what a dumbass”.

why Why WHY do I have such issues with these things?!

Camino is a browser created specifically for the Macintosh based off the Gecko engine. It recently celebrated it’s 1.0 release and I downloaded and installed it with the hopes of moving away from Firefox. Firefox, while a very good browser, was created for the Windows platform and ported over to Macintosh. I’ve noticed issues with it that, while minor, are starting to irritate the hell out of me.

So I downloaded Camino with great anticipation, looking to move away from Firefox. I imported my bookmarks in, and used it for a whole day. I even downloaded CamiTools and CamiScript to increase the functionality. Camino is a great browser, quick, responsive, and those irritating issues I’ve had with Firefox have not been an issue. It looks and feels like it belongs on a Mac.

However…

I find myself switching back to Firefox quite often, either to use the wonderful Web Developer extension, find out specific colors using Colorzilla, or to use something as simple as right-clicking (yes, Macs can right-click…just need a mouse with two buttons!) to view the background image to see how the author coded the site. Half the stuff I’ve come to depend on isn’t available on Camino. Which is a shame, I really like the Camino browser.

I’m going to take a page out of Jon Hick’s playbook, and keep both readily available. I think I’ll set Camino as the default, and when needed, I’ll launch Firefox. And hope someone develops a CamiTool or CamiScript that’ll at least replace my Web Developer Toolbar.

Obviously, I still have some sidebar work to do, not to mention comments, archives, etc, but I think I’m liking this layout/design a lot better than the previous two quickies I had up. I noticed that the titles of my posts/date posted/comments section looks quite a lot like Sarah’s. I didn’t intend it that way, but I obviously liked it and it stuck in my head. I used the nifty corners script for the round corners in my header, not sure how she did hers. And I noticed we used the same clock icon, which I got from FamFamFam. Not sure if she got hers from the same place.

So Sarah, if this is too much like yours and you’re upset by that, let me know! I’ll do something else with it (but those rounded corners are sweet, I’ll probably keep those somehow).

Otherwise, it’s the same old same old. I did go back to Firefox/Thunderbird. SeaMonkey just felt outdated, and I missed little things, like the Google search on the toolbar, rather than as a sidebar like SeaMonkey had it.

-edit- 

For those of you on IE, you might’ve noticed that the logo has a very light grey background (it’s pretty hard NOT to notice actually). This is due to IE’s inability to handle the PNG transparency. I found a script that fixes it, but when I impliment it, it removes my spiffy corners. Guess I’ll have to work on this…stay tuned!

I’ve decided to just leave this work-in-progress layout up, and I’ll add bits n’ pieces as I go along. Obviously there’s a lot of work to do still, but at least I’m a bit happier with this than I was the last one. And the brown layout I had (Which most of you had the fortune of not seeing) was hideous. Wonderfully ugly. I don’t know why I spent the time with it…

In other news, I’m currently testing SeaMonkey, which is basically the Mozilla Suite re-packaged. I use Firefox and Thunderbird on a daily basis, and each time I lauch them both, they launch two seperate instances of the gecko rendering engine. By using SeaMonkey, and launching only one instance, I’m hoping to improve performance. I’ve noticed there’s a few quirks and such that I miss from Firefox already (extentions, integration with Adium, etc…) that I’m hoping are addressed in subsequent releases. I haven’t gotten rid of Firefox and Thunderbird totally, yet, but if SeaMonkey can keep it’s head afloat, it might stick around in my dock.

So let’s see…that brings the total count of browsers on my Mac to 11. Wow. Aside from MS Internet Explorer, I think each of them have their own plusses which makes me keep them around. Plus it’s good to check page layouts in various browsers now and then.