Just some random bits of thoughts running through my head and life:

• I’m supposed to go camping this weekend. I’ve talked about this particular camping trip before. I really hope it doesn’t rain, but the weather forecast isn’t promising
• I was nominated for an award here at work. They call it the Elite Award and give it to one person a quarter. Considering I’ve been here only ten weeks, I think that’s a good sign.
• Over heard at the bar, a lady talking to a guy: “Yes, she was my first lover, but I’m with you now, and I wear your collar” – I so wanted to turn around and stare.
• My buddy Doug has started flying lessons and is keeping a rather comprehensive journal about it. Very good reading, if you enjoy reading about that kind of stuff, which I do. Though it tends to make me jealous
• Looks like my iPod was stolen. Last place I remember having it was here on my desk at work. If it was, and if I did leave it, it has walked away. Sadness.
• I have been working on a new design. I have three mockups, with different colors and layouts. I just can’t decide on one I like. Maybe I’ll put it to a vote. It’d be nice to have my own design up, rather than a prepackaged one.
• Stupid Surf Control software here at work will let me work on muse.harleyroads.com but blocks www.harleyroads.com. Go figure.
• I finally bought the full license for Expression Engine, hence the desire to work on www.harleyroads.com in my downtime here at work.
• I want to sign up for Nathan’s creative writing class again – between work and work and play practice, I’m not sure I’ll have time…
• I need a time machine.
• I so hope it doesn’t rain this weekend.

No wonder I never sleep. Too much crap running through my head. Look at all that!

Some of the lovely code I get to play with:

The ‘xx.xxx.xxx.xx’ is the IP for the domain in question. Basically whoever coded this page created a frame 100% the width of the browser and loaded itself into that page. It’s damn near a Catch-22.

Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the coding, nor the design of this particular website. I am not posting the url here, because lord knows it might come back to bite me in the ass.

About 6 weeks ago, I purchased a new laptop for Gail. Her Dell had been in the path of Hurricane Sarah, and the display on the laptop was half-broken (the top half worked great. Bottom half, not so much). It was an honest accident that happened at least 6 months ago, and Sarah still feels bad about breaking mommy’s laptop.

One evening, after having to use Gail’s clunky jerry-rigged setup (17in monitor hooked up to the laptop, sitting on its own side table while the laptop sat on the dining room table), I went to Best Buy, and pretty much on the spur of the moment, bought a Sony Vaio laptop. The hardware specs on this thing are nice: Dual Core 1.66 ghz, 2GB of RAM, 180 GB hard drive. It’s a good machine and should last Gail awhile. But it has one serious flaw:

Vista.

Windows Vista can be summed up in one word: Beta. And in this case, beta is synonymous with crap. This feels like the most incomplete OS I’ve ever had the misfortune of playing with. It has weird quirks that just makes it feel like it’s not done. When I purchased the laptop, I got a free Lexmark printer/scanner with it. Gail’s been wanting a scanner, so I was kind of jazzed about that. I set it up, put in the included CD with the drivers, and spent the next week trying to get it to work consistently. I would get it to work OK, but if I turned the printer off or unplugged it, the next time I powered it on (or plugged it in), Vista would try to re-install the drivers and set up a new default printer. At one point in the Printer Control Panel, I had 8 freakin’ Lexmark printers listed.

It’s also been having a wonderful time trying to find my wireless network. With XP, I’d open the laptop and in 2 seconds or less, it would detect my wireless and I’d be happily surfing away. With Vista, I’ve had it take 10 minutes, 2 reboots, and lots of creative cursing. And I’m not the only one…my boss at the restaurant has the same damn problem. I’m hoping there will be an update fix for it soon.

And then there’s error messages like the one up above. I’m thinking some poor programmer from India, with a minimal grasp of the English language, was tasked with creating this message, and then no one bothered to proof read it. I’ve read it three times, and it still doesn’t make sense to me.

So, after 5 weeks of crap like this, I did what felt natural; wiped it and installed XP. Well, apparently 90% of the stuff that’s in the Sony Vaio I have doesn’t even have drivers for XP, it’s all Vista. I spent another two days trying to get video working properly (it always looked too flattened for the wide screen), trying to get wireless working, etc. I finally hopped into the Sony Support chat room to ask about the availability of drivers for XP and was scolded for removing Vista. I kid you not.

So, after realizing that XP wouldn’t be that much better, I ordered a System Restore disk ($38 bucks with expedited shipping. Tax time ya know…), and now I’m back to square 2. Not square 1, because I have the printer working exactly as it should. Rather than trying to install from the supplied CD, I just downloaded the driver straight from Lexmark’s website and it works as expected now.

In all this, the thing that REALLY kills me is my impulsiveness…if I’d taken just an hour to think it over, rather than fly off the handle and decide Gail needed a new laptop RIGHT FRAKIN’ NOW, I would’ve thought about getting her a new MacBook, which will install and dual-boot XP just fine for when she wants/needs to use Windows.

Anyone want to purchase a new Sony Laptop?

While it’s not yet the end of the week, I thought I’d update you all on how things have been here at my new digs.

Quite simply, very nice. There are some great people here, I have a very cool boss (and she manages a team of one…me!), and I’m doing something I enjoy. So it’s been a good week!

There are certainly differences from AOL: for one, I’m now exclusively on a Windows box. I’ve always maintained that I use what ever platform that I need to get the job done. I just prefer my macs. However, there are a couple of cool things about Windows (I think I just heard all my linux and mac loving friends gasp);

• Outlook – while I know it’s the springboard along which many a virus is launched, I like the integration, and options within it. Mail is good, I like having the Calendar integrated smoothly, and I am utilizing the Tasks option to keep track of what I’m supposed to be doing here at work. I wish there was a decent ‘all-in-one’ equivalent for the Mac. I know, I know, there’s Entourage – but strangely enough, I never was able to acclimate to that as easy as I have Outlook. Perhaps I need to give it another look. Wish Apple would come up with an all-in-one package similar.
• Homesite – When I first started coding web pages with something other than a WYSIWYG editor (anyone remember AOLPress?), I used Homesite, created by Nick Bradbury (creator of the excellent Top Style, for those needing a great CSS editor). When I jumped to the Mac platform, there was never really one great WYSIWYN editor. Dreamweaver exists for the Mac, but for those wanting the basics, there was BBEdit and TextWrangler, skEdit, and the fabulous TextMate, among a host of others. If TextMate had just a couple of more tweaks, it’d be there…just not quite.
• SmartFTP – Don’t get me wrong…I’m perfectly happy with Transmit. But if I have to be on Windows, I can’t suggest a better FTP client than SmartFTP. It has a great functionality, a beautiful interface, and to top it all off, it’s free.

So all-in-all, being back on a Windows machine full-time isn’t quite the nightmare I envisioned… kinda having a bit of fun even. I discovered a very cool trick today in fact. I’ve been gathering a list of all the domains we own/host/DNS for, and have been importing them into an Excel spreadsheet. Somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1000 cells have been filled. It’s taken me nearly two days. After getting done, I thought that there has to be an easier way, and there is. What took me two days took me two minutes after learning you can import tabular data from a web page into Excel. Very easily in fact. Figures I learn this after I finished my task

O.o

At least I’m still smiling!

Welcome back to me!

The switch that the box that hosts my sites took a dump awhile back, hence the reason this site has been inaccessible. After that got fixed, the owner of the box took the time to update Apache and PHP…which hopefully means the end of the “too many open files” error I was seeing all the time, which would require me to pester my brother into rebooting Apache. That was happening on a regular basis, and even more often when I was updating files.

So, thanks go to Dave, the owner of the hardware, for updating Apache and PHP and hopefully putting an end to my ‘too many open files’ woes. And to my brother Seth for being patient with my whining and asking every few days for him to reboot the server. You guys really do rock (though I know you’re both sick to death of me).

I’ve been spending more time on my Harley site as of late, and neglecting the looks of this page. As it’s just a journal for now (lacking photos and such), I’m not that worried about it. I did upload a picture I took for the header, but that’s about all I’ve done as far as customizing.

Naturally, after doing that, I’m getting a weird error, which you may have seen:

TypeError: element.ownerDocument.defaultView has no porperties.

Something got screwed up!

Ah well. Wouldn’t be a revamping (no matter how minor) without something screwing up.

-edit-

Well, the error described above is only happening on Firefox 2.0 from what I can tell. And I borked the theme so badly, I re-uploaded so that photo is not mine.

I should just leave well enough alone…

I was going through the pile of email I let accumulate over the long weekend, when I saw one from blogger.com giving a link on how to reset my password. Some time ago (like…six years ago), I set up a blogger account, and apparently forgot about it. I went and looked and sure enough, all my old entries are there. I was enjoying reading them, when I came across a particular one…where it seems I’m actually sticking up for IE and tables.

So much has changed. Thank god.

Amusing to see that I’ve been keeping a journal online since at least October of 2000. And I know I started before that, doing it by hand, updating tables, so I’m assuming it’s at least seven, if not eight years now.

wow.

As a web developer, it’s important that I check and make sure my web pages work in as many different browsers as possible (or at least, as expected). This is even more true considering I use a Mac as my primary machine. I can, and have, spent all day working on a website on my Mac, checking it in Firefox and Safari, only to utter curses when I check the layout in IE.

Here at work, I have a Windows XP machine, along with my Mac. It was a tedious process, considering my desktop arrangement, to code on the Mac, swivel around to the Windows box and his refresh. Now, however, things are quite productive.

My current setup includes 2 19-inch Dell LCDs, the one on the left showing my Windows XP machine, the one on the right, my Mac. I have my Mac keyboard and mouse controlling both boxes. This little nifty trick is done using Synergy, which I just downloaded and installed this morning. I cannot even begin to tell you how friggin cool this is. Having the two OS’s and their related browsers side-by-side has already increased my productivity. I can cut and paste between the two OS’s as well. Best of all, Synergy is free.

That and I don’t keep ripping my headphones off my head when I turn to the Windows box.

Does anyone use an RSS Newsreader to go through their sites? I’ve tried before, and never really found any benefit to it. I know that’s odd, considering an RSS newsreader is designed to help simplify your browsing. I find that I am now visiting over two dozen blogs and sites first thing in the morning. I know some people who apparently have hundreds and hundreds.

I think I’m going to give Vienna another shot. I’ve used it before, it’s free and open-source. I’d like to get comfortable with it, instead of loading a dozen tabs or more at a time within Firefox, which tends to get annoyed and bog down with that many tabs it seems.
As a side note, I horked the default design for the journal here, so I downloaded and installed K2. It’s got a nice look, something I won’t flip out over leaving up for a bit as I work on my new layout. I like the layout I’ve got going, but I’m now second-guessing my logo/header. As always.

Well…

That upgrade went just splendidly, didn’t it?

bah