Week 05: Cage Without a Key

Posted by | Filed under Art, Web Design

Week 05: Cage Without a Key

That’s the thing about depres­sion: A human being can sur­vive almost any­thing, as long as she sees the end in sight. But depres­sion is so insid­i­ous, and it com­pounds daily, that it’s impos­si­ble to ever see the end. The fog is like a cage with­out a key.

– Eliz­a­beth Wurtzel

Wait, Week 05? What ever hap­pened to Week 04? Well, my proper cam­era met with a bit of an acci­dent back on Christ­mas day and it’s been finally sent in for repairs. It took me a bit to locate my old P&S 1. Plus, I’ve just been feel­ing a bit down of late. When I first real­ized I’d missed week 04, I planned on post­ing 2 pho­tos for week 05 to make up for it. Unfor­tu­nately, I’ve not been shoot­ing as many images and this was the only halfway decent one of the few I did have. Maybe I’ll post an extra image later in the year to make up to week 04; we’ll just have to wait and see.

Side note: I’ve been work­ing on a new theme for this site and unlike most themes I’ve done this time I plan to do it all from scratch (sort of). I’m using a com­bi­na­tion of HTML5 Boil­er­plate an 960 Grid Sys­tem to build it, rather than work­ing with an exist­ing Word­Press theme. Why? In part because I’ve not worked with HTML5/CSS3 yet and want to and in part because I feel Ian Stewart’s right when he says You should be build­ing your own Word­Press Theme Frame­work. .… Make it your own. When you’re done you’ll have the best Word­Press Theme — for you.

Notes:

  1. This is my old Canon Pow­er­Shot S500 Dig­i­tal Elph. It’s a decent cam­era, though its aut­o­fo­cus is annoy­ingly slow. ↩

Week 03: Tripping the Light Fantastic

Posted by | Filed under Art

Week 03: Tripping the Light Fantastic

Pleasant Surprise

Posted by | Filed under Life

This evening was the annual Burns Sup­per hosted by H.A.G.G.I.S. We try to attend every year as it’s a fun evening of food, friends and danc­ing. And like every year, I went else­where for my meal, but came back for dessert and danc­ing. I have tried hag­gis once and that was an expe­ri­ence that needs no rep­e­ti­tion 1. I should men­tion that the desserts are not part of the catered meal, rather they are all brought by atten­dees of the sup­per as a con­test to see who can make the best dessert, most tra­di­tional and who has the best presentation.

As my wife and I enjoy desserts and there were a cou­ple of tri­fle recipes we wanted to try out; we decided to both enter this year. Her tri­fle was based on a black for­est cake while mine was a mix­ture of black­ber­ries, angel food cake and cheese­cake pud­ding. By the I got back to the sup­per from hav­ing real food. the dessert table had been dec­i­mated. There was a tiny bit of my wife’s dessert left and only a spoon­ful of the gooey bits of mine. I ate that lit­tle bit of dessert and then had to excuse myself momen­tar­ily 2. I was just head­ing back to the hall; when a friend came and got me, telling me that my dessert had won an award.

I have to say, there’s noth­ing quite like walk­ing into a room full of peo­ple all clap­ping for you. It’s a lovely ego boost and that was my pleas­ant surprise.

Notes:

  1. You can basi­cally think of hag­gis as soupy, liver-flavored oat­meal. I don’t like my oat­meal soupy and just the smell of liver causes me to lose my appetite. ↩
  2. I think my fet­tuc­cine Alfredo didn’t entirely agree with my guts even if it did agree with my taste­buds. ↩

Brain Dump 01

Posted by | Filed under Life, Rants, WordPress

One of my goals for this year 1 is to write more here; so while I don’t have a sin­gle idea that feels wor­thy of a full post, here’s a dump of var­i­ous things float­ing around/through my skull today.

  • Is today stu­pid dri­ving day or some­thing? I’ll grant I left for work a few min­utes later than usual, but it seems odd that so many peo­ple would con­tin­u­ally be pulling out into mov­ing traf­fic (from dri­ve­ways and side streets) and then going so slowly 2. For­tu­nately the roads were rel­a­tively clean this morn­ing, so I was able to stop before plow­ing into any of those idiots, but still.…
  • Back in the day when Javascript was new to the web, many sites used it to fre­quently touch my browser in the bad way. So I quickly grew to hate it and pretty much ignored/disabled it for years. In more recent times, Javascript usage has grown up/cleaned up its act. To the point where I’m actu­ally inter­ested in learn­ing to use it. So I’ve been search­ing around for some decent tuto­ri­als but haven’t had a lot of luck. Most tuto­ri­als either assume you already know quite a bit about Javascript or are so extremely dated that they’re use­less. I did run across 2 sites with tuto­ri­als that don’t seem to be too awful: Codecad­emy 3 and jQuery for Absolute Begin­ners 4
  • I’ve been think­ing about about redesign­ing this site, but I’m trou­ble decid­ing what to do. I’ve got some ideas float­ing around in my skull, but I might hold off until I can look into work­ing up a logo.

Notes:

  1. I don’t really do new year res­o­lu­tions, but I do occa­sion­ally set per­sonal goals for the new year around Jan­u­ary 1st. ↩
  2. Exam­ple in a 40mph zone, a car pulled out of a dri­ve­way less than half a block ahead of me, pulled across the lane I was dri­ving in into the other lane and then just as I caught up to them they pulled right back in front of me. ↩
  3. Codecad­emy gives a decent gen­eral knowl­edge of Javascrip. Though the site is far from per­fect, with bugs in the lessons that pre­vent you from com­plet­ing them or with ques­tions that unclear in what they are look­ing for and hints that can be utterly use­less ↩
  4. While tech­ni­cally these tuto­ri­als cover jQuery (a Javascript library) rather than “pure” Javascript and while cov­er­ing an older ver­sion of jQuery (1.2.6), it still has been very inter­est­ing to go over so far. ↩

Going Dark Tomorrow

Posted by | Filed under Politics

Tomor­row from 8AM till 8PM (GMT-6), CoffeeBear.net will be join­ing many oth­ers in going dark in protest of SOPA/PIPA.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Inter­net from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

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