Year: 2012

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[ref]This is my old Canon PowerShot S500 Digital Elph. It’s a decent camera, though its autofocus is annoyingly slow.[/ref]. 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.

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[ref]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.[/ref]. 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[ref]I think my fettuccine Alfredo didn’t entirely agree with my guts even if it did agree with my tastebuds.[/ref]. 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.

One of my goals for this year[ref]I don’t really do new year resolutions, but I do occasionally set personal goals for the new year around January 1st.[/ref] 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[ref]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.[/ref]. 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[ref]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[/ref] and jQuery for Absolute Beginners[ref]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.[/ref]
  • 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.