Tag: Code

Like many wage slaves in the US today, I recently had to fill out a self-evaluation form. After doing so, I started to wonder what these useless time wasters would look like if both the employer & employee were being completely honest…
(more…)

Bah, I’m still a bit torked off about yesterday. At work1, there’s been a person who keeps sending up emails with the wrong code in the subject line. We use these codes to route the issues to the correct person and putting the wrong code on the email can mean a delay of at least a week before the issue gets looked at. Well, this same idjit2 sent an email asking for an update on one of those issues. Since I was running a process at the time; I looked over the issue, found it was mislableled, forwarded it over to the correct person and then spent probably 2 hours writing up a diplomatic response explaining the difference between two of the codes we use.
(more…)

I use the Update Linkroll plugin and all the links on my portal page. The advantage to doing this is when one of the blogs I read updates and pings Weblogs.com; my portal page will show that the site has been updated. Having just finished staying up far too late watching videos on my computer; I was just briefly checking a few things on my site before heading off to sleep. That’s when I noticed something interesting. My portal page showed Greg Dean’s Real Life webcomic had been updated. This had never happened before, so I was curious to see what Greg had done. *shock & surprise* Greg changed his webcomic’s rant system to be using WordPress!

Unfortunately, I’m not able to get through to the WordPress site at the moment (or I’d toss something up on their forums), but I thought it was pretty damn cool and definitely worth mentioning. Oh and if Mr. Dean reads this; it’s wonderful that you’ve ditched Outlook. Now, you just need to ditch Pepsi for Coke. *runs and hides from the Shirt Ninja*

Dusty road part 2 (Altered)

I’ve created a new section in the gallery, called Altered. This is where I’ll be putting any photos that I’ve manipulated beyond shrinking and labeling. For example, the dusty road picture attached to this post is one that I had been thinking needed some sort of work to make it pop (for lack of a better word). So I fired up GiMP and did the roughly1 following:

  • Copied the entire image into a new file, to preserve the original.
  • Created two layers in the image containing the entire image.
  • Selected the bottom layer and applied a 5px Gausian blur.
  • Selected the top layer and set it the mode to multiply.
  • Flatten the image to save it as a JPG.
  • Resize and label.

I really like this altered version vs the original one. Also in currently the altered gallery is a picture I took of some clouds and that tonight I ran through the same basic steps to enhance it. This version of the image also really pops! 🙂
(more…)

If you’ve been involved in the WP community at all for the past couple of months; you couldn’t have missed that Root and Michael Heilemann have been… bickering back and forth about Kubrick and designs and usability and whatnot. From what I saw in the various threads on the WP Support forums, on both’s blogs and elsewhere they both need a good smack to the head. I’m too tired of the whole deal to really care who started it or who’s currently at fault.

Why bring it up then? Michael’s got a thread up that’s continuing the spat. Normally that wouldn’t be enough for me to bother putting a note up here but one of the people commenting on Michael’s thread said:

Quoting Root:

IMHO that is going to make WP less accessible to the self design end user than it is now. Some of us are quite interested in these things.

That means they’ll have to pay a designer to do it for them, hopefully. To that I say, “Bravo!” (There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.)

Another person commenting replied:

There are way too many people running around loose on the Internet with a bootleg copy of Front Page calling themselves web designers, IMHO.

Hear hear

And that just pisses me off. I’m not a designer and make no claims to be one. I do have a very rudimentary grasp of CSS and a slightly better one of HTML. I’ve borrowed a book from a friend of mine and am learning a bit about PHP/MySQL. I do all my coding either in Bluefish1 or Notepad2. I looked at the template WP shipped with in v1.02 and realized it was beyond my skills to really modify at the time. So I grabbed a couple of styles from the Alex King style competition but I saw that under some circumstances they’d break. I wasn’t happy about that and I didn’t like that my blog’s style wasn’t something I’d crafted. I kept looking around for something better to use and then Root came out with his Trident template. I was able to drop that in and make a few modifications so that I had a style that’s my own. It’s ugly as all get out but I could alter it as I need it without having to shell out more money to indulge in my blogging hobby. And the idea that just because I’m not a designer that I must be using a pirated copy of Frontpage3 in order to work on my site is insulting! I also think that if WP v1.3 does make it substantially more difficult to create new themes for my site then I will have to an alternative platform.

1 When working on my desktop and booted into Linux.
2 When working on my laptop, whose CD-ROM drive sucks so bad I can’t get windows off the machine.
3 Frontpage is a piece of crap! I’ve had to use it at work a few times and it writes the most horrific code! If you’re going to claim that people are pirating web design software; why not credit them with pirating something that’s actually useful.