... there is a wormhole between Wilmington, Ohio and Calgary. Who knew? After I posted yesterday on how slow my computer parts were coming, they showed up at noon. D'oh!

Everything works wonderfully... it's nice to have a power cord that just works again!

We finally dug through our files and found the AppleCare agreement for my laptop last weekend. The power cord, having been tripped over one too many times, is broken to the point where I basically need to hold it together to get any juice to the laptop.

They're sending us a new one, but man, it's gonna take forever. They're shipping it DHL, who I haven't really heard of. I'm not quite sure why, as the last two things we ordered from Apple got sent FedEx and it was really fast (like, my iPod came from China in three days).

No, it's been four days since the parts shipped from California, and they're now in... Ohio. At a sorting facility, which will undoubtedly take days to get through given the rate they've travelled so far.

Seriously, four days from California to Ohio? It hasn't even crossed the border yet, and I know that's gonna take some time! At the increasing rate of deterioration of my power cord, my laptop will be cold and dead for a week before I can plug it in again. :(

I have spent awhile today trying to make a master plan for a scrapbook I'm going to start work on soon. Mom recently bought me a good bit of scrapbooking supplies for when the baby comes... a pretty white album with baby shoes on the cover, and pre-made baby-themed sheets and all the little decals and titles you need to make a baby book.

This is all great and I really appreciate all the cute new stuff, but I'd prefer to not suck by the time I start on that. So I decided to get some practice and scrapbook all of my favorite photos of Matt and I from when we first got together, through the wedding and up until the baby comes (my mom also got me a very cute "Expecting" sheet and embellishment set to use with photos of me when I'm even rounder, so I get some pregnancy photos in there). Being the control freak A-type personality that I am, I can't just go nuts with the paper and scissors and glue right off the bat - no, I have to plan.

Got to make sure it's not too repetitive, I won't run out of things to say, I don't miss anything, and I actually have facing pages for my cute sheet set. It would suck if I had to stick something in later and it bumps all the pages up by one and my pregnancy sheets aren't together. They're very cute together... but perhaps not with other pages (there's a few odd colours in there).

Silly me, what do I use to try to plan? Microsoft Word! Sure, why not? I feel like a sucker for punishment today!

It's crashed on me three times already. Once because I tried to change the page size while the printer was unconnected (why it needs the printer for that, I have no idea), and twice when I was trying to move photos (once was accidental... I knew not to do that from the last crash but I accidentally clicked and dragged and down it went).

There has got to be a better way.

I may go to Powerpoint, which I hate even worse, but at least I can move photos without the whole thing dying horribly. I almost feel like I've have enough Microsoft today though. What I would really love is some software like Futureshop's Photobook planning site... it seems a lot easier to move photos and insert text, and it's got template suggestions and shows me clearly what pages are facing each other. Does anyone know of anything like this for MacOSX? I found PhotoPrinto, which integrates with iPhoto (huge bonus!), but I read a review of it somewhere that makes it seem like maybe it needs more computer than I really have.

Suggestions, anyone?

We've got my in-laws' business website up and running... I imagine I'll add a few things here and there (some photos of equipment, etc.) but I'm google bombing it today to get it on the search engines.

So if you need some water trucks or maybe just a water truck or maybe some water hauling or water delivery, then check out Hughes Transport. They provide potable water (drinking water), water for dust control, water for oilfield drilling, and water for movie effects like rain and snow.

Ahh, the frustration of dealing with Internet Exploder Explorer. I've been working on a webpage for my in-laws' business (yes, that's right, I am a Professional Web Designer this week), and (very dumbly) I was using Firefox while mucking with the CSS and HTML to check my progress. I don't know why I do this. I know, I know that IE cannot deal with correctly rendering pages. I know that even if my HTML and CSS check out, IE is still going to puke it up, even though Firefox, Opera, and Safari all make it look the same. ARGH.

So, it's back to the drawing table for a bit... do I put in the kludges to make it look right in IE (which, against all esthetic and technological sensibility, most people still use) or do I keep my artistic integrity and refuse to design for that monstrosity of a browser?

Easy choice this time. I'm getting paid to do a webpage, and it's gotta work for the widest possible audience.

*sigh*

(I do have to admit, rants about IE aside, I am tickled pink that I'm being paid for web work. Even if it is total nepotism. Or whatever the in-law version of nepotism is.)

Well, I've deleted 323 trackback spams in the past two weeks all before they ever saw the light of day! And with Matt's help, I've tweaked the spam prevention so that I haven't gotten anything new in about 19 hours. Looking good!

One effect you'll probably notice is that if you try to comment on any post over a day old, you might not be able to use the name "Texas Bob" or anything with Texas in it, since it's now on the banned authors list. Sorry to all the Texas Bobs and Texas Joes and Texas Whatevers out there.

Other stuff on the banned list: casino, blackjack, slots, etc. If anyone does have trouble with the commenting, I'd like to hear about it so I can fix the problem. You can give me a shout via email: (Those new graphical buttons are neat, hopefully it keeps me from getting even more spam. You can get your own at privacysig.com.)

Update: D'OH! I somehow managed to completely turn off all the comments today. I think it's fixed now, Matt and I have both been testing it. I now realize that it doesn't even tell you this until you try to submit your comment, so I sincerely apologize to anyone who took time out of their day to leave comments which were immediately rejected.

Can someone explain to me what the big deal is about podcasting? I just do not get it. It annoys me to no end. Like, I understand if it's an interview or something that would be a pain in the ass to transcribe, but for something that should be a plain old blog entry? Sheesh. It rankles me when I'll read something interesting on someone's blog, they'll give an link, and I find out that if I want access to the full commentary, I have to stop my music, hunt down my earphones so I don't annoy my husband, and basically quit everything else I'm doing so I don't end up just tuning it out. And then, once I'm listening, I can't do anything else with my hands or eyes and I get all A.D.D. and just CAN. NOT. DEAL.

Not to mention, it's about fifty times harder to surreptitiously listen to podcasts in meetings than read blogs.

Man, I hope this trend dies soon.

I'm mucking with my blog template today, so if it looks awful, well, give it a day.

All the cool kids have pretty banners, so I decided I need one too. Only trouble is the pink text doesn't show up too well against a photographic background. And the text-shadow CSS element isn't widely supported yet, so that's out. Trying some stuff, we'll see if I can get it to work.

Update: seems ok, links work, can read text, and wonder of all wonders, IE doesn't puke it up all over the place. Woo!

Ah, the satisfaction of a pretty new banner with a Wild Rose bud. 'Cause you know, I definitely needed to girl it up in here some more.

I'm mucking around with my blog template again today, so if this page gets real ugly at some point, that's why.

I seem to have a 2 or 3 pixel padding on the main panel that I just can't seem to get rid of. I would like the pink side bars to go all the way to the edges so I can add a cool drop shadow effect to the main panel, but I can't seem to get the side bars the right size and it looks dorky when the pale yellow edges go all the way around.

Update: Got the drop shadow, which is apparently all the rage these days, still have the dorky 2-3 px padding on the main pane. Argh!

Update 2: Maybe not padding at all? layout.php uses a table to arrange the three columns (bah! to tables) so if I knew anything about php, I might be able to appropriately muck with the table style to make the cell borders zero width. Hmm.

Update 3: FINALLY! And all it took was cellspacing=0 in the table declaration in layout.php.

Well, I should be able to resist the temptation to muck around for a little while, now.

Update 4: Well, that didn't last long, as I am now tempted to try my hand at a snazzy title bar graphic. Possibly something involving the Dooce effect. Or maybe that dotty thing she's up to lately.

Everyone seems to use Blogrolling to manage links, so I'm going to jump on the bandwagon and see how I like it there. I have such a small list right now that I'm quite happy to just manage it myself, but I have a feeling it will be growing soon and it would be nice to see at a glance who has new entries. I've also noticed that I am never shown as having new entries on the blogroll over at North Western Winds, so I did a bit of reading and psyched myself up for figuring out xml-rpc, but luckily for me Serendipity has it built it, and even has an option to ping Blogrolling automatically. Well, that was easy.

Serendipity (our blog engine) is turning out really nice. We've been using more of the plugins recently, like comment-spam blocking and now xml-rpc, and it's been really easy. Yay for user-friendliness!

I'm going to be mucking with the layout of the blog today, and probably going to a three-column format so that my link list has better prominence. And room. So if things get really ugly (and I'm sure they will!), I promise they'll get better eventually!

Walter was talking about funny error messages the other day - something about serendipity trackbacks. I'm still trying to figure them out. I'm trying to create a trackback in this entry, and if it works, I'll explain it so that other Serendipity users can do it as well, since the Serendipity website has been down forEVER.

Update: Still not working. I'm getting Matt to update Serendipity tonight.

Update #2: Matt has updated our copy of Serendipity, and suddenly trackbacks work just the way the Google cache of the s9y page says they do. I just make a link to a specific blog entry in my blog entry, and it magically goes out and looks for trackbacks.

Man, did that make me bonkers. I'm going to see if I can do some more, or if that one was all I'm going to get. :\

Matt taught me to use RSS last night. It's pretty neat, but now I wish all my favorite blogs had it. And that Television Without Pity's worked correctly (every time it checks, it downloads everything on the front page to my RSS reader. It's adding up quickly.)

I have put the Syndication applet back in to my Serendipity settings; I took it out before because I didn't know what it did and didn't see the use. Now I see the use, so there it is.

For those who don't know how RSS works, just ask Matt. God knows I can't explain it. ;)

I spent some time cleaning up the html and css in my recipe section last night. It all validates with the W3C now - I checked every single page. I've learned a bit from that CSS book Matt bought me for our anniversary, so I was hoping to get everything to the point where is looks the same an all browsers. Mozilla, Galeon and Safari are exactly the same now, and Opera is 99% the same, at least to the point that's I'm happy enough with the way it looks.

Of course, Internet Exploder still pukes up the CSS. It can't even handle the unordered lists I use to list ingredients and does all kinds of weird indentation. You suck, IE!

The next project is the Cuba pages - both to actually finish the content off and to clean up my html and CSS. I shamelessly stole the look of the page and some of the graphics off my little sister's wedding webpage on The Knot. I wonder if I'll ever learn to do my own graphics instead of just photoshopping things I find with Google Images searches.

I sure do enjoy this stuff. Except, you know, IE.

Maybe I should get even more schooling and learn to be a web designer. Yeah! Way to waste my (not-yet-acquired) master's in physics!

What I don't like is watching IE puke up all of my css even though Mozilla, Galeon, Safari, and Opera all like my handiwork just fine.

Boo to you, Internet Exploder. The W3C likes me at least.

I wish I had more training in the whole web design thing. I really enjoy it. I'm not very good at it (yet?), but I really, really enjoy it. Not so good with the whole "adding content" bit though (as evidenced by the whole recipes project which, yes, sucks in IE). In fact, I got back out of bed (I need to get some sleep!) because I was thinking about webpages and colour schemes and ways I've thought of today to add some fun new fonts to my webpages.

I am a secret font junkie. I have no idea what I'd do with them most of the time, but I saw this and immediately wanted it today. Too bad I'd have to pay for it, and I'm broke because of the Cuba trip and tuition bills. I wonder if I put it on my Christmas list, would someone buy it for me or just laugh at me for having it on there?

Anyway, never having bothered to go through with installing fun new fonts on my Linux machine, I have a new-found freedom with the iBook which I had never really thought about before today. Getting new fonts is dead easy! However, that still doesn't mean you could just stick it on a webpage as is. I imagine hardly anyone's browser knows what Karaoke Superstar is. Anyway, apparently getting these new fonts on the Mac means I can wrangle them into Gimp and make them into graphics which (with transparency) I can stick on my webpages. However, I had to download the new version of Gimp for the laptop (we had 1.something and it was awful compared to 2.something I have on my Linux machine). Anyhoo, adding the fonts seemed to work just fine, though I really have no idea how I did it, and now I can make fun little graphics like this for my webpages. Check out my newest soon-to-be never-finshed project (which, yes, I mostly ripped off from my little sister's wedding webpage. I can't draw, OK?).

Also: I added a ton of new photos. Four whole sets! I was more than a little behind. Somehow I always find time for photos eventually.

So I'm getting used to the new blogging software. As anyone looking at my calendar over the past month can probably tell, I really like the web entry interface better than the old text editor I used for bybloxsom.

One thing that I wish I had enough knowledge to change was the way entries are organized for single days. Sometimes I write followups the earlier entries on the same day, and I'd like the follow-ups to appear below the other entries (in logical reading order, like the two below, where I am first frustrated at debugging and then happy to be done debugging and have a whole bunch of nice shiny new results). I've figured out how to kludge this by just messing with the time stamps, but it's not particularly satisfying, and I lost my fun 00:01 timestamp on the anti-debugging rant. I know it has to do with the overall setup, how everything goes in reverse chronological order, but that's something I'm not particularly fond of anyway in any blog. I hate trying to read archives and having to read from the bottom of the page up. Matt got me started on suburbanbliss.net and I've been reading the archives while home "sick" today (recovering from my all-night code-a-thon). I always lose my spot reading from the bottom up so I finally gave up and read downwards and I'm learning to just accept that things may either make sense later when I read an earlier entry farther down the page, or they may never make sense at all. It's like that for a *lot* of blogs.

BTW, suburbanbliss is wicked funny. I almost wish I had kids to blog about. But I have a thesis, and that's like a child, but with far fewer funny anecdotes and warm fuzzies. Also fewer tantrums, so maybe it's a good thing?