- What holiday or holidays do you celebrate this time of year? – Define “celebrate.”
- What was the best gift you have ever received? – Define “best.” Oh, okay. I don’t have a “Best. Christmas. Gift. Ever.” for you, I’m afraid. I’m happy to get anything at all, really. I like to think that’s a good thing, because the minute I start ranking my Christmas input is the minute I start taking the “holiday” way, way too seriously.
- What was the worst gift you’ve ever given? – The year Titanic came out, because of how much Wendi seemed to enjoy the film in the theater I decided to get her the two-tape widescreen set. She unwrapped it, frowned at me and said, “What did you get me this for?” Oh well.
- Where will you be celebrating the holidays? Are you hosting? Going away? – Home. No. No.
- If you could spend the holidays with someone who isn’t around, who would it be with? Why? – Grandma Hjordis. I miss her more than any other family member, dead or alive, with the possible exception of Frederick, who Hjordis left this mortal plane to rejoin. If you believe in that sort of thing, that is. Ah, other than that, I’d love to have my friends around me. That’s right, all of them. Dammit.
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Dear Santa, please bring me five questions.
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Armwrestling Javascript for fun.
It’s a sad fact that I spend more time listening to music under Windows (and therefore Winamp) than I do on the Linux box at work that used to feed the “Current Music” feature on this page. The time came for a change. The desire to show off my eclectic music collection was unfulfilled, and I had to do something about it!
I found several options, such as DoSomething or finding a way to shim SpyAmp into the site, but I finally settled on BlogAmp. It worked right out of the box, but I wasn’t quite happy. If you look at the BlogAmp site you can see that its music display is quite cool, including clever hover boxes containing the extra data. The default look is just a text dump of title, bitrate and played-time data. Bah!
While poking around I came across references to the acronym tag in HTML, a tag I just now used quite shamelessly to show how it works. It occurred to me… eventually… that I could use it to show the data I wanted in a tooltip.
It sounds easy enough, but I’ve also never dabbled in Javascript before. Learning how to script the output I wanted took the better part of two more hours. (Sad, I know.) At least an hour was spent just looking for a premade function that would convert the raw number of seconds provided by BlogAmp into a nice minutes:seconds display. In the end I just went looking for math syntax references and brute-forced the display.
The end result sits near the end of the left-side column: a list of played songs that you can mouse-over to find out how long the track is and when I listened to it. Hooray, or something.
Do you want to know the really sad part? Of course you do. The really sad part is that I sat down four or five hours ago with the intention of ripping some Ogg Vorbis tracks. So far I haven’t so much as touched CDEX tonight.
Oh well. Tomorrow is another day. I did learn stuff, and I did achieve the results I wanted from BlogAmp. Yay!
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I refer you to my referrers
Via J : Da Blog I found a nifty little toy that provides a real-time listing of referrer information about visitors to this journal. (I will probably expand this feature to the rest of the site… eventually.)
And no, before you ask, I don’t have too much time on my hands.
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I’m kidding. I’d never vote for Bush.
Thank you, Doyce, for adding some needed joyful satire to my otherwise-drab day.
 
I’ll take either one of these, though the “Evildoer” is probably more appropriate… -
Please Drive Carefully… Dammit.
The rainy season has arrived, better late than never. And so one of Portland’s annual traditions is revived. No, I’m not talking about the Xmas light show at PIR. I’m talking about thousands of drivers remembering how to get around on wet pavement.
Case in point: Schmuck in a white Ford Taurus wagon decides at the very last instant that the exit they’re passing is the one they absolutely must take, and so they swerve in front of a Volvo sedan. The sedan’s driver honks and hits the brakes all at once. The Taurus’ driver is in the midst of correcting from the swerve, panicks at the sound of the horn and overcorrects. Tires squeal as the wagon does a sliding 180 down forty feet of offramp and ends up facing the wrong way partway up the embankment.
Thankfully, nobody was hurt, and traffic resumed its regular 9am pace within a couple of minutes. All of this took place along that stretch of I-5 northbound that crosses under the Ross Island bridge just as I was about to hike down to Moody on my way to work.
C’mon, folks. This happens every year. Cutting people off because you’re missing your exit is one thing, but when it’s raining you simply must be more careful. Try keeping the phrase “screaming death at sixty miles per hour” firmly in your mind as you make your way around the city. Thank you.
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Laid out all pretty-like.
This website has always “kind of” worked for small displays, but not really. Upon firing up one of the Compaq WinXP machines and browsing to greyduck.net, I was appalled at the overlapping text and general cruddiness. Time to take action, it was.
An hour, several false starts and some Googling later, we now have a fully functional new layout engine. What’s that? You say it looks almost exactly the same? Good. That means you don’t notice anything broken, and that’s the best news I could get.
The bulk of what works about the new stylesheet rig comes from saila.com’s CSS Layouts page. If you dabble in CSS at all, I recommend taking a peek.
Oh, and hey:
CSS Layouts – saila.com
