They Love Me!
01.May.06
4 Comments
It seems my spin on the Yahoo! beta was a hit. What do you think?
The original post here.
The one that looks similar.
Now granted, my post was (as mentioned) a derivative of several others. But I fleshed ‘em out a bit and (hopefully) made it a bit easier to try. I think I’m flattered, but I do wish if my text is to be copied and pasted that I’d get a source or attribution link!
This Creative Commons link is on every page (over there on the right).
Personal Stuff
23.Apr.06
One Comment
The Personal Blog is up and running. Still a bit of a work in progress, but functional enough for now.
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Widgets Everywhere - WordPress has ‘em too
23.Apr.06
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Based on some feedback, it seems like maybe I should move the more family oriented (aka personal) posts to another blog. I started working on that yesterday. My first big challenge was deciding on a theme and, as I tried different themes, keeping the information in the sidebar consistent. Then it dawned on me…
WordPress supports widgets now! This is oldish news, but I’d not really paid much attention at the time it was announced. So why does this matter? Well, if a theme is “widget-enabled” then it is simple/easy to manage all the side bar content from the blog’s admin control panel. No need to edit good ol’ sidebar.php from theme to theme to keep them all in sync and looking similar. Instead, just set it once and relax.
Well, relax once the theme’s are actually widget enabled… As this is new, there’s movement towards that end, but some designers probably have no intent to visiting old themes just to add this capability. Which is fine really. Turns out it is pretty easy to do it on your own.
And that’s what I worked on yesterday. Found a few themes I liked, so I widget enabled them and then did the usual tweaking of the style sheets to get the look and feel I am after. With luck, the other blog will be announced soon.
Remind me that I’m done with Sprint PCS
10.Apr.06
5 Comments
Grrr.. I’m so frustrated right now I can barely see straight. And I’m going to attempt to explain why I’m distraught. First the short version: A large company lied to me. Twice. One lie was, no way to not say it, intentional. The other more a “lie of omission” as several customer service reps (CSRs) neglected to mention some rather important details.
So here’s how this all shakes out. Last summer we opted to add a phone to my plan for the daughter. This took two phone calls — one call for me to gather information and one call to actually do it. I spoke with two different people. Now, I had fulfilled my contract obligation already and asked, during both calls, if this was going to get me stuck with yet another 2 year obligation. “Oh no, sir.” Ok then. Clarification time and again, both calls, I learned that while my phone wouldn’t be under obligation, the daughter’s phone would have a 2 year deal on it. Ok, fair enough and I can deal with that.
A Mostly Geekless Kind of Day
09.Apr.06
3 Comments
Nice pleasant day today. Lots of family stuff and much relaxing. So no real useful tech things today. This is a “me me me” kinda post. 
[tip - you can subscribe to just the "Tech" categories if this stuff makes your eyes bleed.]
Slept in today. Didn’t roll out of bed until 7am (*gasp*). Wife is picking up some extra money by doing some painting, so she headed over to the client’s home (which is empty) to get going on that. That left me home with the youngest and the oldest as our middle spent the night at a friends. I worked a bit (mostly email and paper shuffling), spent some time in the garage doing a little cleanup and then played a bit of WoW and Vanguard. Also did some breakfast stuff and generally got the kids all moving.
Once the wife got home, we lost our middle son again (he went Geocaching with a friend’s family) so we grabbed a neighbor kid and headed south to Elizabeth and the Big R store. Time to inspect the baby ducks, geese and chickens! Fun stuff and the kids always seem to enjoy it.
From there, we headed to rural Franktown where the daughter’s (current) best friend lives. That friend is 4-H and, with her sister, acquired a couple piglets yesterday. Since we were doing the rural thing, we had to go inspect the piglets and then visit with their 3 horses. The parents there are super nice people and very easy to visit with. We stayed a bit longer than planned, but it was a good time. While there we swung by a couple properties that are for sale… Do we like our “big” house on a small’ish lot in town, or do we want 10 acres but with an older smaller home? Things to ponder over the coming year… and things we’ve been pondering for the last decade it seems. Ever since we moved away from Colman, SD (pop. 480).
Got home and the wife and I had a “Date” — aka, we went grocery shopping with no kids! Such simple pleasures. While out, I finally remembered to buy an innertube for the daughter’s bike.
Supper was good. The carnivores all had hamburgers. We had picked up some “Amy’s Kitchen Veggie Burgers” for our vegetarian son. They looked good so I went that route as well. I enjoyed mine very much. He didn’t. Ah well…
After supper we all went for a nice long walk. Well, wife and I walked. 2 rolled on scooters and middle son broke out the rollerblades. We walk a lot now that the weather is warming up. Daddy is concerned about his midsection… *cough*.
After the walk I fixed the daughter’s tire and did a little maintenance on her bike. Got my bike down and did some maintenance on it too. Got middle son’s bike out and tweaked a bit there as well. Well hell, that meant we had to go for a bike ride and try ‘em all out! So we did. And now we’re done. And I’m all exercised out for the day.
Now I’ll publish this self-absorbent little essay and go play a little bit of vanguard or world of warcraft. Cheers!
