schussat

Congratulations to everybody involved in this! What a big step -- and the new avatar pics are a nice touch of class, too. -Alan

Just in case you didn't have anything interesting going on tonight, here's a little bit of time trivia: At a minute past midnight tonight, the date will read: 00:01/02/03/04. I just thought that was cool. Feel free to go back about your business now. -Alan

Thanks for the review, Darqflare. One of the things that seems most daunting about a little player like this is the task of converting all my music. So, I wonder if you might comment on a couple more things: How do you convert, transfer and organize the music? Do you like the software on the PC side of things? And, just how many songs can you fit in 20GB? Thanks! -Alan

Congratulations!

Hi Jim- Thanks for the feedback! After tinkering with everything for the past hour or so, I figured out a little more about how positioning works, and I think I have most of my issues solved. Now I need to go back in and clean out the stuff I'm no longer using, so that the style sheet and html will be just a bit more readable. But as of right now, I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out.

The past few days I have really been enjoying playing with Textpattern, a new weblog/cms application. Textpattern is slick, and has finally inspired me to redesign my weblog a bit -- it's been a long time! Now that I've thoroughly hacked up the style sheet that came with textpattern, I've become a bit googly-eyed from all the divs and ids. So I'm turning to the Family for some suggestions. I have a design that I like quite a bit, but since I've always been rather hamfisted with the style sheets, it's pretty kludgy. It has three main issues: With a large browser window, the pencil image gets a little orphaned -- it's statically positioned to the upper left. Is there a way to stick it to the corner of the center column? My other two issues are with the right-hand column and have to do with window size as well: Can I align the column to stay next to the center column (so that in a large window, it's not orphaned like the above graphic)? And, with a very narrow browser window, the right-hand column bumps the main (center-column) text way down. The mocked up textpattern page is at schussman.com/textpattern. Can any of you CSS masters give me a few pointers?

One more that I came across today: stock.xchng.

So, I saw the ad again last night, sitting on the sofa with my wife. When those little rats sing "They got a pepper bar!" I just lost it. My wife, of course, thinks I've gone stark raving bonkers, but that one line still sends me right over the edge. I cannot control it; I'm giggling right now. I think the last ad I enjoyed so much for its bold non-sequiters is the Jack in the Box ad that lampooned big trucks: A hopelessly over-designed pickup truck is squealing around in the mud with slow-mo rain falling all around it, and Little Bo-Peep is standing there with a lamb in her arms, and Jack comes running (in slow-mo again) along with a hard-hat on, to save her. Brilliant.

Ah, yeah, that's a, uh, different family altogether, I think.

I sort of like the weird rat-things. It's kind of like stream-of-conscious 80s rock, somehow. Just weird enough to get my attention, but not weird enough to really freak me out. And hey, if it's not Jared From Subway, I'm all for it!

Have you checked out istockphoto? Seems they may be just what you're looking for. -Alan

Papachen, remind me not to borrow your laptop. Ever.

Here's my home workspace. Ever since going wireless, I just can't stand working in the home office anymore. If I remember to bring the camera to work this week, I'll post a pic of the disaster that is my desk. Edit: Per discussions about bandwidth, I decided to upload and post my photo via attachment.

In honor of Mitch's return, a verse from Chuck Brodsky's "Food Pun Song:" Hey, I'll be here all week. Welcome back Mitch! -Alan

Wow, it's like the godaddy-TotalChoice club in here. Well, add me to the list -- godaddy has always treated me right. -Alan

I agree with what others have said regarding many of the pages being pretty busy. The top-level TCH page has a long left-hand column with lots of text that looks like it's linked (but isn't), plus a right-hand menu and the middle column. Now, TCH has a lot to legitimately blow its own horn about, so I am entirely sympathetic to the desire to put as much of that as possible on the front page -- but there has to be a way to re-balance the presentation. This is tough, because TCH also has lots of separate pages, and as VI mentioned, it's easy to get lost or not feel like you're finding the right page (in my case, looking for info on changing the expiration date of the credit card I use for monthly payments, I made a few wrong links and became uncertain that the information I was looking for even existed! I eventually found the FAQs and then did okay, but it was a bit daunting to get there.). So, there's definitely a dilemma: The front page is really busy, but simply moving some of that material to sub-pages won't necessarily help, because there are already a lot of those. Solving that is a pretty hard-core redesign, it would appear. Now, plenty of us have been able to navigate our way to what we need, so I don't think I would vote for a redesign being absolutely necessary; I certainly wouldn't say that the "current site is awful," but it definitely has some problematic aspects -- fixing these would be a definite improvement. But hey, with a user community like this, you're bound to get lots of feedback on every draft (eh, for good or ill! ). -Alan

Hi Raul- I use bloglines, which is a free web-based aggregator service. I like being able to get my feeds from any location, so bloglines works great. -Alan

I guess I should have qualified that a bit: It did pick up a couple of my extensions, but wouldn't let me re-enable a couple of others -- so, it's a bit sticky in that area. Otherwise though, it's smooth sailing. Thanks for the thunderbird suggestions, !!blue and Jim. If I ever finish with my grant proposals this week (aaaugh, it's like poking myself in the eyes with sticks -- sticks that, per the grant requirements, I don't even own!), I'll give thunderbird a try. -Alan

I'm running firefox now, and I'm very happy with it. After disabling extensions in firebird, and then loading firefox, the new browser picked up everything else in my profile perfectly. Firefox is zippier, and the file size is smaller (at least the linux binary), to boot! A happy web surfer am I. Speaking of mozilla projects, is anybody out there using Thunderbird? I've been running evolution for so long that I'm a little daunted with the prospect of moving. However, since I'm not using evo's calendar much anymore, I have less vested interest in the whole gigantic package. -Alan

Wow, looks like something right out of Akira. $500,000? Hey, at least shipping is free! -Alan

Metallica? Heck, Gibralter doesn't have as much rock as TCH! You guys rule. -Alan

Yeah, me too -- only a few have trickled my way, but it was into an .edu domain. Either way, it has my department's IT person in quite a huff. (Admittedly, that's not hard to do, although I can't always blame her. I had a hard enough time keeping systems running smoothly at a small non-profit, so I can imagine what it's like to herd a building full of academics around...) -Alan

Slashdot is reporting this morning that mydoom is a DDoS attack on SCO. Yow. I received just two of them yesterday on my academic account, but none on my other accounts -- maybe the university has blocked this one here. -Alan

Test sent to support at 10:35 MST; autoresponder replied immediately, and Sujit's response reached me at 10:39.

Boxfire- I note that your rewriterule >RewriteRule ^index\.php$ /columns/%1? [L] Looks almost like an inverse of Mike's: >RewriteRule ^content-cat-([0-9]*).html modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=$1 RewriteRule ^content-([0-9]*).html modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=$1 RewriteRule ^content.html modules.php?name=Content That is, the search engine-friendly part of the rewritten URL looks like it comes first in Mike's rules, followed by the dynamic (php in this case) part of the URL. So, what happens if you switch the order, to something like >RewriteRule ^/columns/%1 index\.php? -Alan