Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Kids Are Strange Animals

Completely out of the blue, Ellis says to Reha:

“It’s OK if you call me ‘cherry blossom.’”

No explanation. No context. No preface.

Just “cherry blossom.”

Whatever, dude.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/28/07 at 12:18 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Tuesday, February 27, 2007

Kundalini Express

A week or so ago, Reha (much beloved spouse of moi) went out and got herself a new job. She has had an interesting career path since she graduated law school. She did a judicial clerkship, worked for a small firm, worked for a *really* large firm and just gave notice at the State’s Attorney General’s office.

Now she’s going to work on the railroad.

(She got a job as an in-house counsel for Union Pacific.)

Which means that if you get drunk, fall down on a set of railroad tracks and get a limb cut off your dumb self when the 5:03 out of Ogden barrels by, you are going to have to deal with her. You are going to lose. Trust me on this. She’s very, very good and probably *way* smarter than the dork lawyer you hired. Why are you even bothering with this frivolous lawsuit anyway? It’s hopeless. I only win arguments with her by breaking down and weeping uncontrollably, and you won’t have that option in court.

Anyway, what’s kind of funny about all this (besides the *endless* sing-song renditions of “you’ll be workin’ on the railroad, all the live long day,” we all pelt her with now) is that men and women have completely different reactions to the announcement. Women ask what you would normally expect when someone tells you they got a new job, i.e., “More money? Better hours? Better work? etc.”

Men all ask some variant of this question (yours truly included): “Will you get to ride in a train engine?” I think Lucas might have even asked if she got to drive one.

There’s just something about trains that appeals to almost all men and boys. (And some women, of course). But I have to say, anytime we see a train, I end up pointing it out, like it’s some kind of indefinable “cool” thing. Weird, huh? Trains are cool. I don’t exactly know why.

She also gets issued a Blackberry, which is probably the most exciting part of the whole gig for her. I think when she had to give up her Blackberry when she went to the AG’s office, she cried a little on the inside. You don’t know about Crackberry addiction until you see first hand a woman dripping wet from just exiting the shower and thumbing through her Blackberry while she tries to towel off with one hand.

Though seriously… don’t you think she should get to ride in an engine? Again, how cool would *that* be? Maybe she could just get me one of those cool black and white striped conductor hats?

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/27/07 at 12:03 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Monday, February 26, 2007

Kids Should Never Be in Charge of Anything

Take a look at this photo, please:

See anything odd about it?

Couple of things have happened here:

If you guessed the last two, why, you get a prize! And now maybe you can tell me why one of my kids decided that my t-shirts were not worthy to be in my drawer anymore.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/26/07 at 10:09 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Things I don't understand Photos Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Friday, February 23, 2007

Mac Geek Discovery

If you use a Mac and use NewsFire to manage your RSS feeds (and why wouldn’t you? It’s awesome!) (although I’m looking into NetNewsWire as well, just for giggles), you can do this kind cool and not a little bit geeky trick.

Surf to a site.

Safari notes that the site has an RSS feed. (it has a big ol’ blue RSS thing on the right side of the address bar)

Click on the RSS button thing in the far right of the address bar. The address changes to the RSS feed address. Something about atom or rss 2.0, or index.xml, most likely.

Highlight the feed address and the go to the dusty and NEVER REALLY USED “Services” menu under application name menu. Smack the “Add Feed to NewsFire” item and it automagically adds the feed to your NewsFire list o’ goodies.

Kind of cool.

Here’s a screen shot of me adding Heather Powazek Champ’s excellent site to my feeds in NewsFire.

NewsFire_Feed_Services-menu.jpg

The Services menu… I’ll always love you, even if no one else on the planet does.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/23/07 at 01:11 PM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Photos Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

Dear Microsoft

Gotta say this right up front:

Microsoft, I loathe you.

Apparently my site looks like ass in IE 7. If you are visiting my site using IE 7… I apologize and am so sorry. I’ll fix it this weekend. There is a whole little world/column o’ stuff over on the left side of the page that you can’t see. Again, my apologies and now I’d like to get back to ranting. Thx!

OK, look I’m humble enough to realize that my layout might suck and it actually may be my CSS coding problem and have nothing to do with the way IE interprets the code. Could be. I’ve been wrong plenty of times in my life. Just ask the kids about the time with the mangoes and the chocolate pasta. Plus, I know that I can be dense and not figure things out properly the first time. Or even the fifth.

But I’m also pretty sure that my CSS is vanilla and not awe inspiring or really even all that tricky. Three columns, header and footer. Nothing really goofy about it. There is an IE 6 “fix” in there, so who knows… And I can see from the apache logs that the stuff that is supposed to load over there on the left is loading from the server, but IE 7 ain’t rendering it. It’s also there when one does a “View Source” on the page.

I’m also sure that these Microsoft people are the same people who broke the box model way back with IE 5.5 and thus begat the IE 5 “box model” hack.

Now I’m all sweaty and grunting and bugged.

And I had a really funny story to tell, too. It was all about me and the time I almost got killed by a West Valley City, UT cop. An Arby’s sandwich figures prominently in the story so you know it will be good. But I can’t get to “the funny place” right now.

This is me, rolling my eyes, knowing that I have zero time to screw around with this crap right now. Or tomorrow.

grumble. grumble. grumble.

Jon scribbled this mess on 02/23/07 at 12:04 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post Rants. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link
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