Archive for August, 2003
Tuesday, August 26th, 2003
I’m going to a football game. We’re going to see University of Florida play San Jose State University in Gainesville. I am so excited. This will be my 2nd UF game and my 2nd big football game. My sister-in-law works at UF (this is her second year) so she is able to get us tickets. My first game was last year’s game against Auburn. Wow it was fun. I just about lost my voice because I cheered on both teams! LOL! I’m so ready for football season to start and this is the perfect way to get back into it. So we’ll be out this weekend partying. Don’t expect much communication from me. 
Posted in The Inner Me | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 25th, 2003
Mozilla Firebird has become my new favorite toy. It is the new lightweight browser. It is similar to Netscape and Mozilla 1.4 but without all the extra junk that no one really needs. Add in the PNH Developer Toolbar and the Web Developer’s Toolbar, you’ve got a fabulous utility for developing websites. These two toolbars come with many of the same features, but each has it’s own unique tools as well. One tool I especially like is the ability to remove or disable style sheets. Yes, you can verify that your pages look ok even with the stylesheets removed. The Web Developer’s Toolbar, comes with the capabilities to resize the browser window. It has standard 800×600 and 1024×768 or you can set a custom size.
Viewing the stylesheets or the page source, opens it up in a new tab. If you select to view the stylesheets, it pulls them straight from the page and displays them all. Above each one will show the url of that stylesheet. A very handy tool.
Both toolbars include extensive validation links, which also open in a new tab. Very convenient. I also like the outline features, which allow you to outline block level elements or table elements, so you can view placement. If you’d like to see how your page looks without the images, disable them or remove them, just like the stylesheets.
The PNH toolbar also includes an extensive list of links for most of the standards documentation…such as W3C’s docs for HTML, CSS, XHTML and DOM specifications. All of this right at the click of your mouse…what more could you need.
Posted in Geekery | 2 Comments »
Saturday, August 23rd, 2003
I’ve picked up Eric Meyer’s Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide. Hopefully this will be a handy reference tool. I already had the pocket reference but this has more detailed information so I’m hoping it will be of some use while trying to get my site up to par with accessibility and validation.
I read several of the articles he’s written at his website, and by viewing others’ style sheets, I’ve picked up a lot on using style sheets effectively. Also on how to use them so that if stylesheets are turned off, the pages still look well built. I hope to redesign this site using the new tips and tricks I’ve learned. I’d like a site that is accessible, validates, is cross-browser compatible and even looks good if someone ever decides to print one of my entries.
Posted in All Work and No Play | 1 Comment »
Friday, August 22nd, 2003
There will be no reminiscing for me. No remembering the good ole days. Unfortunately I did not attend my high school reunion. Battling a bad chest, sinus cold is no fun and I have spent the entire day in bed. My husband, elsewhere, is battling the effects of the several worms and viruses hitting the college campuses. He is the one in charge of email and viruses at the university where he works, so he has been one busy man this week. It was just a case of bad timing. I’m actually not very disappointed that I missed it. It would have been nice to see what everyone was up to, but as I mentioned before, there so many of us and I only knew a handful…and most of them were just classmates, not close friends. So I doubt I missed much.
My husband and I plan to attend in 10 years for the 20th. Of course, that’s as long as the timing isn’t bad like it was this time. In the meantime we will continue to live our lives. Maybe I’ll pull out the old video memories and do my own reminiscing.
Posted in The Inner Me | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, August 20th, 2003
The time has come for me to reminisce. To look back on days gone by. To savor my youth. I will be attending my high school reunion on Friday. At $64 a head, they had better have some decent stuff. And that is only for 3 hours on Friday. Saturday’s 5-hour event is like $80+. Of course you get a discount for attending both days, but we aren’t. It’s just too expensive and my husband doesn’t want to dress up, haha! Saturday includes a dinner and dance at a nice hotel (Wyndham). Friday night’s festivities will take place at XS, which is supposed to be some happening place for dining and entertainment, so I guess we’ll get dinner there. I’ve never been there so I have no idea. This is all happening in Orlando, FL so now you know why it’s slightly pricey. I just hope the music is reminiscent of our high school days.
It will be interesting to see what has become of my old classmates, even though I probably won’t remember a majority of them. There were 719 in my graduating class so I only got to know a handful of them. I hope I get to see old friends and it isn’t just a bunch of strangers. I’ve lost touch with my best friend from high school and last I heard, the reunion committee couldn’t get in touch with her either, so I may not get to see her. I’m crossing my fingers that another good friend of mine shows up. I lost touch with him a few years after we graduated. Found him again several years later, then lost touch again. His name wasn’t on the list of unlocated classmates, so maybe I’ll be lucky and run into him again. He was like a brother to me in high school. And Jennifer, if you are reading this…you better be there too!
You guessed it. It’s been 10 years since I graduated high school…gosh how time has flown. So many things have happened in those 10 years…some horrible, some wonderful. Fortunately the wonderful stand out over the bad.
You know…it’s too bad we can’t combine reunions for several different years. Then I could see my old friends who graduated the year before me and have ‘N Sync perform. (Joey Fatone graduated 2 years after me) I think that is the biggest sadness of all this. Several of my close friends from HS graduated the year before me. It would be great to see them again.
I’ll let you know how it went sometime next week.
Posted in The Inner Me | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, August 19th, 2003
I got an email today from a writer for my local paper. She stumbled across my site and noticed that I had participated in the blogathon. She wants to do a feature article on blogging and is trying to gather info on local bloggers. I think it’s great. I answered her questions as best I could and did try to promote BookCrossing, so maybe that will also catch her interest. I look forward to seeing what she writes on the subject of blogging in my local area.
Posted in The Inner Me | 3 Comments »
Friday, August 15th, 2003
Yep…I kept reading and finished reading Harry Potter’s 5th year adventures. Everyone was right…it got better. I really liked the end…even though there were parts that I didn’t like. I’m ready to read about Year 6…I want to know if the threat worked. I want to know his O.W.L. scores.
There are a lot of questions…of course, but I guess I’ll just have to wait patiently for the next installment to get my answers. Yes, I really liked this book. It explained a lot, finally, so many things fell into place and made sense. Yeah! I love when books do that.
Posted in The Inner Me | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 13th, 2003
I first read about Attribute Selectors in a sample chapter of a book on CSS. Then I did a search on google to read more about it. What a great concept this is, if only it was supported by the browsers. Ok, I’m not 100% that it isn’t supported. The only documentation I can find is old. I think it was part of CSS2 which came out before IE6, but what I’ve read says that only Opera and certain builds of Mozilla are the only ones that support this fabulous trick.
It would basically mean you could use input[type=”text”] {color: red;} for example instead of assigning a class to every input field on a form. Much easier and it takes care of the pesky radio button, that forces you to not do input{border: 1px solid #000;} because then it puts an obnoxious circle around the radio button, instead of bordering the button like the rest of the form fields.
Has anyone tried to use this lately with IE? I’m leaning toward the sad fact that it won’t work, but as I mentioned above…I haven’t yet tried it.
Posted in All Work and No Play | 1 Comment »
Monday, August 11th, 2003
I just have to write that I’m utterly pissed off with Year 5. Totally….can’t somebody do something about that evil Umbridge woman? My god! I hate to say it, but it pains me to continue reading about all the horrors at Hogwarts. Aaaagggghhhh!
Someone please tell me things will turn around.
Posted in The Inner Me | 5 Comments »
Friday, August 8th, 2003
I just picked up AMC again after a while of not watching. I really like this show and I’m so glad it comes on at 7pm on SoapNet. So I saw it about a week ago and Erica and Jack were having their rehearsal.
The next time I watch, it’s the day after. Erica is trying to get Bianca to tell her what is going on. I have a few questions. 1. Does Erica know what happened? It seemed like she did and was trying to get Bianca to admit it. And what is with the preview I saw that showed Bianca calling Maggie her girlfriend? Was this just to get a rise from Lena?
So on another note…whatever happened to Carlos? Now it is some other guy? That I can’t stand…he has slime written all over him! I hope Greenlee doesn’t end up with him. Yuck!
Posted in The Inner Me | No Comments »
Thursday, August 7th, 2003
My SIL will be here this weekend, so I may not be online very much. Depends on what we plan to do. Not sure yet. Usually we become vegetables while she’s here and just sit around and watch movies or the Travel Channel. LOL! I hope we do a little more this time. But she has a meeting tomorrow morning and I don’t know how long it will last. Could be all morning.
I hope to get some reading done and possibly get my designs back up. I keep meaning to do it, it’s ready, I just have to upload. But something always interupts me and I haven’t got around to it. And I still plan on expanding my booklist section, but I want a separate design for it. I’m just not exactly sure how I want it yet. I also need to do some tweaking of my site…I am currently using template modules for my includes, but I’ve come across some instances where I need to have index templates so I can use php includes. So I have to make those changes.
And, [heavy sigh], I have to work on my co-workers site, which I got an awesome graphic for via Blog Barter. I hope I can start working on that soon as well. I have an idea for it…simple yet enough for him to start out with.
Posted in The Inner Me | No Comments »
Wednesday, August 6th, 2003
Ok, I have a question. How many of you that work, work in a truly paperless office? My office has brought up the subject again. I don’t think it will happen for us…too many issues that will come up. But I’m curious as to how your system runs. I guess I need to do some research on google or something to see what I can find. I’m curious as to the type of work your office does and how it does it paperless.
Our office sends tons of letters, runs tons of summaries that are used constantly and collects information into a file based system. Many of our documents could be processed electronically, but there are still some bumps that we probably could not get out of…such as some of our letters. We also try to communicate with our claimants on a personal level and I’m finding it hard to see how that would be without a letter. But anyway. if your place of employment operates on even a small level paperless, I want the details.
I’m one of only 2 technical people in our office so it would fall on our shoulders to implement a way to handle the change.
Posted in All Work and No Play | 4 Comments »
Monday, August 4th, 2003
We’re back from our trip to Florida. We had a pretty good time. I got to visit with my mother, which was an unexpected surprise… I didn’t know if she would still be down there. She went for about a week to visit her parents, but I didn’t know when she was going back home.
We also played disc golf on a course in Gainesville. New course, well new for us…much nicer than the one we have here…more trees which made it cooler (more shade) and more challenging since there were more obstacles. It was fun. I picked up three books that I’m borrowing from my MIL, of course. Every time I go down I find at least one book I have to borrow. Go figure.
The drive home was long, because it pretty much rained the entire drive. And at one point we were stuck behind a semi that was spraying even more water on the windshield. But on the way down we drove through Stacey’s town. I didn’t see the hospital, but I did think of you while we passed through…nice town from what I saw. Of course it was about 10:30 or 11pm so I couldn’t really see much.
Posted in The Inner Me | 6 Comments »
