Blogging

Post Weirdness

rmiles7721April 25, 2007Blogging, Technology

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but each of my posts going down the main page is progressively smaller and smaller. I am using tables, but I have my MTEntries stuff INSIDE each table, so it shouldn’t be duplicating those. I may end of switching back to a purely CSS driven page after all. I am just not that good at coding it. It worked fine on my test site, but here it is starting to look extremely weird.

I guess I need to break out that CSS book and take a look at it or something. I have a couple of computers to look at today and some posting to do, as well as the fact that I want to go outside (imagine!) and work in the garden but maybe this evening I can fix it up. It only took me a couple of hours of fiddling to actually get the comment posting fixed, so maybe it won’t take too long to get this right as well.

Day Off

rmiles7721April 22, 20073Blogging, Parenting/Family

This has probably been the least amount I have posted in months. I worked for awhile on my template, moving the sidebar to the right hand side of the page, which was more of a pain in the ass than it would seem.

I’ve found that using the divs in CSS is screwy in some browsers. Most of the templates that I have used throw the sidebar to the bottom of the page in IE 6, or if the person is using a low screen resolution although the work fin in Firefox and IE 7. I set the new page up using hard-coded tables so that they would display the way I want them to. I’m not very good with tables so it took awhile.

I’ve also tweaked a bunch of the javascript that I use on the site thanks to the help of Eric. I have the comments pop-up working correctly, as well as a live preview of each comment and when you post the comment it throws you back to the listing. If you commented here when I was using the popups you know that once you hit “Post” it would take you to the individual entry page in a little 500×400 window which looked really stupid.

Anyway, I decided to just take the day off from blogging. I haven’t even read or answered any comments. I may get the chance tomorrow afternoon, otherwise I am off Tuesday and Wednesday and will get around to everyone’s comments and links then.

Pete hasn’t been feeling very well today, so we just had kind of a low key evening with the kids as well.

Couldn’t let the day go by without at least posting once, nothing major, just wanted to say hello before I went to bed.

Hello.

Another Book Meme

rmiles7721April 19, 2007Blogging, Entertainment

Valkyrie Angel brought this meme up in the comments to one of my other posts, I guess she is participating right now and is trying to get readers to participate at well, so I am recycling this post from March of this year since I am too lazy and it was so recent that nothing has changed.

Another book meme thanks to Jenn at Everyday Randomness. This one is even bigger than the sci-fi meme I did recently.

Look at the list of (100) books below.
Bold the ones you’ve read.
Italicize the ones you want to read.
leave blank the ones that you aren’t interested in.
Movies don’t count.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

I’m not going to italicize any of them because I am not adverse to reading just about anything that might cross my lap. Personally I think that the bible should not be in the list, but to each his own. I have read several different versions of it, so I did bold it.

New Site Design

rmiles7721April 17, 20078Blogging, Technology

Here’s what the new site design is going to look like once I finally get all of the bugs out. Let me know what you think.

desktop0417.jpg

Site Design

rmiles7721April 17, 20075Blogging, Technology

I am getting a new template ready for the site as I have been fairly unhappy with my design for quite some time. It is not 100% complete as it is from a normal web page template, and I am having to code it to work with my blog platform, but I would like some feedback if possible. It is currently located at http://www.shadowscope.com/gothtest/testindex.php. Don’t leave any comments there as I have only gotten started on the main index page thus far, but any feedback would be appreciated.

Lola With Ebola

rmiles7721April 16, 2007Blogging, Entertainment

Back when I was nine or ten (before I knew any better) I used to like Barry Manilow. OK, so the secret’s out now. I have just become a social pariah among my peers. Anyway, the shadowscope mom used to love Barry Manilow, so I got to listen to quite a bit of it and I liked him. I think at that point in my life he reminded me of Gene Wilder, who I loved as a comedian. I don’t know why. I just did.

Mr Fabulous has a stunning re-write of Copacabana over at his site. In order to get the full hilarious effect of the song though, make sure that you listen to the audio portion at the end of the post. Oh, and go vote for him as funniest blogger at the Blogger’s Choice awards (it’s linked in the post).


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Thank God It’s Friday (Even though it’s not)

rmiles7721April 15, 20079Blogging

This is my Friday, thank goodness. I’ve worked about 60 hours over the last five days once you figure in the time I’ve also spent at every single shift change this week. I am not too particularly happy about that but it had to be done. Generally Sunday is my longest day of the week and when you add in the fact that I am also off tomorrow, I will be lucky if I only work 15 hours today.

I almost overslept, not getting up until five this morning (that’s late for me). I was going to spend some time writing something worthwhile this morning, but why mess up a perfectly good first thing in the morning bitch-fest with legibility and things that make sense?

I will have a bit of time tomorrow so want to catch up with writing about that trip along with a few other items as well. Maybe I will get to sleep in the next couple of days.

I still haven’t heard anything from my bosses about that district position coming open, but the new division manager is now aware that I want it, so I will just have to see how it goes this week. They may just transfer a guy back in who has been working in Alabama for the last couple of months. I lateral move means that they don’t have to offer it to the next person in the list and certainly wouldn’t be the first time I have seen them fill a position with a piece of crap, nor will it be the last.

I did finally break into the bottle of Maker’s Mark yesterday that Zonker brought over a couple of weeks ago. Damn good stuff actually. Had myself a few sips and immediately napped. Damn good stuff.

That’s about it for this morning. My brain is moving almost as slowly as my body today.

Goals Meme

rmiles7721April 11, 20072Blogging, Uncategorized

I was tagged for this meme several days ago and just had several other things that needed doing, and then once I started writing completely skipped it. Vicezilla tagged me with this earlier in the week and I apologize for being remiss on getting it posted but here it is.

The premise of the “Gotta Get Goals” meme is to post 5-10 of your most over-the-top goals that you want to accomplish before leaving the earth. I’m not tagging anyone with this, but if you want to participate, just send me a trackback or link to my post.

As Vicezilla did, when I first started writing this I thought it would be easy but it’s not. For the last twenty years I have basically lived, or rather, made my living for my children as I will for the next twenty or so and as a result some of my goals are very selfish.

1. I want to take five or ten years and just travel the world. Heck, I could take ten years just to travel to all of the places that I have been or want to go in the U.S. I want to go to Hawaii and Scotland. I want to go check out Europe before it is overtaken entirely by the Middle Eastern societies. Europeans already dislike Americans anyway and it’s not going to get any better. I want to go to Tahiti and Australia. I want to see Japan. I even want to go hang out in the Great White North and have some brews with Bob and Doug, eh.

2. I don’t want to be filthy stinking rich, although that would be nice. I would like to not ever have to worry about finances or what I am spending this week and how it’s going to effect paying my bills next month. I suppose though if I were filthy stinking rich that would help along #1.

3. I want to be a writer. A REAL writer. I consider my brother a writer but I don’t know if I have the stick-with-it or even the ability to accomplish this. I really admire some of the bloggers that I read that just sock ’em dead with their posts. I read them and think “damn, I wish I could do that”.

4. I want to quit smoking. This is at times much more attainable than the other ones and at the same time just as far-fetched. I want to be able to run around and play with my children’s children’s children. My wife’s parents are both dead partially as a result of smoking and my father is the first male on his side of the family to live past 50 and I figure that is only because of the advances in medicine and awareness that we have made over the last 50 years.

5. I want to have a huge honking penis…Fucking Ron Jeremy huge…So that I can stand there and go Aaarrgghh like a pirate over my victim…Actually I couldn’t think of anything else but the mood around here has gotten much to somber and I had to lighten it up a bit. No, really. I’m fine with my teeny tiny white man penis…

…most of the time.

….no really.

Google Searches…

rmiles7721April 9, 2007Blogging, Technology

I found this somewhat interesting. I occasionally track my traffic (although not as much as those guys at iTalktoomuch think) and found this stuff out tonight.

I am #1 in searches for the blogger’s choice Awards right now and #3 for Youtube Porn. I am also #14 on Yahoo for Watch Deleted Youtube Videos. So what’s it all mean? Not a damn thing. I just found it interesting. Unless you are into SEO and rankings and all of that junk none of it means anything. It does to me obviously because I have been making a little bit of money off of the site, so getting hits from Google on some of my older posts is a good deal. I have also found that occasionally I get a new reader or two as well, which is particularly nice.


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Since it’s Still Easter…

rmiles7721April 8, 2007Blogging

…for at least another 43 minutes anyway. Thanks to that online Porn Star Chickie Carmarthen I found a new site to start visiting. It’s called “Emails from Jesus” and it’s pretty damned funny. You can also email Satan if you have pertinent questions such as whether pissing on your feet gets rid of athletes foot or not.