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Everyone in the department gets to figure out if/how/where they're Milton'd to, and all sorts of stuff.
I think a flowchart nearly one year in the making (and six months overdue) will be revealed to show us where our place is. And maybe boost everyone's morale that they're an essential part of the group? But the damage has long been done.
I know my place, as it was revealed in a mass email to the department.
Okay. I wonder if that's vague enough to not get into any sort of trouble.
Dunno how people praise the ease of modifying and extending it.
I've run into an annoying little 'bug' while using JavaScript to find the dimensions of a hidden element over the past few months, even if it has its height and width explicitly set: it always ends up in 0 pixels (or null, I forget exactly which).
It makes sense intuitively, since a hidden item takes up no space. But that still doesn't help when you need to pre-measure something before showing it to the user.
A few weeks ago, I had a clever idea on how to get around this, and the initial results are positive. Basically, what you need to do is:
- Set the element's z-index to a negative number. It should be pushed behind the body, ideally.
- Set its position to 'absolute'.
- Unhide it (style.display='block' or style.display='' is the practice nowadays).
By rendering it behind the background, we've prevented it from immediately showing to the user (obviously). The absolute positioning was set just to make sure that, when we did unhide it for measuring, it wouldn't knock any adjacent objects out of place. The result is that you should get the height and width that you need.
I think it's a good trick, but other people have probably already discovered it. I'm behind on the times.
The appeal of emulators has gone up 100x since Mohammed said that XBox 360 controllers are USB. He let me borrow one of his, and now I'm roughly 2.5 hours into FF3 (my luck that Edgar has a twin—I totally forgot most of the game's storyline and characters). I'm going to buy a wireless one pretty soon. Good times.
I'd love to program an emulator someday. Maybe the ultimate emulator?
I think Hasan told me that Bashundara City was doing horribly. And until a few days ago I never knew what it looked like. Pretty amazing for Bangladesh.
Pretty amazing that anyone would think to build something like that in Bangladesh. Not just because the socio-economic make-up of Dhaka – or the country – doesn't mesh with the malls offerings and ambitions, but the fact that anyone would put money into that first before trying to build up other parts of the local economy is ridiculous.
I wonder why thinking big can often mean disregarding a reality that won't go away by being over the top.
Not so much a hack, but it's a nifty tool. In the address bar, type:
about:config
For some reason, I can't check work e-mail through the extranet if I'm on Firefox. They made some upgrades that, at least for Mac installations, keep giving me Invalid username or password errors. But it works on Safari and IE.
So, if I can trick the site to view me as Safari, I can use Firefox.
Aren't sites that restrict content by browser so stupid?
Thanks go to John for the info.
Around three weeks ago, I found a $5 bill on the platform, and no one in the vicinity to claim it.
Yesterday, I found a fare card for $13.20 at the top of the escalator.
I wonder what new goodie I'm gonna find on the ground?
On top of that, we got our tax refund today. AND, it's the first pretty day in nearly two weeks.
Transitioning things is a hassle.
A co-worker sent out a mass e-mail yesterday about some big news regarding huge changes in the royalties internet broadcasters will have to pay (check out Digital Media Wire, and MetaFilter for other links).
Essentially, these broadcasters will have to pay per song per user. So it's like the broadcasters are renting out a song to a person, and the broadcaster is paying for it. It's bullshit. Who would force people to rent songs?
I'm still reading the details, but it's ridiculous that the RIAA would push for this. Or that the Copyright Royalty Board is rejecting any new hearings. Or that broadcasters will have to retroactively pay for songs starting from January 1, 2006.
I don't get this world. I really don't. The Virginia Tech shootings don't bother me, but this does. It bothers me that these power structures meant to provide some sense and protection for a large society are fucking people over. One man is one man.
I'm not trying to diminish the suffering that people are going through because of this, and for those affected, I give my sympathies. But for the rest of us, what's going on in Iraq, Africa, Serbia, North Korea, Tibet, India, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and so many other countries – on a daily basis – is so much more worse than this. It's extremism by governments and groups that result in violence, poverty, prejudice, fear, etc.
And what's worse, the American culture and products are so pervasive in a lot of these countries, yet the majority of Americans know next to nothing about the world, or how their tax dollars and elected officials and brand loyalty feed into many of these problems.
I'll quit rambling. I don't like talking about these issues in general because there's no solution. It'll never end. New problems replace old ones. People are so flawed and stupid.
Hopefully I'll fulfill my obligation to help people as best as I can. I think that's all anyone needs to do, instead of being selfish.
Ah… that old clunky layout is gone. Welcome to version 3.0 transitional.
The goal of this layout started off as a much more grand thing, but only because it also involved a lot more content development on my part. But I had to be real with myself and realize that attempting such a thing would probably take a few months to pull together and execute.
So, the alternative, which serves the immediate purpose of dropping that ugly comeback design, was to put up a cleaner and tighter layout, but one that might have a lot of potential holes in terms of a systematic organization across lots of pages (even now, some of the colors need work).
Which is fine with me. It's transitional. It's also table-less! (And hopefully structurally sound syntax.) The greater effort (this one took close to three weeks on and off) may build off this, or it may not. In the meantime, I'll tweak where I can to keep things in check.
Enjoy, while I enjoy a homemade carrot cake.
I can't find recent backups of my camera photos, which sucks because there's a specific picture I need for a color palette for the site.
But while shuffling through the stack of DVDs of all sorts of shit, I came across a disc with a lot of old videos I pulled from a hard drive before reformatting it. They're some (though not all of) clips I downloaded through college. Like the Fensler Film G.I. Joe spoofs, Turnpike Film shorts (“Babies everywhere!”), a Mac commercial spoof (lack of videogames), a bunch of Don Hertzfeld shorts, some music videos, a few The State skits, etc. They're mostly from 2002–2003. I'm happy these got saved.
I also found a picture of me from nearly three years ago. I was a lot smaller than I realized.
I'm a little worried that the pictures have disappeared, even though I remember backing them up at least 6–7 months ago…
I don't think I've given an update on my fatness reality check nearly two months ago. A lot has changed.
Asma and I have been going to the gym fairly regularly now (me moreso than her, but she's catching up). We average 2.5 times a week. I've gone up a little in weight, actually, but that doesn't bother me at all. It's muscle if anything.
The more important thing is that I no longer feel unhealthy. It used to be that eating at McDonald's or anywhere with heavy food would make me feel gross or disgusting. I spent months feeling so inactive and lazy and blah. But that's not an issue anymore. My internals are happy. My heart is much stronger. I think I'm starting to see parts of my body tone up more, but even if I'm seeing things, at least I feel like I look better. And eating bad things doesn't make me feel gross.
I've never been a fan of cardio until now, because I never used to make it a part of my routine. And I've gotten to the point where I want to go to the gym instead of forcing myself to go (we walk 1.5 miles each way to get there, too).
I'm going to turn Asma into a powerlifter, and she will like it. Mighty mouse.
The CulturalConnect
To elucidate on that vague post, I'm quitting TCC effective first week of May. My run with it was over long ago, but I finally decided once and for all that it's not going to continue for me. It's a huge weight off my back. I have free time now, but it's taking some time to get used to it, because I feel like I need to be doing something. (Replaying The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past with the intent of beating it this time is a start, I guess.)
I've got some ambitious plans, but they're all projects that are my own, that I have sole control over what I need to do and when I need to do them. Once I finish my last bit of work for TCC to ease the transition of me not being there, I can fully focus on the new things.
Happy times.
Harddrive
It turned out that the only thing that crapped out on my MacBook Pro was the motherboard (one of the RAM slots was malfunctioning). So I didn't lose any data in the end. I should've posted this…a month ago? Woops. But I'm still no less suspicious of Apple hardware.
Chinchillin'
Mishti has a new cage. It's huge compared to the bird cage we had her in for the last six months.
Yes, it sounds cruel to have had her in a bird cage, but we let her out every night. The easiest way to explain why she had to be in one is that her head is abnormally small and has gotten stuck on three different occasions in the fencing we normally make our cages/enclosures with.
The final straw was when I came home a couple of weeks ago and found her stuck in the only weakness to the entire setup – it was an add-on to the bird cage where we staggered the fencing so that she couldn't poke her head through. It was ugly, but gave her room to run around. And it worked for several weeks, but she managed to nudge the bird cage a bit so that she had some access to the only panel of non-staggered fencing. She was probably stuck there for hours. I had to run to the hardware store and get wire cutters.
I wanted to build a better cage for her after that, but we decided that the effort wasn't worth it. So we ordered a chinchilla condo from Quality Cage Co. We've been happy that she has room to run and jump, that her house and her sand bath and food bowl don't all have to be squished together. It's good stuff.
Shirin has the mansion. If we had a house we probably would've gotten that for Mishti. But since we're keeping her in the living room, that would've been too much space.
There are so many stories and pictures to share about Meesh (and the other babies). Those will be coming in the next few weeks.
I've heard some real asshole-ish things on the airwaves. Don's comment is nothing. Literally. Black people, don't be so sensitive. People are actually saying worse things about you that pass as news or educated opinions. Go after them, not a convenient and easy target.
After all these years of having listened to ‘Something I Can Never Have’, I noticed yesterday that there are birds chirping in the background. A little corny, and maybe the lyrics are too, but it's still one of my favorite NIN songs.
And while we're on the subject, Year Zero is so much better than With Teeth. The creativity – compared to past albums – is still lacking somewhat. But Trent seems to be getting back into the groove, so maybe a future album will compare to The Fragile on some level. But maybe not – he says he's not killing himself with production details like he used to. For various reasons. Which is all good.
Here's to his health.
What is it about Africa that attracts a lot of mercenaries? Or am I generalizing/misguided?
