February – Andrea breaks her leg above the ankle on a patch of ice in the parking lot outside our apartment. She does this after saying she’s just going out to get something out of the car so I’m not there and she ends up limping her way back into the apartment on it. She then ends up having a metal plate and six metal screws surgically installed in her ankle.
March – My father goes in for a Cardiac Catheterization after several years of VERY dedicated heart-healthy living and ends up having quadruple bypass surgery.
April – At approximately 5am on the 29th our downstairs neighbor starts a two-alarm fire with a poorly monitored candle. Luckilly Andrea’s leg is well enough that she’s allowed to walk on it now. We manage to call 911 and get Sid (our rabbit) and get out before the vast majority of what we own is wiped out.
May – Around the 1st we move into another apartment in the apartment complex. From here on every maintenance request will be messed up in some way afterwards. Ikea also takes this opportunity to totally screw us over for the next 6 weeks on a phone-based furniture order. The tales of most of this period are archived here.
June and July – I can’t remember specifics, but I’m sure there was at least one thing per month that sucked in there…
August – I quit my soul-sucking corporate job after being the victim of a passive-aggressive officemate from hell. A couple weeks later I get hired by my current job which is way better than the old one anyway.
October – In an un-suck twist on the year Andrea and I get Bailey, our Victorian Bulldog puppy.
November – One of my closest friend’s (Ginger Kang Kang, aka: another Mike) sister dies of as-yet unexplained causes.
I got word that my good friend’s sister died on sunday. She was 29 and they’re not sure just what did it. Apparently she had a nasty bout of the flu and was staying with her parents while she was sick, they were going out to get some ginger ale for her and asked if she’d be okay if they went out. She said she would, but when they got back a half hour later she was on the bathroom floor.
okay, so DS4Free.com is giving away Nintendo DS systems if you get people to sign up and complete a couple offers. (Please use that link there, that way I get credit for people doing them.) Most of them are free or free trial stuff so if anyone out there wants to help out, please feel free to do so.
Thanks for the heads up from Gary/Phaln/Vanadium over at Splurb and op9.
…But in the end Bailey did sit still long enough to get pictures taken for graduation from basic obedience class and christmas. Puppy cute factor is go!
Andrea and myself went to visit my family in NY for thanksgiving. Bailey loved meeting everyone and dinner was good, got to see my grandparents while I was there too which was a nice treat. Friday we went down to visit some of my old stomping grounds from high school, had some mediocre mexican for lunch and did a speck of xmas shopping.
The trip back was slow thanks to construction-style traffic in PA, which still ranks as one of the most boring drives in the world, in my book.
Interesting techy side-note for the trip: I was unaware that the Sony Ericsson T610 supports XHTML strict websites. Now I’ll have to add some sort of alternate stylesheet to here for wireless devices.
Chris has finally launched his new blogified version of placenamehere.
I suppose I understand the reasoning behind serving cached content, but it still annoys me to no end when I upload changes to a server then try to test them and they don’t get put into effect.
After sitting in on a phone conversation with one of the CMS company developers the other day it turns out that they actually are working on something more robust (though maybe not quite what i had in mind for templating language type deals) for the CMS, it’s just that the people higher up the chain here keep giving us copies of old code to work with rather than getting us copies of the new modern “not hideous” code. we’ll have to see if we can work on that i guess…
I will now ruin your entire day with eight words
Ring ring ring ring
ring ring ring
bananaphone
So, I stumbled across gravatar and figured “what the hell” and set it up in the comments on here. So feel free to get yourself one of those and it should start showing up next to comment posts. In the process, of course, I floated something inside a box and thus had to muck about with the CSS some more to get all the stuff to clear correctly. luckilly this is something I’ve had to do a lot lately at work so I’ve already found a good way to do it via position is everything.
Whoever had my computer at work before me had some bad taste when it comes to typefaces. I’m a condensed sans-serif guy myself, but all the stuff that’s on here is either a script font or what you would describe in positive terms as “whimsical.”
So, I think I have managed to clean up all the CSS and such to work cross-browser (except NN4, of course) here and not have anything go too weird or the likes, so I guess that means things here are ready for action.
If there’s anyone out there who knows how to talk a total n00b through getting JSTL set up for Tomcat 4.1 I’d appreciate the help to no end.
My ultimate goal here is to set up a custom JSP tag library for the stuff we do at work (sort of like the Textpattern template tags) to use with our content management system, but all the tutorials I find are “install tomcat 5, then in the JSP2.0 spec you just…” and the server that the CMS actually runs on is only tomcat 4.1 so nothing I try from the book™ seems to actually work the way I think it will.
Furthermore: Who licenses out a content management system that doesn’t include any sort of developer documentation for using it?
Andrea just sent me a link to The House of Wigs. so far this about made me choke on my orange juice (in a good way)…
Good gracious but these Licorice Altoids are like infant death in my mouth.* Oh so horrid.
*Copywriter 4 Hire! Taglines are my specialty!
