I figured it wouldn't happen, but work was cancelled for today. I have to work this weekend but since I had to anyway on account that my building works a normal schedule during every end of month, that's no big deal. I just won't get the overtime pay for Saturday (which will cover the remainder of my regular 40 hours).
So this afternoon I decided to trek outside my apartment with my digital camera to check out the culprit. For two hours (with about a 30-minute break for lunch—I hadn't eaten yet) I walked here and there taking pictures at anything that looked interesting. It was harder than I thought as I was under the impression that it was colder outside than it was, and thus more unmelted snow. I even briefly wondered why my shift had been cancelled—I was sure that I could get out to work, no problem. But that's beside the point; I ended up with about thirty pictures of varying quality.
When I got back home and moved the pictures from the camera to the computer, one jumped out at me. It (as you can see to the right) is an accumulation of snow on the open lid of a metal dumpster which was melting in the afternoon heat. I tried to get a picture of the snow in mid-drip, but couldn't. Staring at it at home though, I couldn't help but think that it would make a good background for something. But for what?
I realized then that I had the itch to make up another blog design. I had another one in progress (tentatively called "Toasted" as it's crispy and golden-brown) but I knew that this picture wouldn't fit. So I whipped up a quick little template that used the picture, called it "Melting" and sent it out into the world.
Now this was what I call a "snow day". Too bad winter's almost over...
The weather wasn't as bad as I figured it was going to be, but I took a half-day's vacation anyway just to make sure that a) my sanity stayed as intact as normal, and b) that I don't get stranded at work. So I said my good-byes, grabbed myself some Chinese food and trundled on home. I was pleasantly surprised over how clear the roads were. Granted I live off of a major artery in and out of Raleigh, so if any roads were to be worked on first it'll be the ones leading to my apartment complex, but the roads looked and drove like they were hit by rain instead of a few inches of snow. I don't know whether the local DOT or good old thermal dynamics was the reason behind this (I'd guess the latter), but I'm grateful regardless.
At any rate, here (as sort-of promised) is one of the pictures I took this afternoon before going to work. It's my favorite of the six that I shot as you can really see just how big the snowflakes were when it was really coming down.
You just knew this post was coming, didn't you?
It is still snowing outside as I type this, though it doesn't feel as bad as the previous wintry storms that we've had in North Carolina this winter. The difference? As I had put it in a LiveJournal response just a few minutes earlier, no sleet, freezing rain or icy death has fallen. Just snow. Monstrous, wet flakes of the stuff that's melting at all the places it should be melting (The roads, which are salted heavily enough that you could make asphalt jerky. If you wanted to...) and accumulating everywhere else. So far, it's been gorgeous, not dangerous. I'm at work right now, and if there wasn't a ban on digital cameras in the facility I would have dragged it outside to get a shot of the stand of pines opposite the parking lot, as each tree is covered just on one side with snow. A beautiful sight. I did get a couple of shots of the apartment complex before I ran off to work, so maybe I can get them together when I get home.
Of course, all of this "nice" wintry weather could turn all wrong during the evening when all of the melted snow freezes up into a solid mass and makes driving home from work a horror. My gut feeling is that it won't happen, but we'll see.
These days I tead to read blogs of web designers that are more experienced, better educated and—quite simply—more professional than myself (the ATC Project, which is ancient, inert, all but broken and badly in need of a consitent design, is proof of my amateur status). I figure that if I wanted to learn about web design at this stage I could do far worse than by watching what the professionals did with and said about web design.
It was in this frame of mind last week that I visited D. Keith Robinson's site Asterisk and read the article entitled "Random Acts Of Validation", where he checked 30 random sites through the different validators. I was surprised by the results and began to wonder about this blog and how it stacked up. So, this weekend I sat down with my blog and ran it through the W3C's validator.
The result, based on XHTML 1.0 Transitional? 13 separate errors:
- One was me forgetting to close the image tag on the penguin-game screenshot from early last week.
- One was an unencoded ampersand in a link.
- The rest were from code pasted in from various places to get comments and site statistics, most of those being where the
type was not specified in a script tag.
Armed with these statistics, I dove into my code to see what I could fix. So, did I fix everything? In a word, no. My own goof-ups were easy to fix, as was the pasted code from NedStats (script and a "nosave" attribute in the img tag) and HaloScan (more script). However there are four errors in the Blog*Spot code for the ad at the top of the screen. The validator says six, but it gives two errors apiece to two individual unclosed tag issues. I've sent a message along to the Blogger folks detailing the issue, and hopefully they will be able to fix the errors.
But.
Perhaps it's a little bit of frustration over things that aren't under my control, but I have to wonder what the point is in having valid markup on sites that will arbitrarily place invalid markup over what's been written. Should I finally bite the bullet and get myself some paid webspace for which to blog?
Sometimes even I surf to places I've never been before. Okay, that's probably like saying that a fish sometimes swims to places that it's never been before just because the water was there. Anyway, while surfing, I came across an interview with Vincent Connare. For those of you that don't know of him (and I suspect that's most of you), he's a type designer whose two best known fonts are Trebuchet and...Comic Sans. So, take one guess about what the interview is about! It's a well-mannered and entertaining (if short) interview, but the meat of the page is in the comments discussion, wherein Dave Combs, the man behind "ban comic sans", makes an appearance and a meeting of the minds is made.
Oh, and that pullquote is one of the best "lines" I've read in quite some time.
As for my own pseudo-informed take on Comic Sans? While I can understand Combs' position and agree that Comic Sans has been horribly mis-used over the years, I understand that the font (like many fonts, frankly) was designed for a specific purpose and when used appropriately is effective and even interesting. People just need to be educated that there are other fonts out there, if they are only willing to look.
I've gotten a decent number of referrals from Google looking for the penguin-and-yeti games I had talked about two days ago. Well, getting 7 referrals on a page where 30 hits a day is still a big deal is a decent number. Anyway, the link in that post is pointing to someone's home page. So in the interest of keeping his/her bandwidth costs down, I've searched and discovered (which wasn't hard, given the link in the intro to the second game) that the games come from yeti.e-medien.com. There, not only can you play online but you can download the games to play on your own computers.
Also, according to the site's front page, these two games are part of a planned decathalon, and the author is accepting suggestions for game ideas!
The ability for your average human being to transform into a cliff-jumping lemming never ceases to amaze me. For those of you who haven't been following along, or are new to the site, here's the situation. Yesterday, I took the old design I made for this blog, dressed it up for use as a template, called it OMI Ripped (I should have gone for a better name, but it's too late now) and sent it off to BlogSkins, where I have a small collection of templates.
Today, I checked into the site to see how Ripped is doing. An 4.0 rating out of 5 and 10 downloads already. Not a bad start. But then I looked at the comments. One of the regular readers here (hey, Francey!) made the appropriately snide comment "gee, this looks familiar! ;P" before moving on to give her thoughts on the design. Now, without the sarcasm, mentioning that a skin looks "familiar" is local slang for "plagiarized". Apparently the sarcasm didn't take, since the next three commenters hammered me on my seeming plagiarism (though happily they did not rate the skin), even though I explicitly stated it was the design of this blog not five days ago! Ripped is certainly a "used" skin, but it was definitely not plagiarized from another source.
So, if you are coming here from BlogSkins, I want you to remember one thing before you rate or comment on another skin: please, please read the author's comments for the skin before you look at it or the general comments, as it makes clear (at least I try to anyway) what I intended with the skin and where it came from.
I'm thinking that calling it "Ripped" was a bad idea...
It looks like there's a sequel to the yeti-and-penguin Flash game that I mentioned in an earlier post. No batting practice this time; now you hurl snowballs at penguins that are flipped in the air by a killer whale, hoping to knock it into a target like in darts. Where you throw the ball and where it hits the penguin while it's spinning in the air determines the direction it goes. As you can guess it's more difficult than the first, especially as the playing field is viewed at a slight angle.
My best score so far is 480.7. Can you beat it?
As promised earlier, the blog's old design has been cleaned up and released as a BlogSkins template. I decided to go with the name for the file name on my hard drive, OMI Ripped, as I really had no other name springing to mind. As I noted earlier, I'm still quite fond of it and its workmanlike feel, and I hope it becomes at least as popular as Snow and Ice.
The last time I played in the snow, and I mean really played and not chuckled knowingly as other grown people frolicked in the first snow of their lives, making snow angels and throwing snowballs and such, was way back in high school. Over Christmas break, to be exact. My family had driven from Florida, where we were living at the time, up to Minnesota. Most people tend to consider their ancestral homelands to be somewhere in Europe or Asia or Africa. I consider mine to be Minnesota. And like most ancestral homelands, I have only spent a fraction of my life there, though at close to three years total--two-plus living there when I was little and the remainder on various trips--I'd imagine that's more than most people.
Anyway (and the astute reader will already know where this is going) my family spent the Christmas break in Rochester with my grandparents, and everyone from my dad's side of the family was there. To blow off a bit of the steam that had been building up by having five energetic grandchildren in a small house (I was the oldest by a couple of years) while dinner was being prepared, someone decided it would be a good idea to get a football game going in the front yard.
The yard, the street, everything was covered in a thick blanket of snow--a major storm had rolled through the area just two days before (which my family ended up driving through to get to Rochester)--and it was cold enough that it was painful to catch the football at first. And that was with a Nerf football!
The game kicked into gear and everyone was having a good time, and I was starting to get really hot in my winter jacket. So I took it off. My uncles and my dad asked me if I really wanted to do that, and I said yes and that I would be fine. Perhaps knowing that the best lessons learned in life are those learned painfully, they accepted my reasoning and we got back to the game. Thirty minutes later, we wrapped up the game and hauled ourselves inside to eat.
It only took a couple of hours before I started getting sick, and I ended up being bedridden for two days with a persistent fever and severe aches. I remember being very relieved that this all took place after Christmas, as I imagined that I'd be sitting under the Christmas tree and start vomiting all over my stash of wrapped presents. I don't think mine would've been the only Christmas ruined.
So it was then that I learned the virtues of dressing appropriately for the weather (or at least, to the extent that I would be exposed to it). And thinking back now I realize this: damn, I was dumb as a kid!
I couldn't help myself. I really couldn't.
Earlier this week, I was working on a sepia-toned design to add to my list of BlogSkins templates, but was hitting a wall and couldn't put together anything that interested me. So, a couple of days ago I added some dark red to the mix. Bam! Next thing I know this design came together. I was going to call it OMI Rounded after the rounded corners and send it into the wild today. But, the more I played with it, the more I liked it and the more I wanted to keep it.
So I kept it. I even retailored the archive page for it, with a section on memorable posts. What constitutes memorable, you ask? Beats me. The one post I have listed there wasn't memorable for the post itself, but...well, you're going to have to read it for yourself.
And what of the previous design (called OMI Ripped in my files)? I'll probably be cleaning up its code and releasing it into the wild. It was the design here for only a month and a half, but it's a solid if unspectacular design--not to mention my first good 3-column layout--and it deserves to be used somewhere.
The folks over in Mozilla-land have released a new version of their next-generation browser. The major difference this time around is in the name; it was called Firebird (after beginning life as Phoenix), but is now called Firefox. According to reports, the Firebird name had been trademarked by a different open-source group for a completely different program, so Mozilla decided to rename the browser instead of spending time (and money) to work towards "buying" the name. I've only been playing around with the browser for a couple of hours, but I can already tell that the browser is actually faster than its predecessor. This means that it's almost a quantum order faster than IE.
If you're wondering why I'm talking about this, Firebird (and now Firefox) is my everyday browser. It's speed, tabbed browsing, standards compliance and interface designed for maximum acreage for the web page (among other things) drew me to it and I don't see myself switching to anything else anytime soon.
Now you know my browser preference, and I'll stop now before this becomes more of an ad for Mozilla than it already is... ;)
If you look on the right-hand sidebar, you'll notice that I've finally caved in and gotten myself a LiveJournal account. I'm aiming to use that account to comment on other people's journals, particularly certain LiveJournals that don't allow anonymous posting.
I have a question before I commit to that plan, though. You see, I've seen at least one other blog use an LJ account mainly to house comments for the main blog. I'm wondering if I should do the same, which would likely mean letting go of my HaloScan account. I'm confused as far as what to do, since HaloScan has worked very well (despite complaints about a maximum character count per post) and it doesn't require going to a different journal. But LJ's commenting system looks more robust and seems easier to filter out spammy comments.
Okay, did anyone reading this ever really think for a moment that the oft-mentioned Super Bowl halftime gaffe wasn't planned? Anyone? No? Good. It's too bad, too; the game was exhilirating to watch, and this is all people can talk about.
Anyway, I have another new template on BlogSkins. This one is a remix entitled "That Tears It", and it's very...watery. And it has images, too!
Embarrassingly, I also put it up without reading the notation at the bottom of the submission section that plainly states that no remixes should be submitted without the original author's permission. So it'll come down if the original author says so. Hopefully, she'll be a good sport about it and I won't have to take it down.