Jul

29

The dilemma

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Read book…?
Play video game…

Read book…?
Play video game where I get to fly a spaceship…

Read book…?
Play video game where I get to fly a spaceship, blast buildings, anally probe people until their brains shoot out of their inferior little heads, and throw radioactive zombie cows around…

Read book…?
…
…
…
Yeah. Whatever. Pass me my controller.

smooches~
jEN

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Jul

29

Instant coffee isn’t so bad

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 2 Comments

I’m sucking down another mug full of Tesco Organic Instant Coffee. It could be worse. It could be better– I could have my beloved IKEA cafetiere back from the dead… * sigh * At least there’s coffee. I am not going through withdrawal. (Now I know alcoholics will drink cold remedies and mouthwash when desperate– what would I do? Ah, tea. I could just chew on a tea bag in sweaty desperation. I think I’m covered for any upcoming dark moments.)

We got to thinking about the schedule thing last evening. We’re going to give it a go with an hour earlier for it all. Now, I must tackle the aural demon that prevents me from hearing the alarms… I only sort of don’t hear them. I kind of absorb them more than ignore them. We need to find a clock or a solution with the one we have that prevents me from co-existing peacefully with Terry Wogan and the (mostly) dated tunes he plays in the morning. (I realise he’s a British institution, but I am not impressed by this icon’s morning drivel. Not that I like American radio style morning shows either. Morning shows are typically shit. I always prefer buzzers or bells to music and chat that I can tune out of my consciousness.)

Anyway, so the wheels are in motion to try to make a more compatible schedule for me. This will help my overall work/life outlook.

In other news, looks like a little shopping trip might be in order for tomorrow. Likely Reading, since we need a couple of things that we’ll have no trouble finding in the massive shopping areas there. I’m not giving up on a trip to IKEA soon, but I think both in one weekend would be fiscally irresponsible. ;)
That’s about it for now. I’m back to working on a little CSS project and then off to town for a Costa Coffee and Subway. (Geez– Subway, Starbucks, Papa John’s… if I get Taco Bell here there won’t be much I miss in America outside of friends and family!)

smooches~
jEN

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Jul

28

Whooosh! There goes another day.

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I’m not in the right schedule for me. This is painfully obvious. I spent six years in a structured daily schedule of work starting at 7am, so I was up around 4:30 or 5, working at 7, off at 3pm (unless there was overtime), and in bed around 10pm. This worked really well for me.
I’m having a hard time right now adjusting to a less structured work schedule. Granted, I’m not employed in a traditional sense, (I’m more like an intern), but my day is more like: up around 8-8:30am, working by 10am, lunch around 1 or 2pm, no clear break between work and non-work, bed around midnight. It’s not working for me. I feel lazy. I feel unproductive. My disappointment in myself causes conflict in my projects and I spend an awful lot of time not knowing what I’m doing and when to do it. I get distracted. I don’t get things done like I should and can. (Believe me, ADD doesn’t help either… ;) )

My previous schedule isn’t so unlike the current one, but I started my day a lot earlier. I’m not saying I want to get up around 4-5am again… (screw that really), but I need to be up more like 6:30-7am and ending my day much more sensibly than midnight. I don’t want to live a separate schedule from Neil, but I need to change what I’m doing now. His first alarm goes off around 7am and a second goes at 8am. I need something more like 6am & 7am. I need to feel like I’m already working well before 9am. I’m not doing that until long past 10am now. My days whoosh by on nitro and I can’t seem to focus when I’m already thinking about what to do for lunch… Argh.

I guess I just needed to get that out. I like the opportunity of working from home, but it is a difficult switch for someone who’s never done it before. I’ve punched clocks for 18 years… Now there is no clock… You can see how rocky a transition like that can be.

Anyway, enough whinging. I’ve got loads of work to do and it’s already lunch time. There it goes again– you can almost see the exhaust trails of yet another day leaving me in the dust.

smooches~
jEN

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Jul

26

Strange file type/creator/launch behaviour (warning:geek post)

Filed Under me so g33ky, tout le fromage | 2 Comments

It was a pretty good afternoon up to a point. Then I broke the cafetiere. (Any action inhibiting my ability to make fresh coffee is never going to work towards a happy ending…) Then I made some positive headway on a new code/CSS project. I mapped out what I needed to do on paper and fired up BBEdit. File, New, Text Document, ticka ticka ticka type type ticka… Save As: New_Project.css

Wait! What’s that icon for? That’s a Script Editor icon! I wrote CSS… Get Info. Script Editor was listed as the default application for a CSS file! WTF! It should be BBEdit! So I changed the default application to BBEdit manually in Get Info, confirmed the change and Whammo! It went back to Script Editor as a default right before my eyes! Argh!
Two or three hours later, after reinstalling the latest Combo Updater for the Operating System, running system utilities, repairing privileges, fine-tooth-combing over ever Preference in BBEdit, and searching the web for anything relating to: Tiger, 10.4, Creator, Type, Script Editor, BBEdit, Get Info, etc… I found a little seemingly unrelated blurb on one of the MacOSHints search results pages– something about the LaunchServices plist. It sounded like a good place to look, so we looked into the plist file with the Property List Editor and found references to BBEdit. (It’s a plist in the User Library, so we figured it was pretty safe to trash it. I didn’t empty the trash, just in case.) I rebooted, created a new BBEdit CSS file. Saved it. Perfecto! The icon was an appropriate BBEdit icon, the file type stuff was fine, and the file launched BBEdit when it was double clicked. I made a TextEdit document, saved it as an .rtf, opened the Get Info on it, changed it to a .css file, defaulted it to BBEdit, confirmed the change and said I wanted all .css files to open in BBEdit by default. Yeehaw! It worked!

So, according to an excerpt on another MacOSHints search page on LaunchServices, (now that I know what worked), I found that:

Basically, OS X LaunchServices is how an application is found to run when you double-click on a document. If the program is in /Applications, or you launch it at least once, then LaunchServices should detect it. LaunchServices contains a big, long list of all the Applications, and which ones accept documents of which type.

And the article goes on to talk about checking some stuff in Terminal and basically goes into much more detail than I care about tonight (as well as some outdated content). I just want to get some work done, man. Anyway, so my documents seem to be behaving now. It was an unusual problem, (I can say that because no search for my initial clues turned up anything close to my problem, not even on Apple’s site), but now it’s fixed by trashing that plist file.

Here’s the path to follow to it in Mac OS X 10.4.2 Tiger: Computer > Your Hard Drive > Users > Your Home Folder > Library > Preferences > com.apple.LaunchServices.plist
That’s the file that handles what I’ve described. Good luck if you’ve found this blog entry by searching for some of the words in this post. Hope it helps. :)
Next, I must find time to get to IKEA to solve my other problem with broken things… (In the meantime, I’ll have to rough it by taking frequent trips to Starbucks. That’s a shame… ;) )

smooches~
jEN

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Jul

25

Great battles in history

Filed Under irregular, tout le fromage | 11 Comments

Waterloo. Little Big Horn. Trafalgar. Tippecanoe. Hastings. No doubt these are some of the most documented and studied conflicts in history. So what new bloody struggles can scholars turn their learned brains to?
Pop vs. Soda. Eh? Yup. This has now crossed over to academia. Sort of… well, there’s a site about it anyway. It’s tied to the East Central University of Oklahoma. (Clearly the leader in the field of segregated carbonated beverage colloquialisms in relation to American geography.)

I grew up in the Midwest. I called it ‘pop.’ I moved to Pennsylvania as a young adult. I called it ‘pop’ and sometimes ’soda’ if the present company seemed more like a ’soda’ kind of crowd. I’ve vacationed in the South. They call it ‘Coke’ even if it’s Sprite. (RC Cola is also much more prevalent in the Southern states. Sometimes if you ask for a ‘Coke’ there, you’ll receive an RC. You just need to be more laid back really. That’s kind of the way of the South.)

PopsodaWhat does it all mean? I dunno. But I’m not sure it qualifies as a battle or controversy really… ;) (Do you think I can major in that subject at ECU? Perhaps a Bachelors Degree in Beverage Diversity? Hmmmm…) Check out the site and enjoy the interactive map of beverage slang terminology.
smooches~
jEN

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Jul

25

The weekend nutshell.

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It’s fast. It’s concise. It’s–
(enter booming radio voice here)
My weekend in a nutshell!

(I’m already sponging away at a well-deserved glass of absinthe, so this list may or may not leave out important events. I’ll give it my best at 1am and green fairy influenced…)
Right.
So, Friday. I worked on some code. I ate some food. Shit– erm… oh! Neil and I walked to town for a coffee. No, wait… that was Saturday. Friday…
Friday… Oh! Neil’s friend Mike came over to discuss podcasting and we had Papa John’s pizza. (The pizza was just as good as the Papa John’s I used to order in the states. It rocked. We’d been sitting on a mailed menu from them for weeks and finally ordered. Yum.)
Saturday. Neil and I walked to town for a coffee. We avoided most work. Had leftover Papa John’s. I introduced him to House of 1000 Corpses.
Sunday. Chatted with Aaron on vid. Lazy, rainy day with a hefty chunk of coding/work time in the evening. I did some super good work. Gorgeous, tight CSS layout. No ADD demons and I am now pickling myself with a sweaty glass of absinthe as I lure sleepiness into my grasp.

It was a darn fine weekend. And, to top it all off, we made money on the Lotto. Only ten quid, but it was more than we spent so we’re winners. :)
Happy girlie signing off for the night.
smooches~
jEN

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Jul

23

He’s a creep. He’s a weirdo…

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 2 Comments

There’s a really smelly dude living in the flat beneath us. Since most residences in the UK don’t come fitted with air conditioning, (only recently has global warming prompted the stocking of portable AC units onto store shelves), the main method of pushing a cool breeze through your abode is to do it with nature: open your windows. Now, this introduces all sorts of smells into an otherwise controlled personal environment. We have Asian/Indian neighbours on either side of our flat, so clearly, we’re going to smell ethnic spices frequently. And as a vegetarian, smelling your neighbours frying up bacon or steak or worse yet, liver and onions, can be nearly nauseating, but we cope. By far the worst smell comes wafting up from our downstairs stink factory… we call him Mister Man, mostly because we never knew his name, but now because we just can’t be bothered to remember what it really is when we sort the mail dump in the foyer. Mister Man goes away for sometimes several days at a time and it’s during those vacancies that we have true freedom in what windows we open and when. You see, Mister Man must smoke a carton a day with the fog that wisps it’s way up through our windows. It’s terrible. When he comes home to open his flat up for fresh air, we have to close ours for the same reason. It sucks. Such is life in a land new to air conditioning. Such is flat life in general.

Mister Man is generally quiet, save for the occasional outburst when he gets a new CD. He knows he lives in a flat with occupants above, below and on both sides of him, yet the odd hour of cranking it to eleven happens. Infrequently, (thankfully), but it happens. I’ve been able to name what he’s playing based on what persevering frequencies make it through the concrete floor, only to check my accuracy with an ear to the carpet. I’ve not been wrong yet.

After what seemed like a longer than average journey away, Mister Man came home the other day, fired up an intense session of chain smoking with the windows open and continued through his day in relative silence. Until… somewhere around midnight, the Mister Man must’ve gotten thoroughly shit-faced and cranked up his tunes. I’ve heard him wail away to a variety of the mid-nineties greatest grunge movement bands, (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, etc… I’d actually respect him more if he’d throw on some Melvins or scream “Touch me I’m sick!” along with Mark Arm), but in his pickled state, he put on Radiohead’s ‘Creep’ and sang. And wailed. And sang some more. I was laughing with my head pressed against the carpet, but sat up and thought about Mister Man. He may be a stinky creep, but I kinda felt bad for him. I think we’ve only seen a girl around for a brief spell, and it almost seemed more like someone like a sister visiting. He’s got a crappy car, an ageing motorcycle and lives a fairly solitary life. Maybe he’s happy like that– but honestly, the way he sang along with ‘Creep’ the other night made me just a little sad for him.
Not sad enough to want to do anything about it, (won’t be baking him cookies or anything), but it makes me hope he finds a stinky little Miss to be his Mrs. Man. (I just hope she comes with an air conditioner for their flat…)

smooches~
jEN

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Jul

22

Clean Clean Clean… scrub away the voices…

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Ok- several notches too much on the drama-dial for that post title, but I am cleaning– that much we can be sure of.

Was up late again working on some killer code. I seem to have an entry level gift for complex CSS, and so new nuggets of code were hurtled at browser after browser, platform on platform until I stood on top of the selector hill of slaughter, proclaimed my weary victory and snuggled into a coma for the night. I started again this morning, had a minor setback with an ADD fit, (picture me as a pinball machine screaming TILT), then spanked some more code.

Now I clean house.

My code wrangling is mostly done for the day, though I have a pretty complex layout to complete by the end of the weekend. I love it. I don’t mind working over the weekend as long as I get the results I know I’m capable of. For now, however, I am rearranging a few bookshelves, dusting, and will be scrubbing at kitchen filth shortly.

Tonight, Neil’s due to have a close friend over for some podcasting fun, and I hear pizza could be involved. I’ve not had a proper pizza in over ten weeks… I will be merciless on that cheesy bliss. Merciless.
(If I don’t post tomorrow, I’m in bed with a massive cheese-bliss induced gut-ache. Send prayers and stay out of the bathroom please. ;) )

smooches~
jEN

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