Oct

31

Not bad for not reading the book yet

Filed Under expat, regular, tout le fromage | 6 Comments

The UK is initiating a rather strict test for would be immigrants looking for a British Passport. On the page linked below, there’s a 15 sample question quiz to give a taste of the types of questions being asked. You must read a book and have basic use of the English language in order to prepare and pass the test. After a cold introduction to the questions, (having not read the book they require), I managed a respectable 10 of 15 correctly answered.
Given that I’ve been here just shy of a year and my knowledge is essentially via cultural osmosis so far, I’d say after a couple of years and that book, I’ll be more convincingly British in my knowledge of this countries’ society, traditions and government than much of the native-born population.
* enter school-yard sneering * neener neener neener… ;)

click me dammitArticle: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4391710.stm
Quiz: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/4099770.stm

Really though, shouldn’t the fact that I know the four candles / fork handles gag be enough for my inclusion? ;)
smooches~
jEN

Technorati Tags: , ,

Oct

30

and then there were 12

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

The site facelift is underway. Well, mentally anyway. I’ve looked at and waded through a veritable sea of templates for Wordpress, both good and bad, and have narrowed it down to 12 potential layout templates upon which to base my next blog iteration. Yup 12. I think honestly, it’s down to around 3 true contenders for the bulk of it, but there are aspects of all 12 that caught my eye for one reason or another, so I’ll likely incorporate bits of several of them in my final design. Although a great template, I’m sick to death of Kubrick, (the one that currently accounts for the majority of my site code), and need a more individual look. Metamorphosis is on the horizon… Wheeee!

Also on the horizon: holiday begins soon. I’ll be in Portugal for a week of it. I’ve got the bathing suit blues, but that’s my own fault really. I like food. A lot. I’m entirely too indulgent, even when the majority of my intake is truly healthy. My problem is still the irregularity of a fitness regime, but I’ve only got me to blame again for that. * shrugs * I’m flawed. (and so is my beach physique…) I haven’t gained any weight in over six months, just maintained, which proves that I need to shake this ass to shake off some weight.

On the Portuguese upside, I’ll be learning a lot about photography whilst in the Algarve. I plan on getting my feet wet with some manual camera settings and trying to better understand aperture stuff and other camera black arts. I get some lucky shots as my knowledge stands now, but I want to understand why certain photos are better than others. I can handle composition pretty well– now it’s time for more nuts and bolts understanding. Bring it on!

Well, back to some code analysing. More of the unremarkable in abundance for you tomorrow. ;)
smooches~
jEN

Technorati Tags: , ,

Oct

29

might be time for a change…

Filed Under me so g33ky, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

I’m getting bored with looking at my blog in it’s current form.

Might be time to change it up.

Technorati Tags: , ,

Oct

28

How to wake me from a nap…

Filed Under me so g33ky, tout le fromage | 3 Comments

Codeborder…offer the choice of dinner:
fish n’ chips or Papa John’s pizza delivery
* big smile * (Neither involve cleaning up the disastrously cluttered kitchen, washing of forks, or cooking. Yay!)

It was a late night working yesterday. I was given a tricky Photoshop site layout with 9 individual pages to create code and save out graphics for…
…before bed.
The site had to go live that quickly. Fortunately, the index.php page had already been coded and subsequently tweaked by me a few days ago, so making several of the offshoot pages was a relative breeze after some minor adjustments to the initial style sheets and xhtml documents. I got the last two pages laid out after hours of cross-browser / cross-platform mojo and the cleaning up of a couple of dirty mistakes I made due to exhaustion. (You try finding syntax errors in hundreds of lines of code with stale eyes and hours of mileage on your ass. I felt like a geek long distance truck driver trying to make those last miles to home pass safely and without incident.)

I think it was around 1.30AM when I crash-landed into bed and it was nearly an hour later that I finally passed out. There is a problem when I work so late– I almost always have too much on my mind to sleep. I hit ‘Save,’ brush my teeth, crawl into bed, but my brain is still fully engaged in some sort of semi-cognitive exercise where the little file clerk in my head picks something obscure or seemingly insignificant for me to stew over. Sometimes several things. The blinds are drawn, but the brain fire burns on brightly.
Cursed.

Today, after a brief few hours of sleep before morning, I did a little work on another client site, took a nap in the evening, was enticed out of slumber with the promise of pizza, and watched the original “The Italian Job.” What a fun movie! I saw the 2003 Hollywood remake, but there is something really magical about the 1969 Michael Caine film.

So now I sit here, awake but winding down. Tomorrow will be another early day and I’m already damaging my chances at feeling alive when the alarm clock blares Mozart at me come 6AM…

More comforting, who really feels alive at 6AM anyway… that’s why coffee exists. ;) Good night.

Technorati Tags: ,

Oct

27

ADD or born to multi-task… you decide.

Filed Under regular, tout le fromage | 7 Comments

This morning, whilst having an uneventful poo, I began pairing clean socks from the drying rack in the tub.

I got four pair done. (I know you wanted to know…)

Technorati Tags:

Oct

26

Hot damn! What a good day.

Filed Under me so g33ky, regular, tout le fromage | 6 Comments

Ivywall
I just wanna plant a big smooch on the forehead of Wednesday, 26 October 2005. It’s been a great day. Although my brain started in neutral, I had that fat baby purring by midday. I tackled every CSS task thrown my way including a tricky horizontal dropdown menu job using graphics and no Javascript. (Well, almost no Javascript– farkin’ Internet Explorer still requires the csshover.htc file. So it goes…)
Anyway, so I gathered up all my keystrokes, gave them the skinny, synchronised watches, threw them at BBEdit and watched ‘em make magic! I did some remote trouble shooting from over a barrier of monitors between the desks (seeing and understanding glitches, diagnosing and prescribing where and what to fix). I was giddy as a shaved monkey in a barrel of peanut butter! ADD was no enemy of mine today. RArrrr!

So my day of coding has wrapped and I’m changing gears to attack my next writing exercise. The Pixies are wailing and cooing from the speakers on my desk and I’ve changed my posture to a decidedly less professional slouch. Do you know what time I got up today? 6:30AM. That’s a good thing. It’s part of the get-up-earlier-yoga-work-write-bed routine I’m cultivating. I feel a sense of promise and accomplishment today and it has left me high.

There is hope.

Technorati Tags: ,

Oct

24

I love geeky stuff: Skype, my new audio set up, and a CSS fix for IE

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

I bought a US Wisconsin telephone number through Skype today. Now when my friends and family call me they have the option to dial a familiar number structure as well as being charged for an in-state call rather than an international rate. Yay! My mom has used it twice today and it’s fab. Coinciding with the SkypeIn number installation, I’ve reworked the audio set up I’m using to communicate with. The new set up is very similar to an older set up I used in the states for conferencing. I’m back to using a M-Audio MobilePre USB device with a vocalist’s microphone (EV Cobalt 9) on a boom stand. Earbuds plugged into the face of the Mobile Pre provide my monitor functions. This set up can be used in several ways: SkypeIn calls, iChat video or audio chats, as well as perhaps dabbling in a little hot podcasting action. Hubba hubba! I had been recently relying on a low quality Playstation 2 gaming headset for my chat needs, but the quality was inferior and the unit is bulky and sloppy. Consider it retired.

Geeky topic number two… I figured out a solution to a pain in the ass Windows IE CSS issue. I know IE has a “three pixel bug” and I’ve read about the “Expanding Box Trick,” but I’m terribly impatient when it comes to researching solutions to a problem I may be having. I couldn’t find anyone talking about simple solutions for a slight gap when placing an image into a identically sized containing div. IE adds space to the bottom of the graphic via the containing div. (Standards compliant browsers are fine.) Well, briefly reading up on the “Expanding Box Trick” and “three pixel bug” got me thinking. If IE adds space to the image, it must think that the image is too large it’s container. In essence, IE is trying to fit an item into a box of identical size and it can’t fit it in there without the uncontrollable desire to scroll it. There is some logic to that… (It’s almost like unbuttoning your trousers if you’ve eaten too much– stretch the containing element…) Anyway, so I thought, well, instead of doing weird hacks, what if I just add overflow: hidden; to the CSS for that containing div? Hide what it wants to show with a scroll… It worked! Yay number two! Here’s an example of the containing div I was working with: (the image was 386px x 500px)

#image {
float: left;
top: 75px;
height: 386px;
overflow: hidden;
width: 500px;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
}

This may be a known fix or solution, but I didn’t find it with a couple of quick Google searches and I just can’t waste the time digging through forums for the answer. I’m pleased to have figured it out and that’s why I’m posting it here. It’s much more simple than going through some browser targeting hacks and doesn’t seem to negatively affect anything. That’s simple and lovely. :)
Off to do some creative writing… I’ve got my next keyword assignment!

smooches~
jEN

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Oct

22

poking a stick into the slumbering amateur writer inside

Filed Under creative stuff, regular, tout le fromage | 4 Comments

You keep coming back here, so I keep writing. Truth is, even if you didn’t come back I’d still write. I like it. Sometimes I even think I do a pretty good job in my own quirky way. Writing is another area in my life where I seem to do just enough of it, with just enough skill, to get by. I own the right books on grammar, synonyms, and editing. I’ve skimmed them. I pack enough of a vocabulary to be considered above average. I have several ruled notebooks and have written in the less expensive ones. (I still lack the confidence to dirty the pages of the nice, hardback blank books. I save those for when I feel I’ve got something worth writing in them. Does that day ever come for anyone?)

Now I’m beginning to put my writing to the test. I got a little book a week or so ago. It’s somewhat cube-like and is called “The Writer’s Block: 786 Ideas to Jump-Start Your Imagination” by Jason Rekulak. Here’s how I’m using it:
I have Neil put it behind his back, flip through the pages until I say “STOP!” He checks out the page and providing it doesn’t require me to go someplace I can’t at that moment, he tells me the topic/premise on the page we’ve randomly chosen. I am then challenged to write a minimum of 250 words on that idea. The first one yielded a quick and easy 250 words. It was a topic I knew nothing about. The second one, several hours later in the evening, was a painless 1250 1000* words. This is my new mental yoga.

I plan on eventually sharing these experiments on either this site or one of two others I have yet to do anything with. I’ll let you all know. Perhaps you’ll enjoy them. Think of them as sketches in words instead of pencils. Some may have developmental promise. Who knows. Right now I can tell you it’s a helluva lot of fun and I feel this blooming routine is going to be really good for my confidence and just might lead to something. In the meantime, I think I’ll take a closer look at some of those books of mine. I’ve got a reason to pay attention to better sentence structure now…

smooches~
jEN

*I’m using a piece of software called CopyWrite and through my novice experience, didn’t reset the word count per document properly. Damn- I could’ve had a novel done in no time! lol!

Technorati Tags:

Next Page →