Categories
Knitting and Crochet Programming

Of Scarves and Drupal Devilry

So I’m knitting again. Woot! I finished a (unfortunately heavy) orange and tag-yarn scarf last week, and now I’m working on two scarves/shawls (stockinette to the end, then drop every third stitch). One is sparkly red yarn (Karabella Stardust) and will be this year’s holiday scarf, and the other is a tweedy Plymouth Encore that I’m going to have to frog and restart, ’cause it’s too wide for only two balls of yarn.

I started up again because work, both my day job and my freelance projects, have been stressing me out, and after several near-meltdowns, I had a “D’oh!” moment and realized that I’d given up more than just something to do with my hands when I stopped knitting–I’d given up an important stress-reliever. I can’t believe I ever forgot how relaxing it is work with my hands and let my mind fly loose. Stupid.

Anyway, in other news, Drupal continues to kick my ass. I spent four hours yesterday trying–and failing–to beat the forums into submission. I still can’t figure out why setting a block exception for “forum” only works for the forum posts and not the other forum pages, and google was no help this time. I picked up another Drupal development book at B&N today, one more advanced and with far more customization examples than my other two books, so hopefully that’ll help, but for today I’m leaving the forums alone and working on some of the other things for the site that I might actually be able to fix. I need to get a few more successes under my belt before I tackle the evil forums again, and not just because my ego needs reinflating. I also need to have something closer to complete by Monday for the client. Yay?

And finally, because posts without pictures are just plain boring, here is a gratuitous photo relating to nothing else in this post. It’s from earlier this week at work, when the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in from two different directions. It was so damned beautiful that night I took about 40 pictures, but IMO this is one of the better ones.

Fog over Brentwood

Categories
Programming

Yay FireBug!

I found it! The problem that’s been making me crazy for three weeks has finally been solved, thanks to FireBug! Woot!

Note for the future: When there’s a mysterious horizontal line appearing at the top of a table, in Drupal, in Firefox, go to modules/system/system.css and change the damned tbody border that’s hiding in there.

Woot! No more horizontal line!

Categories
Programming

A day full of stupid

I decided I didn’t like that last change and took it out. ‘Course, I was stupid and didn’t do it the smart way, i.e. I didn’t copy the files before I went making changes to them, so there are some other changes that ended up in there by accident when I found I couldn’t remember how to undo what I’d done before. And if you followed that, you’re a smarter person than I.

Sadly, I’m having a ‘dumb programmer’ day all around. I’ve been working on a Drupal site for a friend/client. I generally don’t do freelance because I’m afraid of being unable to deliver what they want, and surprise surprise, here I am today totally stuck on how to create and format the drop down menu the client wants. I can do it in CSS and I can do it in Javascript (or rather, I know where to find programs that can do that), but I have no idea how to merge them with Drupal so that the menu items are controlled by the CMS, without hardcoding them in. It’s making my head hurt, and honestly, when I get frustrated I can’t focus. Brilliant programmer, that’s me!

My brain is mush for today, which sucks ’cause I only have one more day to make real progress that I can show to the client, and if I mush out again tomorrow, I’m toast. Biting off more than one can chew might be a good way to learn things, but it’s got that nasty ‘nervous breakdown’ side effect. Boo! Hiss!

Weird ceiling reflection

And since all posts are boring without a pretty picture, check out this reflective shadow that was cast from my glass dining table to the ceiling earlier today. That’ll wake a person up for sure!

FOR THE RECORD

THE GOVERNMENT

ALREADY RUNS

MEDICARE,

AND ALWAYS HAS!

SINCE 1965!

LOOK IT UP!!

 

Good freakin’ lord.

Categories
News Programming

For better? Or for worse?

In helping my sister set up her new website/blog, I’m learning some new stuff to help my own site. Or is it hindering? As you can see, my latest “improvement” is changing the homepage so it shows excerpts of new posts instead of the full content of each. I thought it would make the page more manageable and less like a 12 story building, but I’m not sure the execution works like I pictured it. I don’t know if the images are to small, or the excerpts are too short, but there seems to be too much space everywhere. Unfortunately my PHP skills are still in the baby-steps stage, so I’m not sure I can change it to the way I want. Phoo.

This place definitely needs an overhaul, regardless. The design, the content, the architectural structure (or lack thereof)…. Sadly there are at least three other websites in line for my spare time before this one, and two of them are paying gigs.