Author Archives: mstroud

More Little Fixes

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I spent most of the day tracking down all the little bugs in my various divs, css styles, and includes, but it looks like things are all good again. What a huge time sink it is to track down all the relative and absolute path breaks!

For now, the updated layout is working and it appears to work regardless of subdirectory or anything else. That’s “a good thing” since I have no desire to go through that mess again. Now I can get back to packing and thinking about putting some new content on this site.

Usability fixes

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I saw an article that got me interested in fixing a text problem on this site, so I fixed it. :)

All of the text on the pages of the site should now be resizable, thanks to the ingenious but difficult to understand em size tag. Now, when you run your browser with medium size set you should see the text as I intended it. But if you scale text up or down that now works too, and it stays within the borders of the layout.

There is also an article separator between posts thanks to a handy div style tag. Hopefully readability goes up as well.

Travel Gone Crazy

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I’m back in town for a few days between the many trips I’ve been elected to attend. It certainly seems like more time is spent in hotels, airports, and meeting rooms than at home these days. In a way it is nice to be out of the office from time to time. But, when you are out for weeks at a time it can become a bit tiresome. And right now I’m exhausted.

More challenging still is trying to close on a house purchase while traveling. It isn’t easy and in this case it is my first purchase. So I am learning and waiting and worrying all at the same time. For kicks, if everything works out, I’ll close on it while I’m on a trip. Good thing I’m not in a hurry to move, I guess.

I’m not looking for sympathy here, but I felt it was worth logging anyway. I suppose the next big purchase is furniture, starting with a new bed!

The Great Cleanup

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It seems as though work never ends these days. I have just had a full day of clean up at work where every possible box, board, and spare part that went unused for the past several months went into the scrap heap. Fine, you say.

I come home and then start to the task of doing exactly the same thing with books, hardware, clothing and anything else I own in preparation for the inevitable move ahead (more on that later). Also fine, you say.

On top of all that I am going through the slogging process of de-HTML-izing another web site I now manage. In the end it will be a good thing, but for now it is just plain grunt work. Sometimes I really wish I didn’t have to do things.

Privacy Online

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I received an email last night from a guy who has his email address posted on another site I manage. He was concerned that there weren’t safeguards on the email addresses and that they could be picked up by spammers. Good point.

In fact, as I look through several sites I find this to be a common problem: it is hard to be both open and informationally available while also being closed off from ill doers. As I search for the solution, if there is one, I suppose I’ll err on providing less information for the sake of better privacy.

It makes me wonder where the balance point is online. Isn’t being on a public network an admission of no privacy by proxy?

Drinkin' in Lincoln

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As I sit here in my hotel room at 11:51pm I now realize how little there actually is to do out in the midwest. I am in Lincoln, NE and there is two things I’ve seen to do (and confirmed with a local): drink and tip cows.

Let it be known that I have verified these facts first hand, or at least the drinking part. Now I recall why I left this region in the first place :)

Crazy Travel

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I just found out today that for the next 3 weeks I’ll be going all over the middle and eastern US on various visits. Each trip will consume at least 3 days out of the week and each day I’ll be in a different city and different state.

I’ll have to take the camera with me because I can’t imagine that I’ll have anyone believe all the places I have to visit. Just you wait and see.

Friends

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I had one of those good days today where I’m reminded of how lucky I am to have friends. I had breakfast with one (and her daughter) that I hadn’t seen in a while. I chatted with a couple online for a few hours. And I spent more than hour on the phone with a third. The day pretty much zipped by. Talking and chatting with these folks does make time spent home alone less singular.

Now if only I could have squeezed some more work into the day, I would be caught up for Monday morning.

Picture Edits

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I spent a lot of time today going through all my recent vacation photos and tagging them with metadata so they can be searched. The challenge is that many of them still don’t have good descriptions, so if you don’t know what to look for the metadata makes little sense.

I am hoping to have the final set of photos cleaned up and ready for presentation shortly. I also need to write the story behind the photos. That will be another chunk of time. I wonder what takes more work: shooting the pictures or doing something with them afterward? Where’s that auto metadata builder when you need it?

One more day of Tivo

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I’m really starting to wonder if my Tivo box has it in for me. I come home and find that some programs recorded fine, while other have random audio and video glitches. All of this is happening on a relatively new hard disk, so I don’t know why there are any problems at all. Things should just work.

Strangely, I think this is Tivo’s way of telling me to record less television. Maybe I need to listen rather than watch?