This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter). Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon

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School Picnic

Early today (from about 0 to 2 UTC) was the picnic for the 7th grade kids and their parents. We went. We ate picnic foods and drinks. We talked to other parents while the kids did their kid things. Brandy wasn’t feeling great, but we still managed to do our social duties.

I can’t believe she is 7th grade now. One more week until school starts up again. Summer was good, but school starting again will be even better. It gives a good kind of structure. Plus I think Brandy and Amy have been driving each other crazy cooped up with each other for just a tad too long. :-)

After my night of CSS I basically slept from about 16:00 to 22:00 before getting up to get ready for the picnic. When I got home around 3 I immediately fell asleep again. Then I got up around 7, and have been up watching TV and futzing around ever since. Everybody else is asleep and I probably should be too, but I’m not.

I messed a little more with the site CSS, but didn’t solve the IE problems. I’m starting to think maybe I don’t care. But I know I should care. And I’m thinking about moving various elements to include files that currently are handled in other ways.

Of course, there are all sorts of other projects and things I need to do at home, but this one is the one that got my attention the last few days. But perhaps it is time to move on to other things.

I am rambling because I know I should sleep, but I’m so off cycle now that I’m not quite ready to do so. But I think I am tired. And hungry. Maybe I’ll go find a snack. Normally on Sunday’s I’ve been getting up early, because Ivan and I typically record the podcast at 16:00, which is earlier than I would usually get up on a Sunday. But Ivan is traveling again this week, so it will be a Samalogue and I can potentially sleep in and do it a bit later in the day.

But still. I should probably try to turn the brain off for a bit.

But maybe first that snack.

I Hate CSS and IE

So, right around when I should have been going to sleep, I noticed a couple formatting things I didn’t like on the site (relating to how the images flowed when they were taller than a blog entry), and I noticed one downright formatting bug (relating to the site footer on pages where the left and right columns were longer than the middle column).

So I spent all night messing around with the css for this site, and on some of the layout in the php as well. I finally got it so both of the issues I had been initially annoyed by were fixed in both Firefox and Safari. I was already thinking of some additional tweaks to adjust other things I’d thought about.

But then I went and looked in IE. It is completely broken in IE. The left column doesn’t show up at all, and things are overlapping in the right column. And as much as I’d really like to completely ignore IE, it looks like about 33% of my site vistitors are on IE 6, and another 24% or so are on IE 7. I actually don’t have IE 7, so can’t check on that. Maybe MS fixed whatever is broken in IE 7.

But regardless, I know it is broken for IE 6. And that is just so annoying.

And the sun is up now. And I’ve got some things I have to do today. So I can’t just sleep all day.

Plus, I really don’t want to go to bed without “solving” this. But I’m not sure what to try next.

My other alternative would be to restore things to how they were before I started messing with them today, but I really can’t say I’m happy about that alternative either.

And at this point I’m finally tired and need to crash for as long as I can. So I need to stop.

Maybe I’ll just leave it in the works in Safari and Firefox but not in IE state while I sleep, then look at this again once I’ve had a night’s rest.

If anybody out there has a lot of good CSS knowledge, take a look at my current CSS and HTML and give me any hints you may have.

Bleh.

Nap time. I’ll worry about this once I’m rested. Worst case, I put it all back how it was yesterday. But that would be quite annoying.

Anyway, I’m done for now.

Did I say “Bleh” yet?

IE Sucks.

DVD: The Sound of Music

Today it was time to watch another DVD. And not just another DVD, but the next one on my quest to watch all of the movies on the 100 Years 100 Movies (1998 version) list. I started this quest soon after the list came out. I’m just a little, uh, slow. I had watched the movies from #100 down to #56 (M*A*S*H which I watched in January this year). So now it was time for #55, The Sound of Music.

I’d of course seen this before, but the last time was quite some time ago. And I am admittedly a sucker for the sappy sentimental type of movie. Usually not for musicals in general, but for ones with songs I’ve known all my life and can sing along to, yeah, I like those. Well, OK, not actually sing along, because I’d never sing in front of others, even Brandy and Amy, but sing in my head maybe. :-)

Anyway, it is a long movie and there are a few slow parts, but in between there are all the classic songs and the cute kids and all that. There were a few parts I had forgotten. I had no memory at all that there was a wedding in the movie. Or the scene in the cemetery.

In any case, yes I like this movie. It is worth seeing… but about once or twice a decade is plenty.

Cinnamon Bun

I really think I need to get into the breakfast habit. Basically all my adult life I’ve pooh poohed and ignored breakfast except on rare occasions. (Not counting breakfast food for lunch or dinner at Denny’s or the like… love that.) But breakfast at breakfast isn’t something I do on a regular predictable basis.

But today (and not just today) I rolled into work a little later than I like, then sat there at the desk useless for a few minutes before I realized that I really was quite hungry.

Went downstairs to the snack bar and got a cinnamon bun and a white chocolate mocha. I’m almost done eating it and am already feeling a bit better and like my brain is almost functional. I a couple seconds I’ll be able to be productive.

I should probably think about trying out a breakfast every day policy and seeing how it would work out. The problem is, of course having time for breakfast means getting up earlier. Getting up earlier means either less sleep or going to bed earlier, neither of which are all that exciting.

Oh well. The Cinnamon Bun is gone. Time to do real stuff.

Ordered Amy’s iMac

It took a little longer than I’d thought it would to sell the stock and mutual funds I was using to fund this and move the money around to the right places, but I just ordered the new iMac for Amy.

There was some last minute hesitation on if I was really going to max the thing out, or if I’d go with less memory and/or drive space to save a boatload of cash. In the end though, I decided to stick with my “max it out, by the time three years is up she’ll find a way to use it” philosophy. But Gulp. I could have spent a lot less and gotten something that would have been more than reasonable for her for now… but here we go.

Between the monthly private school bills and this, we’re now pretty much guaranteed to be cash poor for the rest of 2007. She’d better appreciate it and spend every moment for the next year thanking me!

Well… she is 11. So that won’t happen. As Brandy says, some shrieks of glee when it first arrives and gets set up, and then there won’t be another word of thanks ever. But hey, that’s the way it goes.

And we really need this. Continuing to share my iMac with her ever increasing needs for computer time wasn’t working. And Brandy’s cheap temporary laptop she bought in 2006 is literally falling appart. (It is on the agenda to replace in 2008.) So she needed a machine. Did she need THIS machine? Well, probably not.

But damn it, I want to give her the best I can manage, so I did.

Yes, I’m a Whore

Yup, added some Google Ads. Just thought I’d finally give them a shot. Cause I want that $5 every 10 months or whatnot from the random people who stumble on this site by accident and then stumble away again through one of those links.

So far just PSAs. We’ll see if anything else ever shows up and if so what. In part, I’m just curious about what will show up, cause I certainly don’t have enough traffic to make any actual cash. But I’ve been meaning to try this for literally years, so today was the day.

I’ll keep them up awhile. If they start to really annoy me, at some point I may get rid of them again.

Layout Changes

As you might have noticed, I’ve been futzing with the site layout a bit today. Basically I moved some things to a new right column and started letting the center column expand if you have a wider window.

I’ve also added the little “AbulReading” Google Reader widget so I can mark things I am reading there and think are interesting but don’t have the time or desire to explicitly blog about. Basically I’m putting anything there from the feeds I’m subscribing to that I actually bother to read rather than just skimming a headline or whatnot.

If I stick with Google Reader that will stay. If I don’t, it will go. We shall see. I may add other things as time goes on since the new column gives me more room to play.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated as usual.

Gotta Love the Pirates

We’re Back!
(Suprnova)

Suprnova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated suprnova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!

We were going to keep this site a secret until we had finished it, but of course it leaked, that’s how internet works. So now that the word is out, we’re releasing it!

Please consider these first weeks/months as a beta test. Since we love all you guys and gals so much we decided to keep it an open beta test. That means, please behave, don’t complaint to much and if you discover any weird bugs or problems, let us know.

Some of you have also already discovered our new forum, Suprbay! Which is a joint forum for both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. Discuss movies, music, love and whatever with your fellow pirates.

Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

y’arr!

(via Digg)

Gotta Love the Pirates

We’re Back!
(Suprnova)

Suprnova has been down for some years due to some heavy pressure from the copyright lobby. The former owner sloncek donated suprnova to The Pirate Bay – and as you know, we like to kick ass and bow for noone!

We were going to keep this site a secret until we had finished it, but of course it leaked, that’s how internet works. So now that the word is out, we’re releasing it!

Please consider these first weeks/months as a beta test. Since we love all you guys and gals so much we decided to keep it an open beta test. That means, please behave, don’t complaint to much and if you discover any weird bugs or problems, let us know.

Some of you have also already discovered our new forum, Suprbay! Which is a joint forum for both Suprnova and The Pirate Bay. Discuss movies, music, love and whatever with your fellow pirates.

Finally, some words for non-internet loving companies: This is how it works. Whatever you sink, we build back up. Whomever you sue, ten new pirates are recruited. Wherever you go, we are already ahead of you. You are the past and the forgotten, we are the internet and the future.

y’arr!

(via Digg)

Good Thing We’re Waiting

Hurricane Dean, now a Cat 5, is heading right toward the spot I selected for my next random trip.

We’re not going this year of course, maybe next. But regardless, hopefully it won’t be that bad. This area is less populated than the northern end of the Yucatan, so it isn’t as bad a scenerio as if it was heading up there. But a Cat 5 is a Cat 5, and for those who are indeed in its path, I’m sure this will not be fun.