Ramblings of the Mildly Insane

From the wonderful amazing people over at Angry Alien Productions who brought you The Exorcist and Titantic along with a slew of others in 30 seconds (and re-enacted by bunnies), you are now presented with… It’s a Wonderful Life - Bunny Style. Oh, and it does a wonderful job of summing up the movie in only 30 seconds too.

“he bought me beer, he bought me pizza, he bought me flowers, and he bought me ice-cream and cheesecake - man that was the most romantic week ever.”

My desktop has a tendency to become cluttered. I’m sure many others have the same dilema. Well, I’ve finally decided to do something about it. Thanks to **** for his wonderful idea of creating a custom desktop and that is just what I did.

Inspired by one of Keith’s designs and geared with Suckerfish knowledge, I created my graphics (well, only one big graphic) in Photoshop, the XHTML and CSS coding (both of which validate, not that it even matters).

Click on the image to see the almost full size desktop - opens in a new window (800×600)

How did I do it?

First, I considered my dilema. I cannot stand a cluttered desktop. I prefer no more than 2 (maybe 3) icons on my desktop at any given time, however in the past months I have found myself with 2 (usually 3) rows of icons and shortcuts.

Once I knew what the problem was, I came up with a solution. Condense everything into a folder safely tucked away in the deeper realms of the drive with one click access.

Then I did some planning. I thought about what programs I used most often and which ones I would use more often if I remembered that I had them. I then thought about what would be important to me.

After all of that, I rolled up my sleeves and put it all together. The first thing that hit me was IE and its support of CSS so I needed to add a few bug fixes for my desired layout. I even had to add a bit of Javascript (for the dropdown menus). Designing and coding the page was easy enough, it only took a few hours.

The real problem I had was actually getting the programs to execute without prompting me to download or save or about possible security issues. After a bit of going back and forth, considering some shell scripting - eh hem - I’m not a programmer so that was out the window in a heartbeat. Then a miracle happened - I found this website.

After installing the LaunchinIE and setting it up, my links all work like a charm and I can launch all my programs with a single click of my mouse.

Right now I have to manually edit the content on my page - you may or may not have noticed the empty “Yesterday I accomplished…” and “Today I will accomplish…” sections - I’m hoping to find a way to turn my desktop into a truly dynamic one with a custom CMS, but for now the “Edit Desktop” link will do.

Since I’m half asleep, I’ll have to continue this tomorrow with a lot more detail on what, when, and how. But before I finish up - I want to mention a few perks of designing your own desktop.

It looks the way you want it to. It can remain clutter free. Fewer hassles (you only need to make sure it looks good on one computer in one browser - yours). Your font selection is only limited to what’s in your FONT folder. Your graphics can be as big as you want because you don’t have to worry about download times or even accessibility.

That’s it, I’m goin’ to bed.

UPDATE: I actually took the time to write out more concrete notes for those that are interested.

This post is going to be a total rant: theives can just go to hell - screw the handbasket. I hope someone catches them and throws their ass in jail for the rest of their natural lives and a few after that if it’s possible.

Today I’m busy doing damage control b/c some dumbass got my credit card number and the worst part - I found out they most likely got my credit card info through no fault of my own. One of the merchants who had a test charge on my bank account (who, incidentally, is also doing damage control from the hundred other credit cards that were used against their website) informed me that people skim credit cards that are in the mail.

Yeppers, simply because my credit card was up for renewal and it arrived in the mail - that was it - someone decided it was well within their right to steal my money and attempt to buy their christmas presents with it…

My best advice, if you’re one of those unfortunate individuals who gets a renewal credit card in the mail around the Dec timeframe, check the envelope and make sure it’s not opened in any way - doesn’t have to be torn or anything, just make sure it’s still tightly sealed. Wait until your real card expires to activate your new one. Keep a watchful eye on your statements.

Me, in my braindead state of mind decided it’d be a good idea to install Kaspersky on my system (already running Norton System Utilities) - while dead tired - and just shut off my computer for the evening as if all was well…boy was I in for a surprise this morning.

I started up my computer and it felt like I was in some sort of tarpit, which I thought quite odd b/c I have 1G of memory on this machine and it’s more than capable of handling just about any program I can throw at it. I checked my system resources (which took up a good 10 minutes just to load up), that’s when I caught the clue - I installed Kaspersky.

I really wanted to get pissed at the Kaspersky, but quite frankly I couldn’t - it’s lightyears better than Norton IMHO - so, I had to reboot Windows in safe mode and temporarily disable Norton. That worked, now everything’s peachy.

So anybody out there about to download a new AV program, I strongly suggest you run msconfig and shut off your old one first…

Just upgraded my blog to Wordpress 1.2.2 - been putting it off for a couple days now, but decided it’s time to take the plunge (and eventually do the upgrade for my clients too…had to test it on my site first though).

One small recommendation before upgrading - disable any active plugins you may have going…I know one in particular (subscribe to comments by Scriptygoddess) caused an error when upgrading.

My father and I have always had our problems. He’s made his mistakes, but he’s changed. I’ve made my mistakes, but I’ve changed too. We never really spoke about life in general or just shoot the breeze. I’m not saying he’s a bad father by any means, he did the best he could with what he had, and I appreciate every bit of it.

But this morning, I received the strangest phone call. He called the house, then he called my cell, then he called my house again - so I answered because I figured it was probably important. He asked me how I was doing because he had a dream about me. He dreamt I was 2 months pregnant and that I had an abortion and he wanted to make sure I was okay and nothing was wrong.

Odd dream and I assured him I was not pregnant, nor had any abortions. That conversation turned into a heartfelt talk. He didn’t want to host Thanksgiving at his new house and he wanted me to tell my sister. My sister normally hosts all Thanksgivings and Christmas’s at her home - no matter what. He also tried to get me to tell her he won’t be making it to Christmas this year either.

No one gets out of Christmas. It’s sacred. It’s all that my sister has and it’s how she copes - she asks for nothing more than Thanksgiving and Christmas - that’s all. If it were up to me, Thanksgiving and Christmas and News Year would not exist anymore - period.

Not that I don’t love the spirit or the season, or the sentiments - it’s just very hard. After I convinced him that the only reason I even go to the gatherings is simply to see my family - to see my sisters and my daddy, all together in one place again. And I believe he understood my point, thank goodness.

That conversation turned into that of the ex - how I don’t really know, but I know it all started with “You know, I really like that boy…” and I asked “why the hell am I the only one who wants to hold off on this whole - getting back together thing - it seems everyone is trying to push me into his arms”. He explained to me that people make mistakes, but we need to forgive, learn, grow, and move on from them. I said I understood and that’s why I was waiting to make a decision.

After listening to my side of the conversation, he declared I was “wise beyond my years” and that I’m right to wait. If the ex is really sincere, then he’ll be patient just the same. No one can ever take from you what is truly yours.

Having these lucid conversations with my father - not like he was the man who raised me delivering the hammer of household law - but like one adult to another kind of scares me. I worry so much about losing him and sometimes it just seems like he’s trying to make his final ammends. All in all, I’m glad that he’s doing well and he’s okay and all I really want are just more of those conversations. To hear him happy and speaking to me instead of yelling at me for something and listening with open ears to my side.

Damn skippy - money’s tight and I had to get creative
Now I need to find a way to make it manly so I can finish off the list…

And just for good measure (and if you’re broke too), I’ll include the directions that came with it:
You need four maxis to make a pair.
Two of them get laid out flat, for the foot part.
The other two wrap around the toe area to form the top.
Tape or glue each side of the top pieces to the bottom of the foot part.
Decorate the tops with whatever you desire, silk flowers, etc.
These slippers are
Soft and Hygienic
Non-slip grip strips on the soles
Built in deodorant feature keeps feet smelling fresh
No more bending over to mop up spills
Disposable and biodegradable
Environmentally safe
Three convenient sizes: Regular, Light day, and Get out the Sand Bags.

Gotta give a shout out to Caerlion for sending it - Thanks

After reading about MT author comment highlighting on Dan’s blog, I became a little jealous (I admit it) - I really wanted to have my comment replies to be differentiated from the others and was glad to find Tom’s website which outlined one pretty dern nifty trick to get the same results in wordpress.

I had it running for a while, but as I was working on setting the same thing up for a client, I realized something - something I didn’t notice before. I was using Kitten’s background hack to alternate different style classes to odd/even comments. Combining these two techniques would give an extra unwanted class which would invalidate the page (and possibly cause some styling faux paux’s). So I came up with a little work around (very small one).

I won’t go into all the details because the instructions for each hack are already online (and very easy to follow I may add). First, set up your comment background hack according to kitten’s instructions and set up your author comment highlighting according to Tom’s instructions - except you can skip adding anything to the <li></li> just yet.

This is where my little tweak comes into play. Somewhere in the <li></li> around line 38 in wp-comments.php (the file you should have been editing all along), you will insert this code in leu of Tom’s and Kitty’s:

<?php if($isByAuthor) { echo 'class="author-comment"';} else { if($i%2) { echo 'class="alt-comment"';} }$i++ ?>

in your style sheet, you will have two new li classes:
#commentlist li.author-comment (style how your comments will look)
#commentlist li.alt-comment (style how the alt - odd - comments will look)
#commentlist li (you can use your regular list styling properties for all other comments )

Disclaimer: I am not a programmer. I came up with this quick little fix because I wanted to use two hacks that weren’t initially playing nice with each other as I had them set up. I’m posting this to my blog in hopes it may help some others out who may have overlooked this.