in which I write about stuff
I was going to put together a big snapping links post with a bunch of stuff I’ve read today, but now my instinct is to just say f*** it and save it all as a bookmarked group of tabs, because I’m too tired to think of good parenthetical comments or to write an excerpt/summary that will be useful later.
yay.
anyhow, my wilting new vegetable garden is calling me.
Spring is coming along quite nicely; I should have pictures of my daffodils, crocuses, and maybe even tulips soon. This year I’m trying for a vegetable garden, planting from seed, which is essentially new to me, and that’s doing well too.
You wouldn’t know it today, but we’ve had darn good spring weather so far; it makes me feel considerably more lively. As I say pretty much every winter, it’s not the cold or wet that gets me so much as the dark. Now that we’ve turned the corner, I’m soaking up the days of light. (Not always sun, but there’s a difference when it’s raining and dark at 3 pm, versus raining but before sunset at the same time. Or something like that.)
but I don’t have anything to say, or at least not anything to say publically. no hat of pain today, chiro tomorrow, game Saturday. need to finish getting my (new!) character ready. been reading Raven Alder’s stuff (found by way of Dorothea).
my home office is filled with stacks of paper, and I can’t get at my beading things through the stacks. (oh, and I don’t have a good exercise space either.) something to do on Sunday, then?
(writing here because I’m inbetween paper journals; usually I’d just as soon not write about my headaches here, but I want to keep track.)
another 4 am headache; didn’t take anything this time, which I’m thinking was stupid. more nausea/stomach upset this time, also not so much on the top of my head as right above my right temple. and I can feel my neck tension more, not so much as pain, but that the tension tugs at the back of my skull when I bend my head down, and that makes the front of my head hurt.
(ow.)
and he’d implemented Textile support by the time I got back to my email. nice.
I sent Adam, the developer of Pages, a little note to let him know that I’d installed it and was enjoying using it, and with a couple of my (minor) gripes. He wrote back quite speedily; it sounds like he’s already working on them, which is pretty cool.
And then I went back to the Pages site, and noticed that (a) the design has changed, and for the better (very pretty!) and (b) Beta 6.03 is already out (I have 5.0). I’m curious about the plugins concept, but I think I’m going to wait to upgrade until he adds Textile support. After all, I’m still ironing out the design, so it’s no big to wait a little longer.
(0n that note, anybody know why the Simple Tabs-style navigation doesn’t play nice with stuff right underneath it? frankly, I feel as though I were in 7th grade prealgebra trying to make everything add up to figure out where the extra bit of space on :hover comes from!)
woke at 4 am feeling as though my skull had been removed, a hat of pain set directly onto my brain, and then my skull rather ineptly wrapped back on. yay.
this time I tried the muscle relaxants and C. gave me various sorts of massage, which worked well enough for me to get a little sleep before I had to get up this morning.
today was also my first appointment with the chiropractor. I suppose I was almost glad to be going in in the wake of a bad headache, as a reminder of what it felt like and what I need to deal with.
an excellent experience, in several ways….
the appointment took longer than I expected, but most of that was in evaluation and explanation, which I really appreciated — having various ranges of motion measured, being (gently) poked and prodded. (wow, I’ve been really stiff!)
then he “adjusted” me — not very many pops, especially in the lower bits of my back, but what he did with my neck actually made me cry. a whole series of snaps, like a bendy straw being expanded, that released a flood of emotion…not any particular emotion, but the state of emoting. I didn’t cry long or hard, but I found I couldn’t express myself for a few minutes after that.
now I have that light semi-lucid post-headache feeling — in spades. I want either sugar or sleep.
since this morning I got my first comment spam on this blog, I’ve now turned on moderation. this means that no comment will appear until I’ve approved it, which I like because it means no spam here, ever. but I don’t like it because it means no sidebar chit-chat (assuming there were ever to be such a thing) can appear in my absence. but there’s no other option, really. I need to be a hard-@ss now, before anything ugly happens.
tonight I was looking for a Word document that I wrote at least 5 or 6 years ago…which means at least 5 or 6 computers ago. something for the game (we’re ditching Greyhawk in favor of the world that I made up for our last long-term game).
I didn’t find it, but I did find a Web version, in a backup of the site I had when my webhost two hosts ago went suddenly and freakishly bankrupt.
I probably made that page in late 1998 or early 1999, when I was still fairly new to the whole web design thing, and when I saw the file I was dreading what would need to be done to it. to my surprise, it wasn’t that bad to convert to “modern” markup. (warning: gaming fluff!)
* it already had a stylesheet, which just set background and link colors.
* the table of contents was a single paragraph with breaks: easy to convert to a list
* the headers weren’t in hn tags, but that was easy too, since they were the only uses of the font tag (for bigger text).
* in some places I’d used breaks and in others paragraphs. that was the trickiest thing. I found myself adding more headers for readability, to indicate sections.
then 10 minutes of adding styles, most of which was spent picking a couple of subtle colors. I used the most straightforward selectors, which means it doesn’t look quite right in IE, but I’m okay with that. if it were a more important job, I’d work on making sure that the ToC didn’t collide with the text at smaller window (or larger font) sizes, but whatever.
as should be blazingly obvious, I’ve been working through the templates in all of the various tools that i’m using, trying to get a unified site design. I found myself doing something unexpected: not using a single PHP template file…there were just too many slightly different conditions amongst the various tools and their output. I may go back and pull out the site navigation into an external function, and maybe the footer…everything else is going to stay in the various tools.
oh, and I’ve gone entirely nuts with the site maintenance tools:
whew. (I’ve also got a textpattern install, but I’m not doing anything with it yet.) now my todo list is a bit shorter; some fixes and tweaks, but now it’s mostly a question of improving the design. what, you thought it was going to stay grey-on-grey forever?