try always

Saturday, 26 April, 2008 at 7:39 pm

Tweaked the layout, so now it’s more normalish and not all above the fold with scrolling divs. Yay! Not sure how I like how it looks in 800×600 resolutions though. (The sidebar goes all the way to the bottom of the page in order to not create a horizontal scrollbar. :/)

Um, I noticed that in the “Write Post” page of WordPress, the selected categories are no longer at the top of the list… Why was that changed? I was a little annoyed when they first switched from alphabetizing all categories regardless of if they were selected to having selected categories on the top, but I got over that. It was very handy knowing without having to scroll what categories I’d placed the post under.

It’s doubly annoying now because the Categories window is so freaking tiny now. (Height-wise, I mean.) Scroll a little bit and I can barely see where the window scrolled to. Three lines? Five lines? I can never tell! Very disorienting.

edit: Vote for this idea! “Revert the 2.5 Write screen to 2.3”

stupid .Trashes

Wednesday, 23 April, 2008 at 6:33 pm

I had a horrible fight with a Mac today. Gasp and shock! Yes, I found one instance of complete idiocy in the Mac OS.

At the end of my magazine design lab today, I tried to copy the files I’d worked on to my USB drive but got the message that there wasn’t enough space on the disk. Okay, I thought, just delete the older files I don’t need. Simple enough. But no matter how much stuff I deleted (sent to the Trash), paring my files all the way down to just fonts and one photo I definitely didn’t want to leave in the Trash on a public computer, the drive kept reading as “72.1 megs free” (or however the phrase goes on a Mac).

I started freaking out then. Maybe the one photo I’d left on there was royally screwed up (coming from a PC; I’d believe it) and was really larger than the 71 megs it said. Maybe my drive was royally screwed up and I’d have to run out and buy a new one. Maybe there really was 840 megs of stuff somewhere on my drive and it just had to sit there so I’d have to run out and buy a new drive anyway, possibly a 2 gig or larger one to hold all my files.

I come home, plug my USB drive in my trusty (note the sarcasm) Dell PC, and what do I see? A faint folder (I have hidden files and folders showing, because I’m a control freak like that) called “.Trashes”! Of course! Only Macs have extraneous system files that start with a period! I check the folder and yup, all the files I’d “sent to the Trash” were there!

According to this page, Some Basics for Using USB Drives, I would have to go an extra step and empty the Trash on the Mac hard drive to clear my external drive!

How silly of me! Of course I should have thought of that! Who in their right mind wouldn’t know that “deleted” files don’t really get deleted on a Mac until the Trash is emptied! Too bad this is a public computer for the GrC department and the settings are such that any time the computer restarts, any and all files on the Desktop go into the Trash. I’d hate to inadvertently delete some student’s last copy of a file, so I never empty the Trash. (Unless I really don’t want some snoopy person to see the file that I’d just sent to the Trash. *grin*)

Pardon me for saying this, but I really like Microsoft’s option of holding Shift while deleting (or “Recycling” which turns into “Delete” on the right-click menu) and thus bypassing that step of deleting from the Recycle Bin when I really know I don’t want the file anymore. Does Mac have this option somewhere? Cmd+Option+Shift+3+Return+Enter?

I feel like I should carry around an extra, empty USB drive with me now, just in case the one I normally use doesn’t have enough space for what I want to copy. But the only USB drives I have are two 512 meg Dell freebies (yeah, take a Dell drive to a Mac-dominated department *snerk*), a 12 meg Xerox freebie (what the heck is this good for? Transferring Microsoft Office documents?), and my Iomega external hard drive. The Iomega has 60 gigs, but it’s sort of too big for my bookbag, and besides, I have allll my files backed up on there. I don’t want to accidentally mess up the drive by knocking the USB cable out or something.

Maybe I should go out and buy a newfangled 4 gig USB drive …

(Oh yes. I don’t have the files I worked on in lab. I just have the InDesign Exchange file. Yaaay, re-editing many high res photos, what fun I have to look forward to!)

gay comment in ABC Family movie

Monday, 21 April, 2008 at 11:41 pm

I watched ABC Family’s Princess last night. The movie was all right. Nothing spectacular because hey, it was a tv movie, and a family one at that. My favorite part was probably Ithaca’s clothes. XD;

I almost forgot to watch it, even though I’d been planning to watch it since commercials aired in March. Luckily Hidek had to go work in his studio so I made dinner late and caught the movie ten minutes in.

(Spoiler, sort of.) One thing I wonder about, plot-wise, is if Ithaca is 25 and the girl is somewhere in her teens (I assume 15+ but I’m not a good judge of age), then how the heck is that workable? Calliope (the girl) would go through all that training, then in ten years her rule is up, and they need to find the next girl? What? Ithaca was found at 5 … correct? So she had her powers for 20 years. Maybe what’s-his-face (sorry can’t remember his name … William?) was supposed to be searching for those 20 years for the next girl? Or at least 15 or whatever years, however old Calliope is. But then he’s only in his 20s himself, so he would have begun searching at 10? What was that whole thing about seekers being old? (End of spoiler.)

I don’t know, I shouldn’t bother with the little things, it was only a tv movie. *grin*

The big thing I do want to complain about is a comment made by the character William. Remember, I didn’t see the first ten minutes of the movie the first time around, so I watched the rerun at 10 o’clock.

The reporter friend guy gets the invitation to Ithaca’s dinner thing in the mail and his wife says he and William should go, since she’s so very pregnant and can’t fit into any sort of nice evening gown. Then William says (paraphrasing), “Sure, like two guys going to a ball isn’t gay.” What?!

The comment itself isn’t what’s bugging me, it wasn’t that bad (right? I’m not underreacting, am I?). But I do hate that this is a movie airing on ABC Family, so probably kids as young as … 8? could be watching it. I don’t care that William used the word “gay” when kids are watching, but I can’t stand that he used it in that joking, derogatory manner.

Maybe I’m overreacting about this and gays have become so much a part of the norm we can joke about them now…? But it still creates this idea for kids that it’s okay to say things like that! They might say it around other kids, who might or might not be gay, and those kids will feel … however they feel. Marginalized?

:x Sorry, my brain’s shutting down now … this is why I suck at blogging. Argh.

Closing statement … stupid Disney is still furthering a world where gays are seen as bad and can be shot or tortured. Am I going too far there? Oh yeah.

the lesser of two really crappy companies

Wednesday, 9 April, 2008 at 9:43 pm

A headline on Yahoo’s front page: “Report: Yahoo!, AOL in talks; Microsoft, News Corp. mull bid” :(

I was completely against Microsoft buying Yahoo, but now I think I’d prefer it to … AOL.

I never really commented on that whole news item regarding Microsoft and Yahoo, did I? I really do like Yahoo (except for it buying Geocities…) and I am loyal to it probably only because it’s ancient in internet years. I remember not fully understanding the directory they had going on, along with the search that they also offered.

It’s stayed my homepage ever since … well, I switched from Netscape 4.5 to Internet Explorer 5.5 I guess. (Backstory: Netscape had user accounts so for my account I had my website, Inconsistent Angel Things, set as my homepage. I would open IE if I wanted Yahoo.)

I do agree with one comment I’ve heard, that their site layout is jam-packed with everything, but then who would expect a Yahoo to be couth and suave…?

*gasp* nekkid! (of CSS)

Tuesday, 8 April, 2008 at 9:12 pm

I decided to go along with CSS Naked Day (although I’m not signing up, I just don’t care that much), so the whole site is plaintext for at least the next 24 hours. (I know, I’m late for the world-wide 48 hours of April 9th. :( )

I heard of it last year, but I was too late to participate. (Or was it some sort of grey theme site I saw? I don’t really remember. I like the CSS-less theme better anyway.) This year … I am a little bit early for America, woohoo! *laugh*

(Hm, my knowledge is lacking in the area of time zones and eastern/western hemispheres and … such. I know I’m about 17 hours behind Australia … and eight seven hours behind wherever the Greenwich Mean line is. Which means … well I’ve got 27 hours until April 9th is over. At least 32 hours for April 9th to finish … at least through Hawaii. Where is the last land mass to pass to the next day??)

The only thing that really bugs me about this is the Times New Roman. I am no longer a fan of Times New Roman, or its original Times typeface created for The Times in London. But I … must … not … touch!

(If anyone’s curious [another reason why I decided to do this: I have no idea how many people regularly visit this site and figured, why not, it couldn’t hurt too many people :P], I don’t like Times because it’s meant for newspapers: the letters are all smashed and thin and I like round letters, like Tahoma, or Georgia. I can’t stand Arial/Helvetica because they’re so skinny.)