Month: February 2006

The Tower Is Haunted

At least that’s what Felix tells me. After today I’m starting to believe it.

This morning I woke up with a kink in my neck, a sore and slightly dislocated jaw, and a swollen lip. I slept in and was almost late for volunteering. For the most part the majority of the day went fine. I went to the Pubs office (a rare occurrence in recent years) to try and get some work done and instead ended up playing with the pretty iMac.

Aside: The MacBook Pros got a free upgrade yesterday. I’m so excited! I’m totally going down to Carbon Computing after Reading Week to touch the pretties.

Once I got back home, I started going through my study notes again, but that didn’t last long. Eventually I gave up and decided to clean up the kitchen. While doing the dishes, one of the glass cups literally fell apart while I was washing it. Somehow I got cut on both the front and the back of my hand on a single piece of glass. I wasn’t being hard on it while washing it. I still remember the time last year when Ben lost a huge chunk of his pinky finger and the skin around it from putting too much pressure on Melynda’s cup. It was very weird.

Then I went to the Blueprint meeting, which was great except for the fact that the service at Wilf’s still sucks. It took them about twenty minutes to take our order after we were seated, and an hour after that for us to get our pizza. All in all, maybe fifteen minutes was spent actually eating. Needless to say, a shitty tip was left for them.

After that I went and got some hot chocolate, and now I’m just wasting time. Again.

I’m going to be a good girl now and try to study some more before I feel completely useless.


Fun With CSS

For a change I got off my lazy mental ass and decided to learn how margins and padding work in CSS. Of course, this was partly procrasination from studying for a midterm I have on Thursday, but mostly it was because I realised that I had only designed one theme for this blog from scratch. All the rest are modifications of existing themes designed by someone else. It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have many like that. There are lots of amazing themes out there that I wouldn’t be able to design if my life depended on it. Mostly that’s because of javascript, which I haven’t bothered to learn yet. But still.

My favourite has got to be the Regulus theme designed by Ben from Binary Moon. Not only does it look good and have pretty much everything built in, but it also integrates into the WordPress admin panel so you can change the style without editing the code all the time. Not that I haven’t messed with the code lots anyway. I changed it to allow me to use more colour schemes than the ones it comes with, and attempted to add more header images. It turns out the code didn’t like two-digit values for that, so I had to replace the old ones with mine. The good news is that after doing that I can change the entire look of the site just by choosing a colour and image from the admin panel. ‘Tis very handy.

Anyway, back to the CSS fun. Since the library book I need is still out, I decided to just play around with the margin and padding values in my theme and see what happened. Personally I think I learned more doing that than I ever would have from reading a book. I learn a lot of things from books, but tend not to fully understand them until they’re put into practice. In this case I just skipped the book-reading step.

I wanted this theme to be easily viewable for people with resolutions of 800×600, since both Emile and Stephanie tend to use that one. They have old computers and it’s not like they really have a choice to be able to upgrade. I know it’s better to design with older hardware in mind, but I don’t usually care because up until a few months ago everyone that knew about this site had relatively new computers and used resolutions of 1024×768 or more. It looks good this way anyway, so whatever.

I’m rambling now, but the point is that I neglected review to learn something new and it was awesome. There’s still a couple kinks I need to work out with this theme (like the size of the comment form, it’s huge!) but all in all it looks good and is functional so I’m happy. If anyone can find out how the hell I styled the comment form before, I didn’t do it in the CSS (my bad) and I hate inline styles so it’s not in the comment.php file either, I’d really appreciate it. I know that it’s going to bug me until I find out.

EDIT: Okay, I figured it out. I realise now that I almost fixed it by accident last night, but the change made the page act weird so I left it at the time. All I needed to do was delete part of the comment code and then style the width. Simple.


Books!

I’ve started reading again. Working at the library can do wonders for a person’s recreational reading. I don’t have a huge amount of books out, but 8 is much better than none. I blame university for taking away my reading time. There was a time when I could easily read 30 books in three weeks. That’s a wonderful dream now, but not something I could realistically do without neglecting school. High school was easy. I want easy school back.


How to Make Mud Pie

My mom called me today with an unusual request: to write up a recipe to make pies out of mud. Apparently everyone invited to Erma’s wedding is supposed to submit a recipe for the favours, and my dad wanted to use this one as a joke. Since my mom has no sense of humour, the job fell to me to get it to seem like a legitimate recipe while still keeping the joke. Erma loves it. Her mother is the one planning the wedding and I don’t know how she’ll take it, but I don’t really care because it’s Erma’s wedding and I love her.

Mud Pie

This recipe is a family favourite, traditionally prepared in the summer months. You should not have to buy any ingredients as they should be things you already have around the house. For simplicity, I suggest obtaining the necessary materials from a neighbour’s yard on recycling day.

Materials;
1 dented aluminium pie tin
1 empty large stew can
1 stew can lid
1 empty soup can
1 mixing stick

Crust:
2 cups fresh cut grass
1 cup wet sand

Filling:
2 cups dry clay; strained
¼ cup mud-puddle water (may be substituted with ditch water in cases of drought)
12 live ladybugs (or whatever insects are handy)

Directions:

Mix grass and wet sand until evenly distributed. Press onto bottom and sides of pie plate. In the empty soup can mix dry clay and water with the stick until smooth. Pour into prepared crust. Place ladybugs on top of filling. Leave uncovered on picnic table in a sunny location for 4-6 hours. Cut into 6 pieces with stew can lid. Serve with pond-water tea.

Note: This recipe requires a unique sense of taste.

It’s essentially my dad’s recipe. I just took the loose version he had and spruced it up a bit.