Archive for October, 2004

Man, am I behind.

I had all these goals yesterday, and while I achieved some of them, I did fall considerably short of reaching them all.

I have so many things to write about, baseball being one of them. I watching the series on TV lately, the games have been great, but man I have been useless for going on three weeks now. Although I want the Cardinals to win, at least if the Red Sox do it in four, (two more wins in a row), they can shut up about “the curse” and I can go back to normal life.

Plus something very momentous happened this weekend in someone’s life very close to me that I need to mention, but don’t want to do it lightly. But I don’t want it to be three weeks from now so it is reserved for a “by the way” kind of comment.

To top it off, it doesn’t help that with my new video card I got this game that I have gotten sucked in to, ever more a great reminder why I don’t need a gaming system right now. Justin will get a kick out of this, it is a horizontal scrolling Duke Nukem game, but with great graphics.

So I am thinking positive that I will stay on the ball more tonight.

I posed the question of, “How do I make PDF’s using Microsoft Word” today to my fellow developer. He said, go to PDF 995 and you can download a plugin for Word that allows you to do just that.

When you get to the site click on downloads. Make sure that you download both the PDF995 Printer Drive and the Free Converter Version 1.0.

Once they are finished downloading, double click the installers from wherever you chose to save the file. These should pretty much auto configure.

Then, when in Microsoft Word, when you want to save a file as a PDF, just go up to File > Print and select PDF995 as the option to print. This will open a dialog box that will ask you where you want to save your file, and presto, you have a Word converted PDF.

We have talked about the display property before, but I just wanted to make note here what the defaults are for a select few HTML Selectors.

Elements that default to display:block, and will force a break, are;

p, h1, and div

Elements that default to display:inline and will stay as the name says, inline with other elements, are;

strong, span, and em

Remember, you can change the rules for all of these selectors in your external style sheet in how they display. Here is an example of what you write;

h1, h1, h3 {

display:inline;

}

span {

display:block;

}
In the second example for the redefined span tag, here is what would happen.

The redefined span element with a display of block will now force a break mid line.

This was a pain, and hopefully, it isn’t an omen.

Sarah has asked me twice why I am cheering for the Astros in the Championship series, and I am not. But they have a much cooler and easier symbol to attempt to carve on a pumpkin, or so I thought.

About 3.5 hours later, and stiff neck I was finished. I never remembered curves being as hard as they were, and this seemed like a larger sized carving when I began, but by the end I knew it was pretty small as I was cutting out little slivers just to get the curves to be perfect.

Stay tuned for more pics from this past Sunday and information about our time with the Buissons.

Well, everything is backed up. My fried drive had very few casualties, so I am very thankful for that. It does pay to backup on a fairly regular basis too. So today I ordered my new hard drive, and since I last wrote I have been working on reinstalling all of my programs. I borrowed a drive from work, and will use it until I get my new one and will be able to “ghost” the information and everything else onto the new one when it arrives.

Also today I got to install Windows service pack 2, so I am going to look at the bright side of things, I have a fresh system, all of my data, and am getting a new hard drive.

Sections Updated: Photo Diary, CSS | XHTML

Seeing as I may not have time to write tonight, (We are house hunting and then probably going out to the bar with faculty) I thought I would pass on this little interesting plugin that you can use for Microsoft Word to export PDF’s, and it is a easy and free download.

Sections Updated: Design Tips

Howdy guys, things aren’t going particularly well right now.

I got my video card for dual monitors on Saturday and set it up. A day later my computer took a dump and with some further investigation, it looks like my string of wife induced power surges earlier in the year took a toll on my hard drive and I didn’t even know it.

So we are trying to move that data over and I am going to have to get a new hard drive. So I am writing from work, and won’t be able to update as consistently as I would like. So, I’ll be posting.

Not a particularly great picture, but out of the whole evening, which included having Christine and her little chicas over for lunch, going roller skating with the school, and then going out to the bar afterwards with the faculty, this is the best picture I got that wasn’t beyond blurry.

We had Christine and her daughters over for Simpsons trivia and a dinner full of giggles and little girl chatter on everything from
boys and the definition of “puberty” is to movies and owning exotic animals like raccoons. We were all going to go roller skating, but then Sarah and I got held up, for me something with work I had to help out, and Sarah was trying to clean up the apartment.

By the time we finally got to the roller rink, there were only :45 minutes left, and I had planned on skating, but wasn’t going to pay to skate for only that long. Fortunately Mr. Herre had gotten skates, and had 12 size shoes. It was a blast to do that again, hard at first being back on four squarely set wheels instead of four in a row on my blades, but great none the less.

Then we went to that bar and watched the Yankees kick the hell out of the Red Sox, who have all but rolled over.