trisweb.com

It is officially the Leap Day. You only get one every four years—like the summer olymipcs, it’s special. Now go out and do something cool with it!

This is “A Day in the Life – The Leap Day,” a fun little excuse to take lots of pictures. Spread it around! It would be really cool to see tons of leap days.

Today has been laundry and web design day. I must have washed every piece of fabric I own, and I own too much. It feels really good to have a whole lot of clean clothes though. You can actually decide what to wear! Hmm… and a haircut would be nice. Maybe I’ll get one tomorrow. And web design—the new Cal Band web site is being redesigned, and we’re supposed to have concepts by Tuesday. So I spent the night designing. That is, after I came back from the basketball game, where we whalloped OSU. Good times, good times…. ::

I actually woke up today, which is somewhat unusual. Usually I get up and walk around, but I’m still generally asleep. And I didn’t get much sleep at all either… had to wake up at 9… had an excruciatingly long and tedious EE lab on operational amplifiers, and did CS for the rest of the night. I even had to skip the PR meeting to finish it, and I feel bad about it because I finished early and might have been able to make it. Still, if some bug had showed up I would have needed the extra time.

It rained today; very hard in the morning, and more showers and some lightning just a couple hours ago. We started a fire downstairs and sat around listening to the thunder and talking. Good times. And, in case you’re ever arguing about how to count the thunder, sound travels at about 1000 feet per second, so it’s (about) a mile every 5 seconds.

I find new things I like about WordPress every time I visit. Like, if you scroll down to the bottom of this page, you’ll notice a little timer that tells you how long it took to generate the page. That’s a PHP thing, and not really useful, but still pretty cool. The link manager is also wonderful—much better than having to edit the main template every time I want to change a link.

Deleting my MovableType blog was a little weird… I had to remember that I backed it up and imported the whole thing here. After that, it was easy. I also deleted my fledgling photolog, which was going nowhere, frankly. It was just way too hard to post. I need it to be a one step no-image-editor process. Maybe I can figure out a way to do it better in WP. Until then, keep checking my Gallery ::

As promised, I have completely redesigned trisweblog, and moved it to a new blogging software which I adopted without hesitation. It’s called WordPress, and it is slick. It had all the features of Movable Type, but it’s written in PHP, so it’s easier to program for, faster, and generally better in every way. This is my first post, but I am liking it better already. Not to mention my new design… I think it’s better than the last one. Plus it’s entirely CSS based, standards compliant, and hand-written. Oh man, gotta love those smilies :). Okay, now I seriously need to go to bed. But I’m glad this is finally done.

Oh, you want more? Fine, have a link or two. I went to the CSS Zen Garden a lot for inspiration; it’s truly amazing what some people can do with graphic arts, and this is a beautiful site that just shows off the power of standards-based web design.

Also, Jon Hicks has a great article on the design of the new Mozilla Firefox branding, which I think looks great. Not to mention the browser rocks. Honestly, if you’re still using Internet Explorer, Switch NOW. Thank you.

Now I can sleep. ::

This, my friends, is an update.

Actually, I do have things to say.

First of all, I went on a weekend PR-comm meeting, which was lots of fun and lots of meeting. Both parts were good; we did a lot of planning and talking and more planning, and ate lots of good food.

Secondly, today was a frickin work party here at TH. That actually means, “3 hours of forced manual labor that starts at 8 AM because of a stupid SHB that no one’s going to because they were all up at 8 AM.” That’s called a paradox. But I got off easy, sorting through all the computer junk in the basement. We decided that nothing was worth keeping. That did not take a computer savvy person to figure out, but we did a lot of busy testing and debating to make it seem like it did. I was very disappointed that people were made to mow the meadow by the creek—it was very nice and now it’s just a patch of dirt. I guess most people see meadows as overgrown lawns, which, technically, they are; because overgrowth is natural. We just need some deer to keep things in check. Which, by the way, have been by our house before on several occasions. In any case, it was mostly disappointing because all of the outdoor work was completely useless. People cleared out entire areas of greenery for no reason whatsoever, and it was all just to give them something to do. Shame. Though, the indoor work was a good thing; the entire basement has been organized and cleaned.

Third, I have a note about delivery of online purchases. I got two CDs (a couple of David Wilcox’s originals I’ve been searching for for a while) off Barnes and Noble’s web site with a gift card, ordered January 30th. They arrived yesterday. I also ordered a CD (the soundtrack from the movie “Contact”) from one of Amazon.com’s used stores yesterday. It arrived today. The lesson: don’t order things that ship from a warehouse in Pensylvania; order things that ship from a wherehouse in San Fransisco.

I also found a new weblog program called WordPress which I plan on switching to sometime very soon. It’s in PHP, so unlike MovableType, which builds a static site from dynamic templates, WordPress rebuilds the site each time dynamically. It’s a much better model, and much easier to design for if you know PHP. The interface is also slicker and faster, and very CSS and standards oriented. And it imports MovableType, so I get to keep the last year of entries. Expect a new design and faster operation sometime in the next week or so. ::

Just in time for valentines day, natalieportman.com put up the beautiful backgrounds I designed. Check them out. They’re the last 4 in the 1280×1024 section, or you can click them above.

I do believe, frankly, they’re mostly better than the rest. Heck, that’s why I made them Enjoy.

And, unfortunately, Cal lost the Stanfurd game tonight by a few points… 11 to be exact… The first half was great though—we had momentum, and almost ended up by 5. Good stuff. Go bears, beat the Ducks…. ::

The new version (0.8) of the Mozilla Firefox browser (previously Firebird) is out today. It has many excellent improvements, including a bookmark manager that is actually useful. I also notice it’s responsiveness and speed has greatly improved since 0.7.

If you don’t know about Firefox yet, now is the time to switch. I honestly have not used Internet Explorer for the last six months—Firefox is an excellent, standards-compliant open-source browser with tons of features like built-in popup blocking, tabbed browsing, skins and themes, and a great download manager.

If you do upgrade, I would highly reccomend the Luna Blue theme by Christopher Cook. It goes with Windows XP better than the default theme. ::

Been working on CS homework all night—it’s a little more difficult to do anything in C than it is in Java. Some things are easier, of course, but man, the details kill ya.

Anyway, I’ve got another day and I’ve got a good start. I should be alright.

The rest of the night has been spent on a mouse hunt. Will saw one scurry out our door (from our room), hesitate, then scurry quickly back in to an unknown hiding place. We have not found it yet. We have traps set, hopefully they work.

Mouse hunting is fun but tiring. ::

Want to hear Norah Jones’ new album, the whole thing, right now, pre-release, for free, legally?

Amazon.com is streaming it in both Windows Media 64k and Real. Wonder what they paid for that… ::

After a listen, I’d have to say it’s probably one to get. Some of the songs are quite a bit more upbeat than her debut CD, which was criticized as being too homogenous; which it was, but not to great loss…

This one is different, for sure. Like, one of the songs is decidedly bluegrass, but it’s great, lots of variety, lots of style, a perfect voice, as usual. Something to enjoy even more than her last album. ::