I was at a conference a couple of weeks ago, where I got to hang out with a friend that I don’t see very often (like, every two years or so), but when we do, it’s like time hasn’t passed. He’s ridiculously easy to talk to, which we did for hours, and he’s very good at pointing out things that hadn’t occurred to me, and motivating me when I’ve given up on stuff (for example, he’s the one that convinced me to see another doctor two years ago about my knee–the doctor who then discovered the torn meniscus and need for surgery). This time was no exception.

I’ve been in a rut for a long time. I’ve known it, I blogged about it, but haven’t really done anything to get out of it–and no, picking up the hook and needles again doesn’t really count. The key, of course, is getting the hell out of the house. I spend waaaay too much time alone–sure, I have no problem with my own company, but eventually it does become too much. He gave me some suggestions to move me in the right direction, which may or may not stick for the long term, but for now at least it seems to be working.

So I’m going to San Fran soon for a weekend, to attend some Wordpress seminars and to see another dear friend that I don’t see nearly enough. It was totally a whim decision, which I need to do more of.

And I’ve planned some camping trips–or rather, I’m tagging along with my almost-always camping friend on a couple of her outtings. Joshua Tree should be a good place to explore with my bicycle, and Big Bear will be great for the hiking and the smell of trees, which I really miss.

I have more friends visiting in May and June, and my work on other people’s websites will be ending very soon, so maybe, hopefully, if I stay motivated, I’ll finally take my bike out to the beach once or twice in the coming months.

And totally unexpectedly, but I’m excited so I’m putting it here anyway, one of my little brothers is in town, so I’ll be seeing him this week for the first time in four years. Yay!

Which is all well and good, but the second part is, I really need to meet new people, and that’s the hard part. I suck at meeting new people. Really, truly, please don’t make me do it, suck at it. I am weird and awkward and stay stupid stuff all the freakin’ time, and my friends love me anyway, but I hate to inflict that on strangers. I haven’t really figured this part out yet, but it’s on the List.

I also really need to move out of my apartment, but that one may be the hardest task of all–I hate change, I hate moving, I hate new situations that run the risk of sucking more than the old situation. And there are a couple of other steps on the to do list, that I may or may not do, but those are the key points.

So that’s the state of me. Time will tell if I can rock as Captain of my own Destiny, or if I wind up sitting on a reef somewhere. Again.

And since I hate imageless posts, here’s a tattoo design I’m considering (no final decisions yet, either on design or even if I’ll definitely get one). It symbolizes rebirth encircled by hope.

It’s Drupal day again, and import data problem continues to piss me off (migrate refuses to pass properly export my tables to View, and eventually just stopped importing my table rows at all; and node-import keeps failing at step 7, line 668). So instead of beating that dead horse some more, I moved on to problems I could actually solve, and solve them I did!

First, the breadcrumbs. I needed to a) include breadcrumbs, and b) style them to match the design. I used the Menu Breadcrumb module to solve the first problem, so that the breadcrumb would draw from Primary Links instead of Navigation. For the second, I first turned to Pro Drupal Development by John K. VanDyk–page 181 had the advice I needed, i.e. to add the following function to my theme’s template.php to change the breadcrumb separator from ‘>’ to ‘: :’ :

function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {
if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {
return ''. implode(' : : ', $breadcrumb) .'';
}
}

But that wasn’t enough. I needed to remove “Home” as the first item of the breadcrumb, so I changed the above code to this:

function phptemplate_breadcrumb($breadcrumb) {
if (!empty($breadcrumb)) {
unset($breadcrumb[0]);
return ''. implode(' : : ', $breadcrumb) .'';
}
}

And that fixed that problem! The rest was just updating the css in the breadcrumb call in my page.tpl.php file:
 

For some reason, my css wasn’t working on the “: :”, so I fonted them, but otherwise this worked perfectly! Breadcrumb success!

Except, then the client wanted the breadcrumb changed for one content type. No problem!

(shoot, can’t put the code here without serious edits, due to its extreme php-ness. Damn! But there’s good info on hiding blocks for specific node types here.)

Seriously, I was on fire today!

Next problem, the drop down menus were appearing under the flash slideshows on six pages. I thought it had something to do with Nice Menus, but after much googling, I found the fix to this was actually in the Flash embed code, so I added this code to the swfobject code for each:

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");

And those are the things I fixed today. Woot!

I’ve been working on a new project at work, and it’s making me crazy. I’m working with a team (of two) to create a Flash application using the Google Map API for a multitouch table. Not many people seem to be developing for this specific platform, and I can’t find much help online in the various Flash forums, so I created a new blog (http://flashtouch.wordpress.com) where I can document what I’m doing and the issues that I’m having, with the hope that maybe someone else is out there having similar issues, or better yet, someone who has already solved my issues.

If you’re interested in Flash AS3, Google maps, and multi-touch gesture events, drop on by! I could use all the help I can get!

So I finally fixed the comment widths, using the following in the style.css:

#edit-comment{
 width: 430px;
}
#comments {
 width: 430px;
}
#comment-form {
 width: 430px;
}

It’s the only thing I’ve been able to fix today. I still can’t make the fckeditor stop centering while also showing the custom styles. It’s very insane making.

So I’m knitting again. Woot! I finished a (unfortunately heavy) orange and tag-yarn scarf last week, and now I’m working on two scarves/shawls (stockinette to the end, then drop every third stitch). One is sparkly red yarn (Karabella Stardust) and will be this year’s holiday scarf, and the other is a tweedy Plymouth Encore that I’m going to have to frog and restart, ’cause it’s too wide for only two balls of yarn.

I started up again because work, both my day job and my freelance projects, have been stressing me out, and after several near-meltdowns, I had a “D’oh!” moment and realized that I’d given up more than just something to do with my hands when I stopped knitting–I’d given up an important stress-reliever. I can’t believe I ever forgot how relaxing it is work with my hands and let my mind fly loose. Stupid.

Anyway, in other news, Drupal continues to kick my ass. I spent four hours yesterday trying–and failing–to beat the forums into submission. I still can’t figure out why setting a block exception for “forum” only works for the forum posts and not the other forum pages, and google was no help this time. I picked up another Drupal development book at B&N today, one more advanced and with far more customization examples than my other two books, so hopefully that’ll help, but for today I’m leaving the forums alone and working on some of the other things for the site that I might actually be able to fix. I need to get a few more successes under my belt before I tackle the evil forums again, and not just because my ego needs reinflating. I also need to have something closer to complete by Monday for the client. Yay?

And finally, because posts without pictures are just plain boring, here is a gratuitous photo relating to nothing else in this post. It’s from earlier this week at work, when the sun was setting and the fog was rolling in from two different directions. It was so damned beautiful that night I took about 40 pictures, but IMO this is one of the better ones.

I found it! The problem that’s been making me crazy for three weeks has finally been solved, thanks to FireBug! Woot!

Note for the future: When there’s a mysterious horizontal line appearing at the top of a table, in Drupal, in Firefox, go to modules/system/system.css and change the damned tbody border that’s hiding in there.

Woot! No more horizontal line!

I decided I didn’t like that last change and took it out. ‘Course, I was stupid and didn’t do it the smart way, i.e. I didn’t copy the files before I went making changes to them, so there are some other changes that ended up in there by accident when I found I couldn’t remember how to undo what I’d done before. And if you followed that, you’re a smarter person than I.

Sadly, I’m having a ‘dumb programmer’ day all around. I’ve been working on a Drupal site for a friend/client. I generally don’t do freelance because I’m afraid of being unable to deliver what they want, and surprise surprise, here I am today totally stuck on how to create and format the drop down menu the client wants. I can do it in CSS and I can do it in Javascript (or rather, I know where to find programs that can do that), but I have no idea how to merge them with Drupal so that the menu items are controlled by the CMS, without hardcoding them in. It’s making my head hurt, and honestly, when I get frustrated I can’t focus. Brilliant programmer, that’s me!

My brain is mush for today, which sucks ’cause I only have one more day to make real progress that I can show to the client, and if I mush out again tomorrow, I’m toast. Biting off more than one can chew might be a good way to learn things, but it’s got that nasty ‘nervous breakdown’ side effect. Boo! Hiss!

And since all posts are boring without a pretty picture, check out this reflective shadow that was cast from my glass dining table to the ceiling earlier today. That’ll wake a person up for sure!

THE GOVERNMENT

ALREADY RUNS

MEDICARE,

AND ALWAYS HAS!

SINCE 1965!

LOOK IT UP!!

Good freakin’ lord.

In helping my sister set up her new website/blog, I’m learning some new stuff to help my own site. Or is it hindering? As you can see, my latest “improvement” is changing the homepage so it shows excerpts of new posts instead of the full content of each. I thought it would make the page more manageable and less like a 12 story building, but I’m not sure the execution works like I pictured it. I don’t know if the images are to small, or the excerpts are too short, but there seems to be too much space everywhere. Unfortunately my PHP skills are still in the baby-steps stage, so I’m not sure I can change it to the way I want. Phoo.

This place definitely needs an overhaul, regardless. The design, the content, the architectural structure (or lack thereof)…. Sadly there are at least three other websites in line for my spare time before this one, and two of them are paying gigs.

Nancy and Paula

I’m back from my fabulous 40th birthday celebratory cruise to the Caribbean. There was much snorkeling (that’s my sis and me in the pic, in Grand Cayman) and swimming and walking and kayaking and shopping and sweating (lordy was it hot and humid!) and drinking and singing (karaoke and piano bar FTW!) and eating and relaxing and reading and laughing and not nearly enough dancing (my knee and ankle just didn’t cooperate) and celebrating in general. And perhaps best of all, I only gained two-tenths of a pound-?!! Woot!

For those so inclined, pics can be found here (that’s the edited-for-quantity set).

I need more kayaking in my life. Good exercise combined with zero strain on my weakened lower extremeties = general awesomeness. More snorkeling would be awesome too, but to be honest, the Pacific scares me a bit. (Sharks!)

ION, I need something new to look forward to. Too soon to start planning for next year’s Disney trip? Hmm…..