101 posts
Just spending the day today wrapping up loose ends and getting ready to head for Seattle. Gonna spend Monday night through Thursday up there with the in-laws, and will be meeting the sis-in-law's boyfriend, so it should be fun.
I was the top scorer on the MM certification for the week I took the exam ;). My name will be listed in the annals of history at the Certification Challenge Archives. once it moves off of the main page. We've all gotta have our moment in the sun, no matter how small right?
For the longest time I've been considering a dual monitor setup for my system at home. I currently have a 17" LCD, and I've been considering adding a second video card an a 15" LCD to compliment it. Well, I was looking for a 15" LCD at Dell this morning (I have a Dell Dimension, and my monitors must match dontcha know) when I ran across a sweet 18" dual monitor setup. It runs about 2 grand, but my mouse finger is twitching... I'll be reworking that budget for next year, and hopefully Dell will have a post-christmas sale :). I can dream right?
Hurry Friday... hurry. I'm ready for my field trip.
Now that I've passed my Certification I wonder if I get a secret decoder ring (95% btw).
Got the last chapter turned in today and whooped my brother-in-law at Halo and Dead or Alive :). Glad to have everything turned in, but I'm just waiting for the other ball to drop and a whole ton of stuff back to fix (hoping not :). The editors told me to enjoy my Thanksgiving while they slave away, so I'm gonna ;).
hehehe... saw my new book title on Amazon.com today. But it didn't have the authors listed yet so I can't tell you what it is. My fingers are itching though... :)
Kris and I decided to have our first Thanksgiving dinner at our place, and wouldncha know... something had to go wrong. We were halfway through cooking the turkey when the oven, you guessed it, quit working. Luckily we had already cooked the pie, but the turkey was only halfway done and we hadn't cooked the stuffing yet.
Got my final chapter turned in on Thursday (a day early even) and turned in my first review chapter today. Just gotta review three more (and hope they accept them) and I'm done and onto other projects.
Kris got me the extended DVD edition of Lord of the Rings, and that's some damn good stuff. They've gone back and added more than 30 minutes of new content to the movie. Now they didn't just drop the stuff in there, they actually went back and completely produced them. They rewrote the musical score for the film to tie them in, finished the visual and aural effects, the whole bit. The new scenes really add a lot of additional character development (who would have guessed Gimlee was really a softy ;).
Well JK's back home and up to his usual antics. He sounds fantastic and had me in stitches the entire time we were on the phone. He told the doctors "Ya can't kill a bad weed..." and he was apparently right.
Seems that everyone's liking the new Macromedia Contribute. They just got a great write up in CreativePro. I know I'll be moving some of my clients to the new product. Will certainly make my life easier.
I finally made it to "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". That's some funny stuff :). And I thought Kris and I had a weird family :)
<music style="documentary" />Last night... Dan Short broke the misconceptions of family, friends and those who only partly knew him. That's right people... Dan ate <drum roll>sushi</drum roll>. Not only did he eat Sushi, reports are he liked it. Eating raw Tuna didn't seem to bother him much, although he did avoid the slimy sea urchin (that's just gross). A bit of Gyoza and some Teriyaki and hot sake finished the meal, and he was happy. Where will he go next... Hopefully his parents will continue to speak to him, even if they do use a mediator...
Why is this game so addictive? It's so deceptively simple, yet so very frustrating :). My high score is 2208, although I average about 900 now :)
One of my good buddies is sick... in a bad way. I found out yesterday that JK from Spider Food is in the ICU with major liver problems. Doesn't even really know where he is apparently. He liked to drink in his younger days (hell, he's under 40) and it's apparently caught up with him.
Kris and I had dinner with our 6 best friends at the Western Culinary Institute last night. That's some delicious stuff I tell you. And luckily, Thursday nights are buffet nights (I always find that funny. Gourmet food buffet style). And to add to that, every Halloween, the Thursday before, they have a Halloween theme buffet. Since Halloween was on a Thursday this time we got the full treatment. It also meant that it wasn't near as crowded.
I finally did it. Wrote my own useless binary converter. I had a few nudges from Kindler Chase and grabbed an idear or two out of his head, and came up with my own. Have fun :)
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
It's time for Dan's birthday, so let's make a mess!
What do you say we give him a nice CMS?
We'll fill it with snippets and columns that sort,
All for FAQ-Man (You know- Dan Short!)
--
Bill Horvath
*This poem is © Bill "The Pill" Horvath, and it's usage outside of this blog means you're in big trouble mister...
Who the heck invented those elliptical torture machines at the gym, huh? All I've gotta say is they should be put away...
I can't understand a word they're saying, but it still sounds damn good...
For those of you that have been watching the development of my blog, I just wanted to let you know it's on hold for the moment. I have quite a few book deadlines, and those come first. So once the book is complete I'll be able to hit this again, and will probably be a bit more enthused with it.
The DWfaq Date/Time Format Suite is for sale. Buy it for my birthday (you can keep the suite, I'll take the payment), for your geek's Christmas present or just for the heck of it. Whatever you do, you should definitely buy it (should I be a car salesman?). More info at the DWfaq Store, including screenshots and demos.
Disclaimer: I have nothing against the French in general, I *love* their fries.
Angela has sent the Server Formats suite out to our beta testers, so hopefully things will be ready for release soon. You can find some more info and screenshots at DWmommy.com.
I've informally confirmed a new book deal. I'll be co-author on a new book due out some time about some thing (NDA and all that). This time I'll have my name on the front cover. More details will be provided here once I'm able to release more information :-).
That's right, I'm almost the big 27. If you have an overwhelming need to buy me something, you can check out my Amazon.com WishList :).
It's an explosive combination I tell ya. Jay has just finished his first major database driven site, Bear Creek Baptist Church.
Nothing like a good Army of Darkness movie to start the day :)
I made the style changer ASP driven, so no more funky flashing :~)
In the process of putting together my blog, I've come up with quite a few functions for manipulating dates. This includes find the start and end of a week that contains a particular date (for the archives and such) as well as quiet a few others.
I'm back from Seattle, and this time the only thing I left was Kris :). She's leaving for the week to visit her sister in Iowa, so I have the place to myself for a week. Hopefully I won't trash it too much. I also finally got all of the pieces to finish our entertainment center, so I'll be posting pictures of that for the fam before too long.
I added a bit more functionality to the calendar, disabling the forward and next links if you've reached the end of the posts. This prevents someone from going all to the way to Jan 2003 or back to Jan 2001 if there in fact, aren't any posts there.
You can now filter posts by Category on the blog. You can have any number of categories, a post can be assigned to multiple categories, and you can completely disable a category (this doesn't disable the posts, but only keeps the category from showing up in the nav).
There will be no harassing of Dan this weekend, as I'm about to leave for Seattle, where the weather is cold, and the dialups are slow :)
I refuse to do any more work today. I mean, what good is it really doing me? My wrists hurt and my brain is fuzzy (not enough caffeine I'm guessing) so I'm spending the rest of the afternoon doing.... something. I don't know what yet. After I do """something""", Kris and I are going to go see "My Big Fat Greek Wedding". Hoping it's good and will give a me a laugh or two. Fair to middling review to be posted some time after I get back (maybe next week).
Here are some screenshots of the admin area of the site.
I found a freebie calendar script on ASP101 that didn't have any database connectivity, and hacked it up to add my own. I was having issues with any solution that already had a database attached, as their db schema was different than what I was using. Ended up being easier to add my own hooks in there.
I'm trying to find a good (and hopefully free) ASP Calendar system I can adapt for my blog. I'm going to try and put something together that will let me filter by month/week/day by clicking appropriate links in the calendar. Looks like I'm going to be playing with lots of date manipulation.
Just got back from a weekend in Eugene with Kris' mom. Ate way too much chicken and noodles and had a hard time staying awake on the drive home, but as you can see, I made it.
Never have apples on pizza... trust me on this one.
Well I spent the last few days converting my blog from Blogger to my own server (nothing against blogger, but I'm a bright guy, and I can do it on my own :). So it's now all database driven with ASP VBScript. I got to play with datashaping more (the blog headers, contents and the accompanying comments are all shaped) and got to play with some advanced SQL to get my archive weeks worked out. Everything is also served from this one page now, including the permalinks.
Thank the all-mighty newsgroup gods that school has finally started again. The Macromedia Newsgroups become a mad house every summer as kids are out of school and loitering in the newsgroups causing mischeif. It happens every summer, and it seems only the regulars think it will ever end. Each summer means more regulars though, so hopefully it will get to a point where the people who know what's going on will outnumber the summer hooligans.
Dat's right peoples, I'm currently working on an ASP conversion of Cartweaver, in cooperation with Lawrence Cramer. It should be ready sometime in the first quarter of 2003 and will be sold alongside the CF version from the DWfaq Store. We're not sure yet on the release date, as new features are being worked into the product at the same time. But it will definitely be the same Cartweaver quality, just in an ASP flava (I always wanted to say flava...)
I just put together a new nifty little mini-app for the DWfaq Store. Customers can now choose to email the products to themselves instead of downloading. If you're like me, I keep my email around for ages, so it would be nice to have my downloaded products categorized in there like everything else :). My email inbox is more organized than my house. Kinda scary.
Unfortunately I've had to cancel my scheduled appearances at DEVCON due to some work conflicts. Hopefully I didn't put MM into too much of a bind and they'll see fit to have me for the next one :). Not sure who's going to be taking over my presentations (XHTML and XML) but I'll post here once I find out.
Let me explain my usual trip through a technical book.
I must say, that TODCON has got to be the best conference I've ever attended. And no, I'm not saying that because Ray told me to. The attitude is so completely different than any other group.
TODCON wore me out. I'll hopefully be in full swing again by Wednesday.
That's right folks, TODCON starts on Friday, which means that people will start showing up tomorrow, myself included. There are plans for everyone to get together and go out for dinner, although "everyone" could end up being a really large group, so not sure how this will shake out. I'm looking forward to the conference, hoping it will re-energize me. Been slacking lately, and largely unmotivated, so hopefully this will kick me into gear.
Never ever ever never never ever give your MSN address to a client. Never.
I just got the digital copy of the next MXInsite magazine. And yep, there's an article by me regarding MX Templates. This will be my first article in print, so I'm pretty excited :).
We had some friends over last night to watch the Iowa State/Florida State football game. Two of our best friends went to Iowa State before moving out here, so it was an exciting game. Iowa is ranked 52nd while Florida is 3rd. Iowa got within one touchdown (and 3 inches) before the game ended, after being down 30 points after the first half. Needless to say everyone was excited (and two were yelling and screaming :). Well I had three of the neighbors show up at our door as soon as the game ended (at 9) complaining about our noise. Geez, 9 o'clock, and they're complaining about noise? I hope I'm not that stuffy once I hit my fifties...
Was playing a bit with getting a completely different looking layout without actually moving the placement of my DIVs in the code. The Ashleep theme is the result of that. Not really happy with it yet, because Mozilla adds extra padding to the top divs in the sidebar and neither IE nor Mozilla seems to draw them the right percentage width.
For those of you who may wish to harass me before we even hit the hotel for TODCON, here's my itinerary. I'll be renting a car at Midway, so I might be able to give one or two people a ride if you arrive around the same time I do (and don't have a 100 lb suitcase).
The FedEx man just dropped off a pretty Dell box. Inside it was a brand new shiny laptop. This thing is pretty sweet. The leather bag that came with it actually weighs more than the laptop itself. Plus, I've got a 6 hour battery to supplement the standard one that came with it. Looks like DVD movies on the plane for me :)
That's right. The office is done. Look at pictures, but don't drool on your monitor, it's mine ;-)
Last night I got one (small) section of the other three walls painted, the coffee table finished, the print server hooked up (no more HP visible :) and the bookcase put up. So all that's left is to paint the other three walls and figure out what I'm going to do about lighting. Ikea no longer sells wire lighting that will plug into an outlet, so I have one of two options:
I'm getting hip deep into a new project (actually nearing 40% completion) and things are starting to click. What is it you ask??? Think ASP (you know you love it), think eCommerce, shopping cart, think customers with fat wallets giving you money... I think you get the picture. More when I'm able.
I did it again... left my entire tool bag in Seattle. The bright side? :-) I got to buy brand new tools to put together our Ikea furniture. New Black and Decker Firestorm drill (to replace my dinky $5 B&D Versapak Refurb special) and lots of other little gadgets. I'd like to say I was a genius and left it there on purpose so I had an excuse to buy new tools, but I really am just forgetful.
I swear I don't know what's wrong with me. I can't seem to either a) go to Seattle or b) leave Seattle without forgetting at least one damn thing. It seems this time I forgot the shelves that we were supposed to return to Ikea. I have the cabinets, great, but no shevles. I think last time, when we left Seattle I left my X-Box and Kris' pajamas (remembered the X-Box before we hit the highway and went back, but still forgot the pajamas.
I'm a bit delirious from paint fumes, but the wall pattern is complete, and is lookin' damn fine if I do say so myself...
Now that the wall is finished, it's time to go to Seattle. Kris and I will be picking up all the remaining furniture for the office as well as the missing pieces for our entertainment center. We'll be back some time on Sunday, and then I get to put it all together (I LOVE putting together Ikea furniture).
I'm sore today... I spent all day yesterday painting pretty much (besides the 2 hours I spent at CIDA updating software). I got about 3/4 of the way done with the patter on the far wall of the office. I'll probably get it almost complete this evening. Because of the orange peel texture on our walls, each line has to be taped and painted at least twice. For those of you venturing into painting orange peel textured walls, here's the trick:
My new Dell (DUDE!) is in production. Hurry hurry hurry...
This post is for Danilo. His printer sometimes doesn't work on his cabled router.
Just got back from Office Depot with a longer CAT5 cable and a cord cover. The Desk is now complete...
Just found a wonderful reference for working with dates in VBScript.
Probably what I like least about VBScript is it's lack of built in functions for manipulating arrays. This means you've gotta write your own. In working on my new top secret project, I needed a way to remove an item from a 2 dimensional array without affecting the rest of the items in the array. And to that end, after 2 hours of searching on Google, I decided to write my own dang functions. You can find them in the test area of Web-Shorts.
Just starting on a new project with some other DW group developers. Wish I could say what it was, but rest assured, you *will* like it (or else).
I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of this JavaScript stuff. Been putting together some js to filter shipping options based on the shipping destination. Pretty fun stuff. Does that make me officially a geek?
Kris and I have finally got brave, and we're going to do some redecorating. We've already repainted our living room, and we'll soon be repainting and rearranging our back bedroom to give me a dedicated office. I'm so stoked :).
I've just finished up my latest product, the StoreFront Related Products Add-on, and I must say I'm very pleased. It's now possible to add Amazon.com-style related product information to your product detail pages, thereby increasing cross-selling throughout your store.
I finally finished up my two new tutorials on DataShaping and gifStream. Check them out in the Dynamic section of dwfaq.com.
I finally did some "spring cleaning" and cleaned up the test area on my website. I've tried to index most of it (and there is quite a bit I haven't got to yet), but you can find some code I'm working on, and some you can grab for yourself in my little playground.
Spent the weekend in Seattle, and boy am I glad to be back. Dealing with all things in-law is emotionally draining, considering the combativeness of the entire family. But another weekend is gone, and Kris' brother is now settled in a new apartment (his living room is larger than his entire old apartment. Feels good to know he's better off, and that he actually appreciates the help Kris and I give him.
Been playing with CafePress.com lately, and I've opened my own ego-stroking store where I'll be selling WebShorts merchandise, and other goofy HTML geek type stuff. Let me know if you like it :). You can even buy an actual pair of Dan's Shorts.
That's right, say it with me now... datashaping.
Well, I made it look better in Netscape 4.x, but not by much :). Mostly I just had to change div#layername to #layername in my style sheet. Netscape 4 wasn't liking the tag reference in there.
Spent a lot of time today on my gifStream Tutorial. Had some more help from Danilo on the JavaScript (I'm gonna get this down sooner or later :). Hopefully I can have this finished with example files in a few days and get it up and running on DWfaq.com.
Danilo found a book just about me ;-).
lol... I saw my name on Amazon.com again today... I just can't get over that. I never knew I'd written a bunch of books on financing though :).
Well, Jag over at UltraSuite has been on an extension packaging fit and has released several new suites this evening. Find out all the latest at his Announcements page.
That's right, I'm being strict. XHTML Strict to be exact. What did it take? Removing target attributes and borders from links and images. <br /> instead of <br>. Hmm... that's about it :). Dontcha just love it. Check out my article on MM DesDev (The X(HTML) Files) to learn a little more.
I've just finished testing the final beta release of the extension for my Image Manager application. If I can stay on schedule, I'll be releasing the update to current customers, and putting up some screenshots of the interface in the DWfaq /Store.
Kris and I signed papers yesterday to refinance our condo. WOOHOO!!! Shaved a full percentage point off, and got enough cash out to pay off all our credit cards (those evil bits of plastic...)
I was going through some old Alistapart articles and ran across one on switching style sheets with javascript, so I thought.. what the hell. Now you can switch between a Multicolored version or one in Shades of Gray.
Well, it's Wednesday, my "day off" when I'm supposed to be working at home, but the slackers at the day job are screwing things up again :), so I'll be there all morning. Then this afternoon I'll probably sign the papers to refinance our condo and get rid of the evil credit card beast (boy I can't wait). And then to celebrate, Kris and I are going to try and catch MIB II at the matinee. We can all use a little escapism.
Well, I went and got myself registered for DEVCON. Here's are all the sessions I'll be attending.
Eddie Traversa of 333 Creative Central and DHTML Nirvana has released a new commerical extension, the Fading Menu Builder. It's got a ton of flyout menu options, and looks pretty easy to use. Haven't got my hands on it personally though...
I thought the day would never come, but my blog (I'm going to maintain that's the case anyhow) has helped convert a longtime NN 4.x dweeb to NN 7 (he'll soon be moving to Moz if I have my way). You guessed it, Danilo ditched the 4.x beast and is browsing in style.
Skeptic: Dan, Dan, Dan... I see tables on this page, but your logo at the top says "sans tables." What's up wit dat?
Dan: Skeptic, skeptic, skeptic... "sans tables" means that I'm not using tables for layout purposes. I'm not using shims and 's to hold table cells open.
Skeptic: But aren't tables evil, shouldn't you be using CSS instead of tables?
Dan: There's where you're wrong. In fact, in CSS2, there are numerous styles just for dealing with tables and their styling. Look at the style sheet on the blog, and you'll see a style like "border-collapse: collapse". This is a style just for tables. In fact, there is absolutely no formatting information on the table tags in my posted schedule. All colors and borders are done with CSS. Use tables to your heart's content, so long as it's for tabular data, such as the DEVCON schedule below. Tables aren't evil, they just need to be used in the right context.
Skeptic: Ahhh... now I feel better...
Macromedia's put up the new Team Macromedia pages, where we each get our own personal shrine ;-).
Since it's my blog, I figured I might as well put up some information about me. You can click the "there's more..." in the personal area on the left, or just go straight there.
Here's the gifStream demo I mentioned in the last entry. I'll be turning this into a full-fledged tutorial eventually.
I've recently been playing with a new technique I picked up from Humankind Systems' AnswerTrack application. I'm currently calling it gifStreaming, as that's the name of the transparent gif that AnswerTrack uses.
oy... what the hell am I doing up this early in the morning... Isn't there some kind of law?
This is my first attempt at a blog. Do I have anything important to say? I don't really know. I'll try to throw some random daily thoughts in here, maybe one of my latest experiments on DWfaq.com, mayby some nifty VBScript I come up with or some links to sites I find during the day.
