Monthly Archives: March 2009

I should have told you about the theme

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8

, that rather unique blogger and friend of mine, has reminded me that I have been remiss in posting about the new theme change here at the site. Well, he’s right. I should have said something earlier but I figured that the folks who visit on a regular basis around here are already used to me flip-flopping around themes like I was trying on clothes or something.

Of course, I should never assume.

It’s all ’s fault actually. She tried on this theme quite awhile back and I have to admit that I fell in love with it when I first saw it. A month or so later I still couldn’t get the thing out of my head so I emailed K8 and said I was going to play copy cat and snag her looks (her site’s look…not hers), she said fine and dandy so here it is.

The theme is called Absynthe and the author is who is also the author of the well known Rusty Grunge theme. To me the theme has that nice comfortable feeling I’ve always wanted to wrap around the blog, something folks will feel comfortable with when they first arrive rather than being jarred out of their knickers by the garish wall paper and bad color coordination like some sites I’ve been to in the past. Loading time for the theme is plenty quick so no complaints there either.

The theme’s been updated by the author once already since it first arrived here to bring it up to date with WordPress 2.7.1 and 2.7’s threaded comments features, something I’ve actually come to like much to my surprise. Always though I’d stick with the old non-threaded way of doing things but that’s what I get for thinking.

I also added a couple of my own modifications as well.

As is, the theme doesn’t call the comments template for “pages”, only for posts so I added the appropriate PHP snippet to the theme’s “page.php” and that was taken care of.

Another matter involved the theme’s links in that they were the same color as the regular text with only a subtle line underneath (I do like the way the line is done though). I thought this tended to make the links disappear within the text especially in the sidebar so I changed the color of the links to the same blue that’s splotched all over the date you see in the upper left corner of this post. At least the links stand out better this way and besides—I like it.

There’s also no distinction between “active”, “hover” and “visited” in the “style.css” file for links at the moment but I’ll get to that later. This is all minor stuff anyway and all changes are purely subjective on my part. Making it mine so to speak.

So thanks goes to Chris for coming up with something I can actually live with in a theme and to K8 for providing such a wonderful site to go find it at.

I might actually keep this one for awhile.

The family’s on Facebook and they found me!

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4

The unthinkable has happened. Something that I never thought would ever occur and now my peaceful and pleasant virtual world has been turned upside down.

I’ve had a Facebook account for quite awhile and up to now it’s been a quiet, pleasant thing with only 2 or 3 apps to my name, a few good friends and the occasional Mafia request and/or domestic animal thrown my way. This suited me and my somewhat non-social self just fine.

But all that changed just a few days ago.

My honey now has her own Facebook account.

I was so shocked I almost dropped my coffee and if you knew me at all you’d know that dropping my coffee is akin to the sun not showing up at dawn. I have to admit that I was in a state of complete denial for the first 24 hours before I was able to reconcile with the fact that my better half had actually joined the Facebook crowd.

It’s all her (grown) children’s fault actually. One of them sent her a Facebook invitation via email and, much to my great surprise, my lady accepted it. The love of my life, the most anti-social site poo-poo’er that I’ve ever known, is now happily ensconced in Facebook throwing things at her family, taking quizzes and IQ tests, saving reefs and giving away Muppets and all sorts of other crazy things.

And even my friends have joined her in the fracas ( even chucked a sheep at her). They think she’s just wonderful (that’s true enough—she is).

And now they’ve all turned their attention my way.

As of now I have 46 requests and 62 invites awaiting my attention. It’s going to take me all weekend just to get through it all. I’ve things to receive, animals and insects to duck and throw back, comfort foods to eat (oh, my poor virtual blood sugar) quizzes and tests to take, reefs to adopt, Mafia to kill and 18 people called me an idiot just in the last two days—how did they know?

Life’s never going to be the same after this.

Perhaps I’ll sic K8 on her?

We shall bind our legs together and hobble as one

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Ah, the wonders that come with age. Creaks, aches, pains and all the times you pushed your poor body beyond it’s limits finally catching up to you. No one is immune and my lady and I are no exception to the rule especially when it comes to those two lower appendages that’s carried us sooo many miles over the years.

Now it’s time to pay the piper it seems.

You see, her right leg has been yelling and screaming at her lately to the point where it stops working altogether and just sits in the corner and sulks. On the other hand, my bad back takes out my left leg more and more often these days and it also usually heads off to the same corner for a joint sulking session. They’re taking to muttering a lot also.

So we’ve arrived at a solution.

We’ll bind her right leg to my left and we’ll hobble around as one. This won’t be a permanent type thing since it would make sleeping and the occasional bathroom visit rather awkward to say the least. That plus the fact that she’s off to her quilt shop 6 days out of the week (7 during the warm season) and there would be no one left here to do the chores. And I’m sure she has no desire to go traipsing down to the VA every other week nor would she appreciate me hanging about while she waited on customers.

Velcro straps seem to be the best way to go then.

Of course we’ll have to practice at being 3 legged for awhile to make sure we get it right. After all, we wouldn’t want to seem awkward at doing this sort of thing. Once we have it down pat though, we figure it will come in handy for shopping trips, going for walks, general errands about town and making other folks look at us in funny manner. We’re always looking for new ways to make that happen so why not take advantage of the situation?

If one or the other leg starts acting up and wanting to go for sulk then we’ll already be leaning on one another and the other leg can take over for awhile.

We might even get our picture in the local newspaper, you never can tell about these things.

At least one can always hope?

Three Legged

A New Computer Desk for an Old PC

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Went to Walmart on Sunday. So this is news? Well, not for most folks but here in the ‘Kingdom’ going to Walmart means putting aside at least 5 hours of your day. That is if you only plan to shop for one hour since the other four are spent in travel time. So it may not be news but it’s a significant undertaking.

About half the time, on these trips to “civilization”, our visit to Wally World results in a bit of “impulse buying” but nothing in the way of an extravagant nature since the budget is always sneaking up from behind and poking us in tender places, reminding us that frugality is the watch word these days. This time however was different and much to my and my old PC’s advantage I might add.

I now have a new computer desk and a new home for “old reliable”.

New computer desk

You have no idea how much I’m lovin’ this.

My old desk was very much a “make do” type of thing since the space for my setup wasn’t quite wide enough for what you might consider the standard sized computer desk so finding a new one that fit had been rather difficult up till now so I had to deal with a yard sale special. And sometimes, when we did find one that we could shove into the space available, it didn’t quite fit the decor.

But more to the ergonomic point, my old desk had no keyboard tray at all so the keyboard had to sit in front of the monitor on the desktop itself. This tended to make me feel like a child sitting at the dinner table without a high chair in that typing on the keyboard was a rather “elevated” experience. My fingers tended to slide across the keys rather than descending from above as it should be. It also made me feel like I was sitting way too close to the display—which I was.

But that’s all in the past and my eye’s should uncross any day now..

The PC tower is now nicely ensconced behind it’s own door (behind the chair seat in the photo) instead of sitting on the floor under the desk upon which I kept bashing my knee every time I swiveled out of the chair to head to the kitchen for another cup of coffee. This also led to significantly less cussing and groaning on my part.

And finally the surge protector with it’s snake’s nest of various power, phone and Ethernet cables is also off the floor and out from under my feet, safely mounted on the lower back panel of my new desk. It’s still a snake’s nest but at least now it’s a vertical snake’s nest safe from my kicking and shoving feet.

So what’s next for my aging computer?

The new video card and cooling fans should arrive on Thursday. This should bring me up to date to at least 2005 standards anyway.

Goodbye Paul Harvey, I’ll Miss You

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Paul Harvey

It seems like I’ve been listening to Paul Harvey since before I was born as odd as that might sound. The feeling is genuine though and although his death at 90 has already been announced throughout the media I couldn’t help but posting about it here as well. But I won’t bother with his personal details at all, you can read that for yourself elsewhere.

I’ve traveled around quite a lot in my lifetime and no matter where I went (within the US that is), no matter where I lived there was always Paul somewhere on the dial, either AM or FM right around noontime with his news and comments. And fate must have appreciated Paul as well for my car radio ‘seek’ button frequently found Paul’s The Rest of the Story as I was traveling through one of those out of the way places where the houses were scarce and no other station was available.

So what now?

One day, not that long ago, I was eating lunch and listening to yet another Paul Harvey news and comments episode when, at that classic closing line, I heard this:

This is Paul Harvey Junior…Good Day?

I remember stopping in mid-chew—I hadn’t even known the difference.

So Maybe that’s what’s now? Like father like son, carrying on the tradition perhaps? I, for one, hope so. This nation of ours is in too much turmoil at the moment to lose that one friendly voice that’s been easing our daily souls for so long now and if it is indeed the son that carries on that one genuine American radio tradition then all the better. If not, so be it.

You will be sorely missed, Paul Harvey.