Thought it was supposed to start getting warmer as the month progressed, not colder! I think I did more riding in the month of January than I have in the month of March. That's messed up.
Well, regardless of the weather, it was a nice weekend. Gail and I went to the Opera on Friday night and had a good time. Then on Saturday night, we went to an Italian restaurant called Maggianos. Damn, talk about good food. I think I have a new favorite restaurant.
Other than that, it was a quiet weekend. Jeff and I are starting to plan for our Sturgis trip in August. Can't wait!
I was working on getting the forum up and running on my Harley site. I'm changing everything over to PHP, but somehow, while uploading one of my pages, I killed the webserver. No problem, I can restart that. Restart it, go and check the url, that works fine. Go to load a php page, and it hangs. Back to the main index page. It hangs.
whoops.
Seth's in London right now, and I think it's a good thing. See, I'm hosting my Harley site, as well as this one, on his machine. So I break something, he's likely to be upset with me. Hopefully, when he gets back (or reads my email) he'll be able to show me what I did wrong.
Cold ride in this morning. Yup, back on the bike. Was supposed to go on a poker run this weekend, but that was cancelled. Riding to our meeting point early on Saturday morning, it was cold and way foggy. Because of the chill, I ended up getting some chaps. Now I have warm legs. Hooray for me.
Spent yesterday washing my bike, then my buddy Jeff and I took the kids to Best Buy. We picked up some network cards, and some cables, and hooked my two machines up together. Now we can play Starcraft!!! Hooray for us.
Today, I'm going to try and get my voting script and my forum working on my Harleyroads site. We'll see how that goes. I imagine I'll end up banging my head in frustration more often than not.
Welp. It's been awhile. I was hosting my personal site under the Harleyroads.com domain, but in December I let that lapse because I didn't want to pay another 100+ bucks.
My brother Seth said he was going to be able to host my site(s), so I just cancelled the service and waited. I created a new look for the site while waiting, and while there's still some stuff to do, I like the layout and look, and can hopefully stick with this one for awhile (I'm really bad at sticking to a layout...)
Now hopefully I can get back into the habit of using Blogger to write my thoughts down.
Ok, I guess I forgot to make sure it works in Netscape. I'm really beginning to HATE Netscape. Don't know why I'm bothering to put a link to it here.
Someone get them on the phone. I want to tell them what a cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey shit their product is! Hallelujah! Holy shit, where's the Tylenol.
For those that are wondering, that's from National Lampoons Christmas Vacation. I thought it fit well, with a tweak here and there.
OK, now to back up that little tirade with some comments.
They state that the new 6.0 browser complies with W3 standards. Which is just fine and dandy. But when your browser has gone from a majority of the market to something like 16%, you have to be willing to do more. Look at Microsoft. I'm not a huge fan of Microsoft, but the browser is far superior to anything Netscape has come up with. IE support table backgrounds, CSS1 and CSS2, tables are MUCH easier to deal with in IE than they are in Netscape...ARG
The picture, by the way, is what a part of my page looks like in NS6. Sure didn't look like that in MSIE 5.5.
I'm just freaking fed up with the stupid thing. I could go on and on about problems I've had with it. The Java plug-in for the Linux platform doesn't install properly; the preferences were obviously not tested fully when using different themes; even their tech support sucks. I wrote asking about the prefs problem, and 3 weeks later (3 weeks!), they wrote back and said:
Dear Valued Netscape Customer,
We thank you for your inquiry and appreciate your patience. We are receiving a much greater than anticipated volume of interest and apologize for any delay in response that you may have encountered. We realize that you may have sought out other sources of support. If you continue to experience problems with Netscape please reply to this message with a brief synopsis of the problem as well as any new behavior you may have noticed from the problem. Upon receiving your response a Netscape technician will respond to your request in the order in which it was received.
Netscape Technical Support
Now that was helpful. Notice the "a much greater than anticipated volume of interest"? Translated, that means "Holy shit, we didn't expect this much mail about our crappy product!!"
And another thing: This has been touted as a browser for "Core Internet Users"...and what does it do? Sends you to shopping channels on every third click of the button, or so it seems. Yeah, as a hardcore Internet user, my main purpose is to shop. Isn't everyone's?
OK, I think I'd better stop ranting and see about getting my layout to play nice with Netscape. Besides, I have a headache now.
The preceding has been a public service announcement from Shad, and it's his own opinion and nothing else. So don't sue me Netscape or you'll just piss me off more.
Hooray...I think I've gotten all my Xmas shopping done. I think. I hope.
In all honesty, it's NEVER done. Someone gives you a gift out of the blue, you feel as if you should return the favor. You see the one thing, The One Thing that would make a perfect gift for someone 2 days before Xmas. It never ends. There's people who go to the after Amas sales to start stocking up for next year. Ugh.
Not much going here at work now. We finished our big project, and as everyone else is slowing down for the holidays, there's not much to do. So, whilst I'm at work, I'm going to work on getting my new layout working with my journal. It's gonna be interesting. Wish me luck!!!
Damn it's been a busy week. It's only Thursday morning, but I've already put in 40+ hours. Nothing like a deadline at work to make everyone nuts, eh?
The Commercialization Train that is known as Christmas keeps moving on, and is unstoppable. And I know this isn't a lot of segue here, but have you ever gotten really frustrated when writing something down, and you have a specific word in mind, but you can't spell it correctly, so you attempt to look it up in the dictionary, but because you can't spell it correctly, you can't find it?
Anyhow...
Christmas is coming, and I'm so woefully unprepared. I haven't even started my Xmas shopping. Gail and the kids took care of the tree...it looks great!. I've been working too much lately, so I haven't even seen my kids, let alone go out and shop for them. I think sometime next week, I'm gonna take some time from work and go shopping at the mall. That, or whip out the credit card and go shopping online. Woooo...that can be so dangerous.
And speaking of dangerous (now there's a nice segue. My dad would be so proud :), check out the link to the article below. I think the most dangerous thing on this planet is stupid people. 'nuff said about that!2022 Edit: Link removed from dead site.
Took my brother to the train station last night. He's off to "the big city"...New York City that is. He's finally got all his crap together and moved up there. Gonna miss him. But he'll be back for Christmas, and it's only a 3 hour train ride up there. I'll make it up there to see him sooner or later.
During the day we cleaned his car, because he had to sell it. He said all the change I found, I could keep and put in my chrome jar. I bet I walked away with over 5 bucks in change. He's worse than I am.
We took his car to Carmax to sell. I have to say, I was impressed with the place. Next time I go buy a car (hopefully soon. The poor little Honda's on it's last legs) I'll be going there.
We had a nice day. My brother came over, my mother in law and Gail cooked all day, we ate, played some board games, ate s'more. Generally, stuffed our faces.
Interesting weekend. Saturday morning, at about 1:30 am, I was awaken by a boom outside. I sat up and said "What the hell was that?" and it must've woken Gail up too, 'cause she answered me with "It came from outside. And I hear voices too." So I got up, and peeked out the window. Took me a minute to figure out what I was seeing was the neighbors car on fire across the street. Naturally, I had to get up and go outside to watch. The fire department wasn't even there yet, so just to make sure, Gail called 911. The next day, the car was just this slag, looks like it's gonna take a putty knife to get all the melted fiberglass off the driveway. At least no one was hurt.
Saw a couple of movies over the long weekend. First one was Unbreakable. The second was the X-Men which we rented. That rocked. As a comic book and X-Men fan, I thought they did a good job.
Not much happening. Tomorrow's Turkey Day. Or, as it seems all the sitcoms seem fond of pointing out, "The Rape Of The Native American" Day. I've seen no less than three shows that mention how poorly the white man has treated Native Americans. Geezus, we're still doing it now. Gail was telling me of a tribe that the government won't recognize. Without government recognition, they cannot open a casino on their reservation. And heaven forbid they find a way to support themselves.
sheesh
/rant
OK, sorry about that. Personally, I'm looking forward to stuffing my face full of food tomorrow. And I plan on enjoying it too!!!