Posted by
C on June 12, 2009 at 12:36 pm.
Two people I love have been diagnosed with lung cancer within the past month and a half. That’s why I haven’t been writing anything here, although I made many posts in my mind during the five weeks I spent in the States after the first diagnosis was confirmed. It’s probably best that none of those posts saw the light of day.
And it would probably be better if this one didn’t see the light of day, either, but it’s going to.
I’m very sad, and I’m very scared. I don’t want to watch another loved one go through cancer; there have been far too many already.
But I’m even more saddened by the stark contrast between the environments in which these two people are having to deal with their cancer.
One of them is very lucky. That person is surrounded by an incredible amount of love, and that love is shown with lots of laughter and support. It’s palpable as soon as one walks into the house; someone here is very much loved.
The other patient is not so lucky. That patient lives with someone who professes love, yet who radiates emotional and mental misery, and who is seemingly selfishly intent upon making sure that misery is fully shared by the cancer patient. There is constant arguing and jealousy, and very little (if any) laughter. Whether this person can help acting this way is entirely irrelevant; the point is that it is happening, and I very much fear that it will have an extremely negative effect upon the patient’s ability to fight the cancer.
I am thankful that the one person is living in an atmosphere of such overwhelming love and support, and I am deeply saddened that the other one is living in an atmosphere of such suffocating misery.
Posted by
C on April 25, 2009 at 5:34 pm.
A couple of months ago, Gunnison had a really weird spell, during which he appeared to be deathly afraid of just about everything, but most especially of his sister and the room in which their food, water, and litter boxes have been since the cats first came to live with us.
He would cower and slink, very low to the floor, when he moved at all. He wouldn’t go near his sister, and nothing — not even Whiskas fish — would entice him to enter their room. I (only half-jokingly) wondered if maybe he was seeing or sensing something in there that we couldn’t see or sense. We had to put one of the litter boxes and food & water bowls out in the hallway for him. This was totally out of character for him, because he’d always been the outgoing one; the one who got into everything, while Cimmy was the one who hid under the bed.
After a day or so, he’d let Cimmy get near him, and he started acting a little more normally, but he still wouldn’t go in the room. He was lethargic, and just not himself at all. Then we noticed that his breathing seemed to be very fast and I thought I could hear him wheezing. That was when we decided it was time to go see the Nice Vet.
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Posted by
C on April 6, 2009 at 8:55 pm.
I installed MODx on a test site a week or two ago, and started to port an existing site into it. Basic templating is very easy, but I began to doubt my ability to work with such a flexible system due to my lack of PHP knowledge. I made a remark on Twitter to the effect that MODx seems to be a developer’s CMS, and I’m no developer.
I only today saw a response to my tweet from one of MODx’s “evangelists,” David Mollière, who assured me that he believes it’s also a designer’s CMS, and that it’s very empowering once one gets beyond the learning curve.
So I started following David on Twitter, and saw him mention a series of blog posts on MODx for newbies being written by einsteinsboi. Well, that sounded right down my alley, so I clicked the link.
That was a stroke of luck, as it led to The Coding Pad and some very well-written tutorials. As of today, there are five MODx tutorials on the site, with a promise of more to come. I’ve gone through them this afternoon, using my original test site to practice on. I understand some things much better now, especially the usage of chunks and snippets.
Now that I understand these a little better, I am beginning to see David’s point about MODx. And I’m beginning to like it quite a bit.
So many thanks to David Mollière and einsteinsboi — & I can’t wait for the next tutorial!
Posted by
C on March 25, 2009 at 1:49 pm.
I’ve just returned from a 2-week trip to the USA to visit my Dad. I had a great time, and there were several things during the trip that made me think, “Okay, I gotta blog about this.” But can I remember now what they were? Of course not. Jetlag and brainfog prevail.
One thing I do remember, however, is reading about ModX, and now I’m trying to decide if it would be more useful to apply what limited brainpower I have left to learning it, rather than theming Wordpress as a CMS.
I think I jump back and forth between things too much. Javascript, PHP, Wordpress theming, and now ModX. Could it be that I have iADD – internetz Attention Deficit Disorder?
I guess I really need to just sit down, close all the curtains and windows (email, browsers, Skype, and Twitter windows, that is!) and READ for awhile.
That is, if the jetlag doesn’t put me to sleep.
Posted by
C on February 27, 2009 at 1:03 am.
Carl Malamud’s got some very good and exciting ideas about how the Government Printing Office should be run. Please take a few minutes to check them out.
I like his ideas, I like the work he’s done so far, and I like that he looks like Skinner.
I think he would make a fantastic head of the GPO.
Posted by
C on February 27, 2009 at 12:39 am.
I have been thinking about the ongoing debate about dropping support for IE6 in website design, especially in light of the launch of Stop Living in the Past. It seems to me there are two paths to ridding the world of the scourge that is IE6 (and its earlier incarnations, but I’ll just say IE6 for simplicity.)
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Posted by
C on February 26, 2009 at 4:14 pm.
Okay, we seem to be happily up and running on NSDesign.
The loading speed is incredibly fast now compared to the way it was on Thinkhost. So far so good, and a huge sigh of relief.
Posted by
C on February 23, 2009 at 4:13 pm.
I’m moving this site away from Thinkhost. My next post will be made from a real hosting provider.
I will keep my static sites on Thinkhost for now, since I’m still stuck with another 18 months of “service” from them, but no more Wordpress on Thinkhost.
I reckon that’s gonna save the NHS a lot of money because my blood pressure should go down a bit now.
Posted by
C on February 21, 2009 at 12:08 pm.
This site’s been down three times within the past 24 hours. I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve bought a hosting package or a virtual yo-yo.
Good thing I’m not trying to run a business site on it. I wouldn’t dare, with this kind of “reliability.”
Posted by
C on February 21, 2009 at 3:22 am.
I am helping a friend with the redesign & restructuring of one of her genealogy sites, and I’m putting it into Wordpress so its content can be more easily updated in the future. I’ve got the HTML & CSS set up in a custom theme, and I’m working on transferring the actual content from the original site into it.
Out of the 8 pages I’ve completed so far, 6 validate XHTML 1.0 Strict pretty much “out of the box,” but I had to remove 2 lines of HTML comments in another file before it would validate, because Wordpress kept generating closing paragraph tags after those comments.
It took awhile, but I think I finally figured out what was causing it: each of those comments were inside unordered list elements.* Moving the comments outside the unordered list made Wordpress happy, and that lovely green line finally showed up on validation instead of the Dreaded Red, so I was happy.
The other page, I’m admitting defeat on. At least for tonight; maybe for forever. It was a contact form. Again, Wordpress kept inserting closing paragraph tags into it, which threw off the validator. I lost count of the number of times I tried to fix it. Nothing seemed to work. So I’ve downloaded the Formbuilder plugin to try tomorrow. Fingers crossed it’ll work.
I’d try it tonight, but I can’t, because I’ve spent so long on this that it’s no longer tonight; it turned into tomorrow a good three hours ago.
*From reading the Codex and some support threads, it’s apparently all to do with the way that Wordpress filters out “invalid” code. Fixing it involves changing some of the internal Wordpress code at the moment. I am not sure I’m ready to get quite that adventurous just yet.