I’ve always liked staying up late to do work.  I am just more focused at night.  But lately, I’ve been staying up all night and sleeping almost all day and I have to say… it’s taking a toll.  The days seem to fly by faster and it is harder to keep track of time.  I’m about done with it.

However, being nocturnal is no where near as bad as the 24/12 experiment I did, though.   The plan was to stay up 24-hours and sleep 12 to create a 36 hour day. After a few 36 hour days my brain was mush and I was ready to give up since there was no point to the experiment in the first place.  Maybe it would have worked better if the environment supported a 36 hour day with corresponding light/dark periods.  After all… it works for plants, right?

As you may have already noticed… there isn’t really a point to this post.  I was just tired of looking at my previous one.  No matter.  No one reads this anyway.

I like President George W. Bush.  Hear me out before you call for the tar and feathering!

I like him because he is the decider.  I like him because he doesn’t read newspapers.  I like him because he has an evil snicker and sneer.  Most importantly, though, I like him because he has done more for this country than any other president in recent history.

Don’t believe me?  Look at what is going on in our country today.  President Bush v2 has so enraged and demoralized the american public that they are turning out to the polls in record numbers, and a lot of those voters have a new kind of choice.  You are still limited to democrat or republican, but at least it isn’t a ticket of four aging white men from privileged backgrounds.

Think about that.  Could that have been possible if George W. Bush had never become president?  Would we have the choice we have today if he had not fucked up our country, and the world, so severely?

Even republicans are abandoning the sinking ship as the party turns into one of the ultra right-wing Christian conservatives.  A legion of Sarah Palins.  Imagine it!  The cries of one thousand, “you betchas”, ringing in your ears.

It would be really great for our country if all these non-insane republicans would form a new party where “missions from God” didn’t exist.  I might even vote for some of them — maybe.

George might not be responsible for all this directly, especially, the bumbling of the McCain campaign, but he definitely got the ball rolling.

My only hope is that George Bush has done enough damage to our country.  Done enough damage to the world.  And done enough damage to the republican party, so that we will not see another one of his kind for a long time to come — if ever.

Well… my Border Hopping trip is delayed again!

If you read the last post you noticed that Abbott Pointe Apartments was responsible for my delay by towing my car even though they gave me permission to park.  Guess what?  They did it again!  Can you believe it?  I couldn’t.  This time I wasn’t even parking overnight.  I was only visiting my girlfriend and was parked for less than 5 hours (!!!) before I was towed–again.

You can read more about this story, Abbott Pointe Apartments (part 1), and Auburn Place Apartments (part 2) over at the Border Hopping blog.  Yay.

Update: Since I was one of many having problems with DTN I’ve created a gripe site that aims to bring attention to the problems with their apartments.

Visit http://www.borderhopping.com/

My friends already know that I’ve been planning to leave on a trip around the United States for some time.  Well, that time has finally come–and this time, nothing is going to stop me.

To those that don’t know, I will be leaving on a yearlong trip around the United States.  I was supposed to leave today but thanks to Abbott Pointe Apartments I have been delayed until tomorrow.  But come tomorrow, I’m leaving and not looking back until this time next year!

While I’m on the road I will have full access to email, web pages, and other technology so this isn’t a vacation, but instead an experiment.

You can learn more about my trip and follow along as I make my way around the United States at Border Hopping.com.

For the last couple days I’ve been dabbling with creating a Javascript that will allow visitors to one of my websites to embed my content in their sites.  (It’s done and you can check it out at http://www.angieshealth.com/article-widget/)

To make it easier on my visitors when copying and pasting the code I decided to use Javascript to select all the code when they click on the textbox.
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What I want for christmas: http://eburl.net/crystal-pepsi

Now if only I could find myself some Mr. Pibb.

Facelift has been downloaded over 6,000 times in the last four weeks.  I never thought that it would become so popular so fast.  I am actually pretty amazed and just happy that everyone is finding it useful!

Version 1.2 has just been released out of beta and as always, I urge anyone who finds any bugs to report them in the forums.

Look forward to many new plugins as well as documentation on how to make your own — finally!

I swear.  Every time I get an idea for something, I am a Google search away from finding out that someone has (1) already done it, (2) done it right, and (3) just finished doing it.

My latest idea was an image search engine that would allow you to upload an image and find other versions of the image.  It would be useful if you had a piece of an image and wanted to find the whole thing or had a small thumbnail but wanted to find a full quality image.

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With much delay Facelift v1.2 is here.  If you are still using v1.1.1 you are crazy, especially now that v1.2 is out of beta. Download Now!

FLIR v1.2 includes so many new features over v1.1.1 that I’m not even going to list them all here.  Not much has changed since v1.2 beta 4 except some bug fixes.

The one thing worth mentioning is the inclusion of a FLIR Javascript plugin entitled RefreshImages.  You can read more about it, as well as keep up with some of the more advanced features of Facelift at the new detailed facelift examples page.
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I do a lot of web development locally on my computer and I am always switching between local and remote servers using entries in the hosts file.  Because of this, it is hard to know if I’m actually looking at the correct version of my site.  Opera and Firefox both cache DNS to various degrees which makes it difficult to know if that change to the hosts file really did take effect.  I know you can disable the cache in Firefox — and probably Opera too — but I think this method is still useful.
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UPDATE 9/13: I’ve fixed the bug and will be releasing the fixed version sometime tomorrow.

There is a bug in Facelift that is causing all images to be generated with a white background. The temporary fix is to disable GIF/JPG support until I can release a fixed version. You only have to modify one line of code to fix and FLIR will behave as it did before with transparent PNG images.

You can read more about the problem and get the fix here.

If you’ve been reading my posts you would have noticed that I recently had an HP notebook die.  I thought I was just unlucky enough to have the hardware fail on my 14 month old notebook — but I was wrong.

» Skip right to the forum thread with angry HP owners discussing their dead HP/NVIDIA GPU notebooks.

The other day I happened to be reading an article on arstechnica about how NVIDIA is being sued about faulty GPUs.  “That’s funny”, I thought, “My notebook had a GeForce.”  I read further and indeed HP was named in the article as a company scrambling.  A few more articles worth of reading later and I found out my NVIDIA was indeed the cause of my notebook’s untimely death — and HP refuses to service it!
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Take a look at eburl.  It allows you to shorten the nasty, god-awful URL that EBay gives you when you sell an item to a nice simple and short one, that you can post in messages and forums.  You can even customize what the URL says.

The recent eBurls are reason enough to take a look.  They can be appreciated for their randomness and “who the hell would buy that” quality.  Take a look at these recent eburls:

SITEC GBT15/40 Oxygen Gas Booster
diy red plaid hot pants shorts punk rock emo gothic M
Baker’s Edge Nonstick Edge Brownie Pan Baking NEW

Facelift v1.2 beta 4 introduces a new feature called the Font Collection.  A Font Collection is just that, a collection of similarly faced fonts in various styles.  This means that you no longer have to create a separate entry for Your Font and Your Font Italic.  By combining the Font Collection with the CSS values set in your web page, FLIR can intelligently detect which font variant to use.
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I was all set to release the final v1.2 but instead I went crazy and added a bunch of new functionality.  So, I am releasing v1.2 beta 4.

• Font Collections
• Basic Callback Functions
• Better error handling
• Bug in generateURL causing HTML not to be sanitized
• Added functionality/bug fixes for “wrap” mode.  Better line-height support.
• Rewrote element replacement algorithm. You no longer need to encapsulate plain text in span elements to have it replaced.  The new algo is recursive so it can replace any number of child elements.  You could even run it on document.body if you wanted to!
• Added flir-image and flir-span classnames to the elements flir creates
• Javascript Plugin support!
• Moved DetectImageState code from facelift.js into a Javascript plugin
• querySelectorAll support for the browsers that support it (Safari, FF3.1 alpha)
• Font size modifier for cSize in FLIRStyle. You can now specify a font size calculation to be applied against the CSS font size.  For example, if you want the generated image to have a font size that is 140% the one you specified in your CSS you could do cSize:’*1.4′.  All font sizes will then be multipled by 1.4.
• FLIRStyle.buildURL no longer requires an HTML object to be passed
• Hover caching problems fixed.  Better hover style support.
• JPG and GIF support! Set the “output” option in FLIRStyle.  The default output option is auto.  Auto will cause the generated image to be a transparent png if the element doesn’t have a background color set.  Otherwise it will use GIF.
• Hover now only works with <A> elements.

My notebook died and I had to buy a replacement.  I should be back online by tomorrow.

Sometime last week I noticed my Western Digital MyBook external hard drive starting to give CRC errors.  I scanned the drives (2 in the RAID) for problems and sure enough, drive #2 was starting to fail.

I contacted WD who quickly shipped out a replacement drive and started the horrible process of moving almost 1TB of data from one drive to another.  Luckily, I have a copy of Second Copy installed on my machine for backing up my data, so I just setup a quick job to transfer the files.  Quick to setup, not to run.  After about 24 hours the job was done and my data was safely duplicated on the replacement drive, and then another 18 hours to run Eraser on the drive.
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Bryson on the forums found a pretty big bug today that is causing images not to be cached by web browsers.

This means that each time a user returns to your web page or hovers over a link they are being forced to re-download the generated image.  The image is still being cached locally by Facelift so the images aren’t being regenerated.

This is a pretty huge bug in my eyes and you can either download the fixed version from the download page, or make the following changes yourself:
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I’d always read that to get the total size of a directory (and everything below it) on linux you use du -ch | grep total

This works but gets slower the more files/folders a directory contains.  Then I remembered the tail program and presto — my life just got easier. du -ch | tail -n 1 will give exactly the same output as grep total and takes no time.

I know a lot of people who find this will be like… duh! But oh well, I’m happy about my discovery and now feel like I’ve accomplished something today.

Shortly after putting up v1.2 beta 3 for download I noticed a problem. It has been fixed and Facelift is back to working in IE again. If you’ve already downloaded v1.2 b3 you can make the change yourself or you could download v1.2 beta 3-2.
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