oipom.com

This is my second installment of Why I Find the Republican Ticket Terrifying and Why I Think the Democratic Ticket Is Awesome. If you missed Part I, I recommend reading that first.

Onward!
(more…)

I don’t think I’d consider myself to be a negative person; I have my moments I guess, like anyone does, but on the whole I’d say I’m mostly positive. In my experience, most people I follow on Twitter (or other similar services) post positive things, or neutral at the very least. The problem I am having is dealing with the people that, for whatever reason, feel the need to make everything they post about be how awful everything is.

I would like to keep up with these people. I really would. I like them and they write witty things on their websites and seem like people I would hang out with. But it’s getting really, really draining when every single thing I hear from them is how this one bad thing happened and then they got a migraine and had to go grocery shopping and they got stuck in traffic and it rained and they came home and their favorite show was canceled and they got in a fight with their significant other and now the dog is sick and meanwhile I am almost starting to question how one person’s life could really be that awful.

Everyone has bad days. I get that. I myself have had a lot this past month. What I don’t get is how consistently awful these people make their lives sound. Surely your child did something cute today? Or perhaps after it rained you saw a rainbow? Or you thought your dog was sick but it turned out he was just faking and you saved a $300 vet trip?

Maybe it’s because I tend to post really banal things on Twitter - I see it as being more lighthearted than anything, and when people post these gut-wrenching missives on really depressing topics it gets to me.

Do I unfollow these people because I feel like they are bumming me out more than they’re amusing me, or is that totally heartless? Does it make a difference if they don’t follow me (meaning: we are not at all close)? What to do?

How sad is it that for years, I’ve dreamed of having my own CD/DVD/vinyl/book database that catalogs our vast media collection?

I would love to be able to check my media database for someting to make sure we don’t have it before we accidentally buy another copy because it was on sale. Most recently, we found a copy of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles for $1 at our local Goodwill and snapped it up, only to make it home and realize that I had purchased it at Powell’s a number of years ago for $3.50.

Dang.

I would love to have a scan-thingy I could beep everything and it would keep a catalog of what sort of media it was, title, author or band, that sort of thing. Failing that, I could type it in, but it would be easily searchable and maybe I’d have an image of the cover in there too.

Years ago, I actually sat down and designed a giant database that this information would go into, but I made it unnecessarily complicated (adding in band members by year and making the group different depending on which members were in it at which point in time - what was I thinking?) and I never got around to designing the interface where you’d actually put in the information.

Anybody else? I have a feeling that there is a large, untapped market of twenty-somethings with expendable income that would love some kind of easy-to-use media catalog, like a library database.

Edited to add: The lovely Amanda suggested MediaShelf, and after installing it and testing it out, it looks to be exactly what I needed. YAY! Problem solved.

I have played around with WordPress 2.5 for a bit and I have a few annoyances with regard to the new admin interface. I managed to change my color scheme to “classic” and that helped me out a bit, but my thoughts on the interface are as follows:

Things I Dislike

The big blue area with your site title and nav
My problem is not so much with the large blue area, but the fact that the main admin navigation sits within it. Pre-2.5, the nav is within a lighter blue bar with a top border, so it is separated. I find this easier to parse through visually; the new version makes it seem like it is part of the same area when it is not. Also, why is Design before Comments? Surely people check comments more than they change their theme?

Text styles
Since I am not on a Mac and am not using IE7, the main nav text looks aliased to me. It’s unpolished and chunky - not sleek and smooth. In the “Manage” area, I dislike that the page/post titles are tiny and bold - I wish they were normal-weight and larger. I’d also love to see the sub-pages with the em-dash next to them be tabbed in a bit, or the dash lightened. Right now they still sort of look like they’re on the same level.

Relative time
I really, really dislike the whole relative time thing. Instead of being able to glance at a date and know when a post/page was created, I have to glance at the date, see how long ago it was, figure out what time it is now, and do math. HATE.

“Published” instead of “View Page”
It also took me a minute to figure out that the link that says “Published” is a link to view your page on the site. Not sure that is very clear. Or maybe I am just slow.

No visible post/page IDs
Lots of conditional statements for templates are made using post/page IDs. I prefer this to page names, since you might rename a page and screw up whatever formatting you had based on the name. Problem is, the ID is not visible anywhere in the “Manage” section. You can figure it out if you hover over the page title and check your status bar to see “action=edit&post=3″ and deduce that 3 is the ID, but UGH. Complicated. I want to just LOOK and see what ID something is.

Lightbox for image adding
Lightboxes for core functionality make me nervous. For an image zoom or something superfluous, I think they’re fine. I just don’t like that the image uploading/adding is within the fancy lightbox business because it doesn’t seem stable. What if my browser is running slowly and the lightbox takes forever to load?

Image upload errors
To my knowledge, I don’t have any weird settings on my server. I have never run into image uploading problems until installing 2.5, whereupon I immediately got a “HTTP ERROR” when I hit “Upload.” I tried over and over to get my image to work, but until searching through the support forums and finding some bizarre .htaccess fix, it wouldn’t work. I have no idea what this fix really does, but all I know is that it’s crappy to make people do that to get image uploading to work. Stupid flash uploader. If they wanted a Flash uploader, why couldn’t they have modeled it after Flickr’s image uploader? You know exactly how much of your image has uploaded, and it’s on a PAGE, not a lightbox, and it works.

Subnav
Needs some padding or a very faint dotted line or SOMETHING underneath it to break it out from the main content. I get that it controls the main content area, but it’s too squished up to the content for me. It also seems easily ignorable.

Dashboard
Do people really change their themes often enough to warrant a large button on the Dashboard for it? Also, I wish the placement of the “Write a New Page” and “Write a New Post” buttons was customizable. I rarely create new pages on my site, but on sites that use WP as a CMS, they may create many more pages than posts.

Max-width
On my other monitor at work, the admin area cuts off awkwardly and there’s a ton of extra white-space on the right. However, the “utilities” nav is still squinched off to the right. I think I’d prefer it to all end at the same point, whether that’s narrow or full-width. Better yet, let users enter what width they want to use, and default to a mid-range width otherwise.

Post/Page options all beneath post text instead of in sidebar
A site I’m working on at the moment is primarily using pages, not the blog posts, and there are several different sections of the site that have different color schemes. Therefore, I am using page templates and parent pages a lot. This used to be in the sidebar, and draggable to re-order if need be. Now they are stuck permanently at the very bottom of the page, underneath the Custom Fields (which I am not using), Comments & Pings (which I am not concerned with), and Password Protection (which I am not using). How crap is that? I want to be able to move these around based on what the site uses the most. Also, for posts? Categories being at the bottom is also not that helpful. There is a sidebar! USE IT!

Things I Do Like

That cute little comment image in the “Manage” section
Clever, and adds a nice visual touch to an otherwise imageless page.

Itty-bitty rounded corners
The buttons look nice. Plain, but nice.

Um, that might be it.

Conclusion

I feel like they’ve made WordPress a lot easier for newbies to use, but more difficult for people who know what they’re doing. I don’t need something super fancy that doesn’t work to upload my images. I just need a browse for file area.

Who knows - maybe I will get used to it eventually. In the meantime, I am cooking up a scheme to make a custom admin theme so I am not sad when I go to write a post (however infrequently that happens nowadays).

Finally, an article about something I’ve suspected for ages:

Significantly more girls blog and create or work on their own webpages than boys.

Apparently, boys are more likely to post video (in theory to impress others) but girls are more likely to own and operate a website. I feel like I’ve definitely seen this personally in the years that I’ve had a website. I always find it intriguing to find a personal blog operated by a guy. I mean, sure, tons of guys run websites and tons of guys blog, but I feel like a lot of them are tech blogs or gadget blogs or portfolios, not personal websites.

The gallery over at Perfection reflects this phenomenon. We have a few standout sites by guys (neonglow.net comes to mind) but the vast majority of websites featured there are managed by girls.

The only real complaint I have regarding this article (other than citing a 13-year-old who says making “glitters” for MySpace is, and I quote, “really hard”) is that they extrapolate this into majoring in computer science. Working with HTML and CSS is not computer science, it is web development. Computer science is programming. Languages like C# and Java.

I mean, I was one of those 14-year-old girls at one point! I did not major in computer science, but I did major in web design and I now work as a web developer. I’m not saying that some of them don’t go on to major in computer science, but you’d think the logical next step is web development - that’s what they’re doing anyway! Just weird. It’s like comparing apples to oranges.

What do you think? Have you noticed this too, or am I just missing all the well-written blogs by guys out there?

I saw this American Apparel ad on a website and I just had to share:

Not only is the idea of a company selling unitards and high-waisted shorts hilariously silly, they’ve gone and spelled “waisted” wrong, so it appears that the shorts are in an altered state of mind. “You know, those shorts. They’re high and wasted.”

Hee.

Never have I been so happy to be with Site5 for hosting. Apparently, DreamHost ran some kind of script recently to nudge delinquent customers into paying their overdue bills. As it turns out, what they really did was run the script on 2008 customers instead of 2007, and in some cases it ran twice, causing massive overbilling and chaos.

Several people mentioned they were out $9000! The mildest offense was still over $100. I was sort of surprised to see how many people were overdrafted by this error, but I suppose if you’re only counting on paying $10 per month and that’s what you can afford, a $200 bill is not going to make you very happy.

A few people mentioned their credit being on the line - mortgage payments, credit repayment programs, etc. I hate to think how many people were totally screwed due to this massive mistake.

I should mention that I have not used DreamHost’s services. I’ve had two hosts, the first being Cyberpixels and we all remember how that went down, and now I’m with Site5 and couldn’t be happier. Still, I was surprised to see how many people host business sites with DreamHost - I always assumed them to be sort of… well, the sort that have a spare server in their parent’s basement. I know they host a huge number of sites, but they always seemed too unprofessional for me to even think of using them for a client site. I feel really awful for the people who now have to explain to their clients why all their sites are down (many of the overcharged sites also got suspended, presumably for non-payment).

I’ve read about DreamHost’s screwups before. The last one I heard about was when they had massive downtime and then sent out some ridiculously flippant email about it, like, HEY WE’RE REALLY DUMB HERE’S A RABBIT AND A PANCAKE TO CHEER YOU UP.

Messing with hosting is one thing, but deducting hundreds of thousands of dollars from bank accounts all over the world? No. Grow up. Stop fucking around and own up to what was probably the stupidest mistake in your hosting history. Refund the money, cover the overdraft charges (or work with banks to negate them) and learn to proofread your code.

Today is the special day of the year where the Qbee members talk about the Quilting Bee. I myself joined around this time in 2005, so I’ve been a member for two years now! I’ve had a couple lapses where I didn’t participate in the activities or trade very much, but the community is so welcoming that it’s almost hard not to be involved.

That’s honestly the thing I noticed first about the Qbee - the members are genuinely nice people. The BBS forums are a fantastic, supportive place to be, and I think that’s phenomenal given the nature of the Internet. There are some young members, some single mid-20s members, and there are also married housewives with kids that are members too, and even some guys! I think it’s great that the Qbee is universal enough to appeal to lots of different people.

You don’t even have to be a pixel genius to join. It does help if you have some artistic inclination to begin with, but you’ll find that if you participate in activities and practice, you will definitely improve no matter where you started from. I know I have. The members are willing to give you tips too if you’d like, so you’re not floundering by yourself, wondering how they do it.

The thing I worried about when I started was, “Will I have enough time to do it?” I was afraid I’d get into some high-maintenance group where I’d have to be checking the site constantly to keep up, but that’s totally not the case. You should trade twice a month to continue to be an active bee, but the activities (Christmas ornaments, Trick-or-Treat patches, Valentines, etc.) are totally optional. They’re a lot of fun when you participate, but they aren’t required. This meant a lot to me because I could pick and choose what I wanted to participate in based on my schedule.

All in all, I still really like being a member of the Quilting Bee, even after two years! I’d definitely encourage you to join if you’ve been on the fence about it. Tell ‘em I sent you!

I may have just stumbled across the video equivalent of Cute Overload.

Ready? READY? It is videos of babies laughing on YouTube. Now, I know. Babies make lots of noise and are expensive. BUT! They are also very funny and I dare you to watch these babies laugh and not end up with a smile on your face.

First up: Laughing Baby
Baby laughs so hard at pieces of paper being ripped that he falls over in hysterics. Part of the reason this cracks me up is because the person behind the camera is obviously getting such a kick out of it himself. Eeeking out “Here, have some more…” is perfect.

Next: Baby laughing at the Wii
I mean, really, Wiis are inherently funny, so it’s no surprise that this baby loves it. But that huge belly laugh at 0:26 is just too great for words.

Baby busting a gut laughing
Excuse the awful title - no baby guts are harmed in this video. The baby is laughing at a puppet show involving a rabbit and (possibly) a dragon. The really good laughs start about 25 seconds in, but the whole thing just warms your heart. I am such a sap.

Baby Laugh
This one cracks me up because his whole little body jiggles and then he falls over backwards.

An honorable mention goes to “Hahaha,” but only because I feel like I’ve linked it here before. It still makes me double over laughing. I’m just amazed that the baby can keep it up for that long! My cheeks would cramp!

Okay, wait. One more. Quite possibly the funniest baby I have ever seen in my life. HOW DOES IT MAKE THOSE FACES? I can forsee it becoming a cunning criminal mastermind someday.

What? It’s the weekend. Have some fun. :grin:

I first joined the Quilting Bee the winter of 2005 - December-ish. I was a mere student back then and somehow had loads of free time with which to trade, participate in activities, create new patches, and post on the Bee*Bee*S. I found the Qbee community to be insanely warm and friendly, and I loved having a very positive, helpful message board to contribute to.

Somewhere along the line, life got in the way. I began preparing for graduation and then I was in the midst of graduating and getting a job and then working full-time and then… Well, it’s now October and I haven’t washed my quilt in ten months. I have traded since then, but not nearly as much as I should’ve. *sniff* I have been a bad Bee.

A few months ago, I went through my huge backlog of Qbee-related emails and added the appropriate gifts, awards, and miscellaneous patches. I felt horrible when I realized I had accidentally ignored a trade request for nearly three months. I always respond to trade requests! They are the easiest for me to keep updated! Argh. My apologies to the Bee in question. How embarrassing.

There were still some things to be worked out, but for the most part I felt reasonably well caught up. And then… it has happened again. I got a reminder that I need to trade twice a month to remain in the club. Eeep! I have poked around the new site a bunch and created my profile, and I am really getting a kick out of the less-awkward site.

The current activity is “Cauldrons of Goo” in which you trade pixeled cauldrons (or patches, if you prefer). I have just sent off my official submissions so hopefully I can begin trading those soon. I’m sad that I missed out on the other activities this year like the Eggies or the Golden Honeybear Awards but I am looking forward to this one. If you’re a Qbee member, don’t hesitate to request a trade! I love meeting new Bees and finding out more about the members.

These things bother me and I feel compelled to mention them.

• Using “colophon” instead of “about”
  There’s just something about this that irks me. It’s a book-based idea, and is generally a short blurb that describes relevant edition notes. If this section were used like an actual book colophon to describe typography, the company, kind of code, accessibility features, etc. I might not have as much of an issue with it, but it seems like more often than not people are flat-out using it in place of an “About” page like they’re very clever. I’d imagine a website colophon could be useful, but in addition to an “about the author” page, not in place of it.
• Giant RSS icons
  I like icons, I like RSS, and I like oversized visual elements, but ye gods I have seen some giant RSS buttons. We get that you want people to subscribe. Please do not attack us with your giant, shiny, orange buttons. Particularly offensive are the ones that are not only giant, orange, and shiny, but also 3D-esque like they are looming over you. Scary! I am always curious about people that use that as their main design element.
• Eleventy-hundred social networking links on every post
  Seriously. How many options do you need? Especially if your blog is not particularly noteworthy? I can’t really foresee a time when I would put social networking links on my website, but if I did, I’d start with Alex King’s ShareThis plugin. It’s simple, clean, and relatively unobtrusive.

  In my admittedly short search, I didn’t come up with any examples but you know the ones. All the icons are not particularly well designed, people forget to remove the image link border, and they are lined up in two rows because there’s 20+ of them. Argh!

  09.24.07 - Edited to add: I found one! Many weeks later, of course.
  

While browsing my student loan website attempting to make a payment, I came across this little gem:

Take a look at that, and then tell me HOW BADLY they want me to navigate back from this page instead of forward. The fact that the “next” button is on the second line may be due to browser differences (maybe they meant it to be in line with the others?) but the fact still remains that they’ve got three different versions of GO AWAY with a subdued “fine, go forward.” They’re attempting to take my money - wouldn’t it make sense to spend some visual effort getting me to continue forward?

HOOKED ON HARRY

I did not visit this website after reading this ad, but I did take a screenshot of it because it made me laugh. Also, what is with their weird capitalization?

JAVA

“By installing Java, you will be able to experience the power of Java.” I saw someone else make fun of this install text, but I couldn’t resist. Seriously? Who in the world wrote that copy? There was another awkward sentence somewhere during the confirmation step but I didn’t save that one.

EMBROIDERY

I’ve finished a few embroidery projects lately that are worthy of mentioning.

First up is a gnome design I made, based off of a product photo of a ceramic figurine:

Second is a Kurt Halsey design from Sublime Stitching:

I also finished an old-school coffee grinder for Daniel to frame and put up at work. They have a huge wall where they’ll post artwork or photos that customers bring in, and one of the other employees has been asking if I’d embroider something to put on the wall. The original pattern had some totally creepy dog next to the grinder with an awful pun about “the daily grind” or something of that nature, but I left all that nonsense off. I’m thinking of putting a border around it or something else to add visual interest, but it’s doing all right at the moment. Will take a photo soon. I also bought the Olde English Sublime Stitching pattern so I can do one that says “MUGG LYFE” because it’s some silly inside joke at the coffee shop.

KNITTING

I went on a crazy yarn binge. Two weekends ago, a local yarn store was going out of business and had a 40% off sale, so I picked up a few things. Then last weekend I stopped by, and it was 50% off! So I bought more. I am not totally sure what to do with the yarns I bought (you can see them on my Flickr feed) because the only projects I can imagine myself making and actually using are scarfs and mittens. Any ideas? I hate felted things as a general rule, and I am totally not up to knitting socks yet - I’ve decided the only way I could probably knit socks is knitting two socks at once with the Magic loop method. Any other way and I couldn’t guarantee I’d make them the same size or even finish the second one. Anyway, what might you do with the lovely Maisy Day Cacao Nibs from Hello Yarn? I want it desperately and yet I feel I can’t do it justice because I will turn it into a mere scarf.

As far as projects go, I finished one Saartje bootie (pdf) and… I think it could probably fit a three-year-old. But I’m not sure. I’m thinking I’ll just knit the other one and hope they come out the same size, even if it is big, because then it will fit SOMEONE. Stupid gauge.

Do you ever get the feeling that the United States is going to hell in a handbasket? Or is that just me?

I know it’s a product of reading the news, which is always remarkably sensationalist. JK Rowling talked about the Harry Potter books and said she felt compelled to kill off parents to show how truly evil Lord Voldemort is, and the headline was “Rowling says, ‘I wanted to kill parents.’” Seriously? I mean, I suppose it worked because I clicked on it, but couldn’t it have been something else a bit less… punch you in the face?

Then I see things like pharmacists suing over dispensing the morning-after pill or stories of women fleeing to a hospital directly after being raped only to be told that because of the hospital’s religious affiliation, they would not be receiving emergency contraception. To me, this is a blatant disregard for one of the most important duties of a doctor: CARE FOR THE PATIENT. So what if you don’t like the idea of someone preventing a possible pregnancy as a result of a rape? Why punish the woman? It seems as though these doctors (or pharmacists) value the possible life of an unborn child more than the living, breathing, troubled woman. Why else would they refuse to dispense it, even on religious grounds? What they are saying is “We do not care for your future, or how you intend to cope with this traumatic event, or the possible outcome of a baby and what that will mean for you or your life. We just want that possibility of a baby kept alive.” Or, I guess alternatively they are saying “Even though you and your doctor have chosen what is best for you, I think I know better, and I don’t trust you to make your own decisions regarding your future.” Either way it’s infuriating and demeaning. ETA: Proposed new bill in Ohio requires women to get a man’s permission for an abortion. As though we didn’t have enough of a patriarchy to begin with.

A recent study says religious doctors are no more likely to help the poor or underprivileged than non-religious doctors. Interesting, no?

There also seems to be a rash of news stories like “Two children found dead in trash bags under sink” or that awful story about the lady with four (dead) premature fetuses in her house, of varying ages, who was only discovered because she was admitted to the hospital with heavy bleeding presumably after delivering one of them early.

And then this new thing I don’t really understand about Rupert Murdoch and the Dow Jones? And something about the Wall Street Journal? Whatever it is, it sounded bad, like he might be gaining control of another media outlet. If that’s true, I think it’s awfully sad since it’s already so hard to get even moderately unbiased information. Monopolies are rarely helpful to society.

Ohio election records from 2004 have mysteriously disappeared. Which is awesome, you know, because they could have proved the election was stolen. Dick Cheney recently claimed he can ignore executive orders because he is not part of the executive branch, but now he does not like to say he is in one branch or the other. He’s also defending Justice Alberto Gonzales throughout his whole scandal. Seriously guys, does it not end? (ETA: Cheney believes Bush will be remembered fondly on his deathbed. Are they all delusional?)

I know a lot of people abstain from reading the news, and I think that’s commendable. I have to ask though, how the heck do you stay on top of everything? I don’t like being uninformed or ignorant about current issues, but I also don’t like to be bombarded with insane, sensationalist crap all the time. I do generally prefer the BBC news website over MSNBC, just because I feel like they’re more objective since they’re not actually within the US, but where else do you go to get news?

And why are there so many political scandals lately? Is anybody on the level anymore? I am feeling disheartened and rant-y about the US lately.

Just a quick rant to say that I cannot stand it when people say something “peaked their curiosity.” The word you are looking for is “piqued.” PIQUED. Something can pique your curiosity but it cannot “peak” or “peek” it. IRRITATING.

I just saw that on a popular marketing community website, written by someone who is apparently an associate editor of the publication.

Probably the most horrible and yet somehow the funniest prediction regarding Harry Potter that I have seen as of yet:

This is how the 7th book and movie will ( or should ) end: There is a huge fire at the Dursley’s House ( the “muggles” that hate magic ), and, when the firemen hear a noise from under the stairs, they break through and find Harry, at 21 years old, talking to himself, and because he says stuff about magic and wizards, etc. he gets sent to a mental institute, IE, the whole story, all 7 books/movies turn out to be Harry’s imagination while going batty locked under the stairs, his scar being from brain damage.
Dave Morganton, North Carolina (Sent Friday, June 01, 2007 1:24 AM)

From Harry Potter Predictions.

I can’t get over how many people think a) Dumbledore is not dead, and b) Harry is a Horcrux. Personally, I think both ideas are rubbish but I suppose we will have to wait and see. Also, just for the record, I still think R.A.B. is Regulus Black.