PLANET3RRY

In our house [in the middle of our street] there’s an aura of geekiness…

I recently exploited some of my hardware geekiness in making something that should be recycled into something that can actually function (huh, I wonder in I can put Google’s Chrome on there). When it comes to software, I can fumble around to an answer… that’s how I became so proficient in Excel, but if I could learn SQL coding, I’d be dangerous.

But if you want to really geek in the family, look no further than My Lovely and Talented Wife… In her previous life, she constructed an Address Book that we could select people for our Christmas Card lists each year… It was alot like Plaxo only in Access. Now, she’s Got Her Geek On in Wordpress.

I moved from LiveJournal to Wordpress because it gave me more control over what I could do and how I could make things look. But for me, the prepackaged Plugins and Themes worked just fine, maybe a minor tweak here or there, but nothing major. Enter My Geeky, Lovely and Talented Wife. If there was a plugin, that didn’t quite do what she wanted to do, she stripped it down and rebuilt it to get it to do exactly what she wanted.

Then there are the themes. And I do say theme(s) plural because she has Wordpress for both her Career Website (Pink Powerhouse) and Her Personal Blog (What Jen Finds). Both themes had been altered quite a bit to get everything to work. But that wasn’t good enough for What Jen Finds. Oh no…

If you are a seasoned reader (bless you my child) you can remember the orange theme that I had, which was a hack of another theme, but for the most part, the original theme was intact? Well, My Lovely and Talented Wife has changed the theme of her blog so much that it’s her own theme. She’s been Coding CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), Plundering in PHP and Embracing her inner-geek.

Case in point, you might remember when people couldn’t comments on my theme because of some conflict with the plugin, well she fixed her plugin… and now it works perfectly. Me, I just deactivated the plugin and moved on.

So tonight she’s all giddy because she’s making little tweaks to her theme… it IS the little things. I ♥ my Geek.

Greetings fellow readers… I know that some of you have been having issues with leaving comments on my blog, that for some reason, you are doing all the Right Things, but that computer is blowing its nose at you.

Unfortunately, I am at a loss on WHY this is happening, It’s probably some conspiracy from Big Brother to limit the reach of this influential blog.

The only thing that I know of is that a majority of the people are yahoo.com email users, which shouldn’t be a problem, but I am going to investigate WHY more people aren’t leaving comments. Of course, if I would post regularly, that might help, or if there was quality content… I did get an almost record number of comments on my recent Guess My Time, Win Crap contest blog entry.

Of course, I might have to post nude pictures of me, from the knees down (of course) but that might draw a different type of readership.

So, I will tinker with the blog today… there’s a WP upgrade anyway, so WHY THE HELL NOT? Sit back and enjoy…

If you came here and said… “Hmmm, something’s different”

I didn’t shave my beard or mustache off nor colored my hair Nuclear Green, but I did change the WordPress Theme. I haven’t moved the hard links from the sidebars, or changed the header picture but I am test driving to see if I like it or not.

Well, I have the theme just about done. There are a few minor things here and there that I need to fix, but I think it is at least coherent enough to function for most uses. I don’t think that I will win any award for the design or even the coding… but it’s good enough for me.

I actually restructured the code enough that I decided to rename it and make me the author. I do credit the original author and still link to her website. However, since I changed the design to incorporate 3 columns and changed the style a bit. I dunno…

GRRRRR… I just check one of the pages so that I could TAG this post correctly and I notice something ELSE that I have to fix… *SIGH* 

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So my Terry Weekend has started… the kids, My Lovely and Talented Wife and our Au Pair are traveling down to Loris, South Carolina for the weekend with Lolo and Lola. It’s going to be JAM Packed with fun and excitement chores and more chores. Today, I will do all the stuff that needs time to set, cure and otherwise be untouched by 4yo and 2yo paw prints.

I was thinking that I might do a series of posts that highlight the projects. Of course, if I have any super secret projects that I want to hide from My Lovely and Talented Wife, then I can’t show those… since she reads my blog now.

It’s a shame that I am not training for anything specific this month, because this weekend would be a great time to get a super duper long run or other crazy exciting adventure. I do have the 10 miler at the end of the month, but I’m going for a specific time, that’s a base training run… so no need to sweat over that. I may take The Loud and Lovable Skipper Doodle out on a trail run… he’d like that.

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Other site enhancements will be a Glossary plugin that My Lovely and Talented Wife found. This way, all the nicknames that I use… you’ll be able to see who I am talking about.

And I did get the GIMP to do my wishes… I just had to take an extra step from how I perform the same task in Potatoshop… once I figured that out, the picture changing went quickly. I also had a chance to upgrade to GIMP 2.4 which I was still using a GIMP 2.2.somthing. So now I have all the pretty buttons… awwwwwwwww.

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I’ve done really well on my stock picks this go around… Seening that the Stock Market has been rolling over to previous lows, I have banked on this with some PUT options that have been very profitable. Most of them expire today and I hate to see them go… but alas, that it one of the characteristics of Options is that they expire unlike holding the Common Stock which you keep until you sell.

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I’m hoping to get some other posts out today… I have Christmas Photo Safari pictures ready to upload… I am awaiting approval from my niece to allow me to post her pictures.

I’m going to be doing some Gluten Free Mad Scientist stuff in the kitchen this weekend. As much I as I appreciate my “Little Helpers”, when you are doing something for the first time, The Maestro needs some space to work his kitchen mojo.

If you’ve staring at my site all day refreshing to see what exciting content I am going to be up next, do yourself a favor… get a RSS feed reader. It’ll  save you TONS of time.

But if you are still living in 2004, then you’ve been hitting F5 (or if you are in-the-know) Shift-F5, then you’ve seen a possessed blog with white space showing up, disappearing, moving, disappearing… something like The Excorsist.

Actually, I wanted a 3 column theme but I love the color scheme and so I decided to go ahead and just change my theme to a wider, faster, sexier theme. Well, once I figure out what was going on…

The code was written like a TV season finale… to find resolution of the code in the current PHP file, you had to go to the next PHP file to get it. It’s like a puzzle. Instead of a box of smooth squares that where it’s own piece by itself, these were true puzzle pieces… So, in something that I wish I knew Yesterday! (adam sandler)… I figured out one out.

Thanks to Sam I Am (short name version) for sending me to a tutorial about expanding the column function of a column impaired Word Press theme, I was able to mash together something that didn’t look pretty but works.

I now have to work on the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) (read: make it look pretty) and as much as I want to love GIMP… it’s so annoying because it’s not potatoshop (borrowed slang). I don’t think that I will be able to work on the image files until later tonight. So, if the screen looks a little messed up, it’s okay, you can have another Tequila Shot, or shot of espresso… you aren’t imaging things (I don’t think)

I ran into a wall yesterday as I was migrating our family pictures from Coppermine Gallery to Picasa Web Albums.

Our evolution in web pictures: I originally constructed webpages by hand to host our pictures. Cut and Paste Code to construct the pages, format the pictures, upload, etc.. Then, I found this great tool that built the web albums for me, but I still had to have space to host the albums and I had to upload all the files myself. I could batch resize pictures within the program and all the coding was done for me and such things such as auto-navigation and thumbnails were a nice treat. Next came Coppermine and the other Database-type web albums. You had a TON of options and uploading and constructing the webalbums was much easier. Then, after seeing my brother in law using his Picasa Web Albums from Google, you could just select the pictures you want in a GUI interface and a couple of clicks it was done… I could create 10 albums in about 90 seconds…

However, despite you having a 1 gig of space to use, you can only create 250 web albums. So right now, I am stuck and I still have 750+MB of space left. I can’t make anymore albums unless Google ups the limit or I open another Google account. The latter being that I have to have 2 URLs for our pictures which is something that I want to avoid and was my reason for moving stuff over to Picasa since it was so easy, fast and user friendly.

I have an email to them inquiring about Picasa, so we’ll see…

If you happen to use Firefox as your preferred internet browsers of choice, I offer you this Holiday theme:

Tinsel Town

Okay, I jumped off the bridge.

You can now subscribe to comments to individual posts and will get an email for comments submitted after yours.

Don’t forget to play the It’s Race Week! Be a Winner contest

I really liked the orange, but did agree that it was WAY orange. Hopefully the picture with lots of blue and white will hopefully tone the orange down. I could even change the background if I need to but, it fits, I think. I did play around with some of the Theme (php) files, so there will be tweaks here and there as I get it customized.

I think that I have narrowed it down to 2 different themes, one is gray and the other orange. Each has things that I like and don’t like and I think I can tweak the theme enough to make them to my liking. So now I would like to collect some data from you. Which theme is easier to read, looks better on the screen? Does one of them makes you want to puke? Any suggestions for the picture on the screen?

Here are the candidates (in no particular order):

and

I guess it would have helped to include some of the typing of a post in the picture, now wouldn’t of it?