Category: Etc

After a long, winding and thorough hunt, I’ve finally managed to locate the archives from my old blogging software. There were encoded in a strange dialect (DasBlog’s XML) so I had to write a little tool to do the conversion to WordPress. The converter is just a bit of C#; If you want it, lemme know.

Along the way, I realized that I needed a better way to exhibit all of these wonderful articles from the past. I don’t really like calendars and most archive pages seem to involve too much paging, so I borrowed a page from Mark Pilgrim’s book and put up one page with everything, separated out by year and month. I rather like it.

If you’re seeing this in a feed reader, come on by the site and check out the new look. I went for a simple, easy to maintain look with minimal graphics for a fairly speedy page load. I also pulled out a few things that were slowing down the site: a plugin that was inadvertently pulling in the YUI library, some supposedly fancy Amazon script that showed previews of products when you hovered over their links, and biggest of all, Google’s Adsense. I’m still pulling in Google Analytics, but it’s the last thing on the page and shouldn’t affect load times too much. I wanted something simple and clean and easy to read, and I think I’ve got that.

I also spent a fair bit of time trying to get the typography right. Fancy, no?. I really enjoy The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web and I wanted to try my hand at working within their framework. For example, the asides follow the sidenotes section. Getting the vertical rhythm right was more challenging than I expected, especially with photos and other non-text elements that are inherently pixel-sized. I was trying to get everything working on a em-based grid at first, but eventually caved in and ended up with a 50 by 50 pixel grid on which to base the layout. There’s always more things to learn…

This was my first WordPress theme from scratch and I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to develop. I’m tracking WordPress’ SVN and the theme using Git. That too has been a fun learning experience; I’m getting much more comfortable with git, git-svn, and git-submodule as a result. If anyone is interested, I can write up a bit on how the whole development process fits together. In the meantime, here’s the code for the theme and my WordPress mirror with that theme as a submodule.

Git really scratches an itch I’ve had for a while with SCM systems. I started out with zip files, then Visual Source Safe, then CVS and Perforce, then Subversion. I liked Perforce quite a bit, especially the branch and merge support, and Subversion works just fine, but the branching and merging support in Git is just phenomenal. I’ve built up a little library of reading material on Git if you’re interesting in learning more; I’d start with Git from the bottom up by John Wiegley.

Going forward, I’d like to extend the blog a bit and add some features using Dojo. It only seems appropriate. Maybe Ajaxy inline-comment loading? Real-time search? Fancy graphs? We’ll see.

As always, feedback is welcome and the comments are open.

My insurance & doctor story is finally coming to a close. After further investigation and a couple calls to the office and my insurance provider, it looks like my only real option is to pay the bill and move on.

The gist is that the visit was billed as a 99204 / 278.00, which is a medical office visit (in this case for new patient establishment) with a diagnosis of obese, which is excluded by my insurance contract. Future visits would be billed as physicals and would be covered, though I’m not sure what I want do at this point. It’s a bit of a rock and hard place, as if I want to move to another provider, I’ve got to go through another new establishment visit and possibly another diagnosis of obese and a rejected claim, so…

The office did give me a 25% discount on the bill, which helps a bit, but this whole thing just upsets me. This is the latest in a long line of headaches with health insurance since Jack was born, it’s no wonder to me that everything has gotten so expensive. The amount of red tape and confusion I’ve had to break through just to get to the bottom of a couple hundred dollar claim is mind-boggling.

If you’re trying to install the lovely Firebug browser debugger, you’re probably finding that getfirebug.com is down. The team is moving to new hosting, but in the interim, there’s a supported build available at the official add-on site for Firefox.

Sources are:

1. Ben Arthur Cairn
2. Homemade: Ciabatta with Pesto, Provolone Cheese, Tomato, and Basil & Persimmon
3. Manchester Farm
4. When I’m sleeping, I slow down my breathing…Living in dreams, dreams that come true…thinking of the color blue… ZZZzzzzzz…
5. Jewel Staite & Morena Baccarin
6. Pools of Oberon
7. Jurassic Sunset ( Valdengo – Italy )
8. Chocolate Pound Cake
9. The photographer
10. Mandy & Jack Hands
11. SV Adventurous.
12. blowery was worried the drinks would be too sweet, but they were just right