macapinlac.com

Crazy old cat lady… sans the cats

The next topic is something that has been bugging me for a while now. It occurs every so often with either Cheryl or myself. I’ve debated if I should really post a story like this here on my website. I mean, the internet is public and google is all knowing. God forbid that my neighbor googles up “crazy old lady” and this post gets returned, I’m sure that there’d probably be lawsuits and knocks on my door with print outs of my website (print stylesheet not available, yet). But, I’m running out of blog fodder and she made herself an easy target.

Let me start off by saying: as responsible dog owners Cheryl and I always pick up after Java. We even bought a baggie holder attached to our leash to avoid the “walking without a little baggie” situation. Also, let me just say that I hate walking the dog (reason: laziness) and dog poop smells kinda funny (obligatory world-changing observation). To me, picking up dog poop is just as enjoyable as getting run over by a 18 wheeler truck over and over again.

One night I was walking Java to the park from my house (please refer to my ghetto 5 minute fireworks diagram). Now, walking to the park, you have to pass crazy lady’s house. While walking, he really likes to play around in the smaller part of the lawn between the sidewalk and the road. On occasion, He’d either poop (which we always pick up) or he pees (in this case we can’t really do anything).

During this night, I guess, he couldn’t hold number 2 any longer and he went infront of crazy lady’s house (still in the smaller part of the lawn). While I’m waiting, I’m getting a baggie from the little holder to scoop up; nothing different about the routine. That’s when I heard some very aggressive window knocking and some muffled yelling through the window.

So at this point in time, Java is in the middle of pooping and she’s acting like some flipped out mental patient behind glass just after someone had stolen their jello. She’s yelling, knocking on the window and screaming for us to move on to the park. Now, what am I supposed to do? (a) Ignore her, (b) Turn around, give her the finger, hope she gets a coronary, pick up after Java and move on with life or (c) Act like a gazelle infront of his impending doom, furiously point to the baggie and make a poop scooping motion.

Sadly readers, being me, I picked option c. When in retrospect, I should’ve used option b with the addition of throwing Java’s poop at her window.

8:10 am 6 Comments

Needles… ugh!

I have a fear of needles. Actually to be more specific, I have a fear of getting poked by anything sharp. This, of course, includes syringes. Lately, it seems that getting “poked” has been part of my daily routine. Blood work here, vaccine there, vitamin shot here. I think my body can now be compared to a human pin cushion, well at least my ass.

All nurses seem to have very similar technique though. They say, “Ok on the count of 3. Are you ready?” Then they say, “Now deep breath… 1… *poke!* Where was 2 and 3? If Big bird taught me anything it’s that counting from 1 to 3 involves more than the number 1. And we all know Big bird doesn’t lie, remember Snuffalufagus?

I guess there is a good thing to this phobia. I will never get into drugs* that require it to be injected. I don’t like it when nurses are administrating shots to. It wouldn’t make any sense that I would administer myself a shot. I get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Note: I don’t condone drug use of any type. Trust me, my head is already pretty messed up. Drugs wouldn’t be able to do anything worse/better.

8:49 am 4 Comments

Interfaces…

So as a web interface developer, I like to focus on big scary words like: interaction design, usability, user experience and information architecture. Think of it this way, if you had a whole bunch of information and things that you want the user to see and do, how would you make them see or do those things?

Obviously with blogs like mine, the goal is to get people to read the blog posts. However, since I switched to wordpress, I decided to include a lot more content into this site. I included the links to other people’s blogs specifically. Not only does it show the other type of blogs that I enjoy reading but its also there to promote. It’s all about the linky love baby! (read: link me! link me!)

So the challenge was that my side bar was getting quite long. In some cases, where blog posts were scarce, the side bar would actually be longer than the blog content and wrap underneath the footer of this site. Not good. So I decided to reduce the number of links to 5 for each side bar section. The technique worked well for the archives links because not a lot of my readers look at the older entries and displaying the recent 5 months was enough.

But it wasn’t acceptable for the links to other blogs (powered by del.icio.us) because the older links would get bumped past the recent 5 and get no linky love. No linky love = bad! I’d like to think that I’m an equal opportunity linky love person. So my challenge was to find a solution where all of the links were given the same opportunity to be displayed and didn’t take up space on the side bar.

Well this is what I did. I collapsed the menu for the links on the side to show only one link at a time then cycled through the different links in sequence. This, however, didn’t quite do it because the first links would still be displayed first and the last would take a while to be displayed. Remember, equal opportunity linky love was a priority. So I randomized where I started cycling from, this managed to give all the links a relatively equal chance of being displayed in the first little while. There you go, problem fixed. Hugs all around, linky love to all.

And that was my roundabout way to say, “Hey! Look at my pretty little animation script on the left right side”.

2:21 pm 6 Comments

Happy Schmappy Valentines day!

Obviously, I’m not bitter. This, however, is the obligatory Valentines day post.

This morning my girlfriend asked me where I wanted to have dinner (yes, I do have a girlfriend). I responded by giving a very snarky, “how about sushi take-out?” This apparently doesn’t land anywhere in the vicinity of “romantic” in any woman’s book. I guess you can’t compare a candlelit dinner, romantically overlooking the city to sushi served in a styrofoam box huh?

I suppose I have to acknowledge Valentines’ existence at some point today. So here it is, I give my Top 10 things you shouldn’t say to your girlfriend on Valentines Day.

10. What? It’s Valentines today?
9. McDonalds number 2 meal it is!
8. Shhh, I’m about to roll the dice for my damage points.
7. Phew! And here I thought it was your birthday or something.
6. KISS is appropriate Valentines day music isn’t it?
5. But… But Christmas was only 2 months ago.
4. Honey, I’m pregnant.
3. Soo… Rambo 1,2 or 3 isn’t considered romantic movie viewing?
2. Oooh, when you said “jewelry” I heard “Starbucks gift card!”
1. I posted about you on my blog didn’t I?

4:35 pm 3 Comments

Jumpin’ ship… pr0n and dead prostitutes.

So here’s the deal. I’m officially jumping ship… figuratively. The past few weeks, I’ve been trying to research solutions to completely remove shaw from my life. It’s not that I’ve gotten really horrible service from shaw. I just want some HDTV programming without having to buy a $700 dollar digital box. If I get more channels and an HD PVR in the process then its all good. I won’t complain. I can always use 200 timeshifted channels of CTV (CTV Prince George, CTV Nunuvit, CTV St. Paul’s Alberta, CTV in-the-middle-of-nowhere… etc).

In the process, I’m also moving to ADSL from cable. I think my neighbor is downloading too much pr0n and slowing the whole neighborhood’s internet connection down. He is a bit on the shady side if you ask me. I mean, how much pr0n can you really download? * A few nights ago, I saw him coming home with a big tub of hand lotion. ** It’s simple logic, isn’t it? And thats why I’m switching to ADSL, and incidentally also, why I don’t shake my neighbor’s hand.

* note: I don’t actually know if he’s downloading “adult” content off the internet, but doesn’t it paint a funny picture?
** Tub of lotion was assumed to be inside the grocery bag. I mean, if by “tub of lotion” you mean vegetables and actual groceries. Then yes, there was a “tub of lotion” in his grocery bag… maybe even a dead prostitute.

On a complete unreleated note: I’m using feedburner now. Mostly because I need to keep track of how many people are reading this site through a feed. Please change your readers to my feedburner feed.

2:37 pm 6 Comments