October 2005 - Posts
Here's one for you. I decided to run IE 7 (tabbed browsing
finally! yay!) on my main machine. Granted, it is only beta
at this point, but one would think the major bits are in place.
Unfortunately, I immediately noticed something glaring. When
browsing my website, I can't post using the text editor that Community
Server provides. I haven't been able to pinpoint what the problem
is. Oddly, it works fine in FireFox, which caught me off guard,
since pretty much everything in CS is written in .NET (C#, mostly, I
gather). FireFox is amusing, but still can't be my primary
browser -- namely because of lack of ActiveX/.NET Winforms
support. It also doesn't work very well with a couple of our
internal systems (or the other way around, more accurately).
Is anyone else venturing down the IE 7 road?
So far, the appearance is nice, but there are some annoyances:
- The menu bar is now a toolbar, but the address bar isn't.
So the back and forward buttons, along with the address/search bar, are
at teh top of the window. It will definitely take some getting
used to. Why'd they do that? What UI benefit does that have?
- The links toolbar doesn't size the buttons based on the
text. I have a packed Links bar, and now most of it doesn't
fit. Perhaps as I get better at tab-navigating, this will be less
of an issue, but I make a lot fo use of that toolbar.
- It somehow has my Adobe PDF toolbat and my Google toolbar confused. Wierd.
- I can't figure out what the Feed button is for. I use
newsfeeds a lot, but use a separate reader. It would be cool to
make use of it, if I could figure out how it works...
Good stuff:
- Tabbed Browsing: Cool. I like it, although the layout
leaves something to be desired. When I have a single page, the
tab seems like overkill (and a waste of real estate) though...
- Integrated search: It always annoyed me that I had to grab
my Google toolbar to do searches (my way) from the browser. Now
you can switch between your choice of search engines -- right on the
address bar.
I'm a bit stressed out. Between all the travel I've been doing,
some financial SNAFUs, and just normal life stresses, I am a
wreck. Last night, I tried to just relax and go to my Sunday
night bowling league as a distraction, but I was still freaking
out. Today, I have so much on my plate (mostly catch-up from
being out of the office so much over the last 6 weeks) that I shouldn't
even have time to think about stuff, but I am still freaking out.
I think this is bad for your heart or something like that... I
think I need to come up with that plan to become independently
wealthy. I'll let you know when I get that all figured out.
I don't have much to say, but since the site is working for the few minutes I am in here, I'll post...
I've been stuck for a while on the weight-loss front, I'm at about 37 pounds lost, and have been there for a while. I can tell that some of that is my body adjusting to the weight loss, but I'd like to be shedding some more. The last 5 weeks have been hard, as travelling makes it hard to exercise, and eating right can be a challenge, too. Hopefully, I'll be at home for the forseeable future (trip to Microsoft in two weeks notwithstanding), and can get back into the swing of things with the exercise front.
On other fronts, I haven't gotten much done on the house in the last several months, but I am headed up there this afternoon to do a quick assessment of where I am at, and touch up some mud and maybe get rolling on finish sanding. Probably won't be able to do much sanding as Joshua wants to help out.
The boys continually make me laugh and surprise me with how fast they grow. This morning, playing around with the guitar, Joshua whipped out his harmonica and played along. It just makes me smile. We probably sound terrible, but I don't care, it still makes me happy just to see the big grin on his face.
So even though I've been stressed out beyond imagination with work and our ever tight financial situation, the simple things make it all worth it and keep (mostly) sane.
Well, obviously, the website is on the blink. I apologize to anyone who
actually bothers to come here and read my posts. I am currently
shopping for a new provider, and as soon as I scrape together some
cash, I'll probably be moving to WebHost4Life or GoDaddy.
On another note, I am in the process of getting my spare laptop
harddrive configured to run windows vista. Pretty cool so far, except
for the fact that no drivers for my ethernet cards automatically loaded
(DOH!)
After a few hours of sleep and some time to settle down, I decided I better not spout off quite as strongly as I did early this morning. If you read the post before I removed it, you know I am rather peeved with my current situation. If you didn't, well, you can be assured that I am rather peeved with the current situation.
Well, I am back onsite, and have already gotten re-accustomed to west coast time. Unfortunately, the situation onsite isn't as rosy as I was hoping it would be, given what I saw by the time I left two weeks ago. Unfortunately, it looks like it will be highly likely that I will be required to stay beyond my scheduled two days. I only hope that that doesn't come to pass, as I really don't want to be here all week.
Last night, since I got in somewhat on time, I popped out to Rock Bottom Brewery (next door to the Taphouse, which closes early on Sunday) and had a couple of Pale Ales. Pretty good, actually, even though my last experience with a Rock Bottom was that the beer was pretty mediocre. I had my AHA Rock Bottom Mug Club VIP card which got me 20% off, so I was able to enjoy a couple pints for less than 5$. I'd rather be enjoying a Two-Hearted at home, but I guess this isn't so bad.
You'd think I was a consultant by trade... I will be flying back to Seattle on Sunday for just a couple of days (hopefully) and then again the first week of November. The only good thing is I am racking up the Frequent Flyer miles in a hurry (4K a pop). Unfortunately, I will probably end up just shy of Elite. I'm at 10K for the year, and will add another 8K in the next month, but I need 25K for Elite. Bummer. If I have to constantly travel, it would be nice to get automatic first class upgrades...
Today is one of those days when you get to 4:45 PM and you think, well, maybe I can get something done now. I doubt it will happen today, though. This week I have to write performance reviews for all of my employees. The fact that we have to do all of them at once is a mild annoyance. The fact that we have to do them all at once on two weeks' notice is pretty ridiculous. I will be working on these at night, I believe.
If you're reading this, then my web hosting provider must be doing better than they have been of late. It seems like every time I try to get to my site to post something, I am getting errors due to either SQL Server being down or ASP.NET being hosed. I am shopping for a new provider... if you know of a reliable web hosting provider with SQL Server and ASP.NET for a reasonable monthly cost, let me know. I am currently paying a pittance, but since it is only a personal site, it seems like overkill to fork out 20$ a month for hosting. At the same time, I am running community server, which isn't exactly the tiniest application in the world. Give me a shout out if you have any ideas... In the meantime, I guess I should put a better HTTP 500 error page up -- as it is right now, everyone gets stack traces every time SQL is down (not really a great thing to do...)
Well, now that I have been able to relax a little and actually sleep in, I am feeling more rested. Seeing the boys has certainly lifted my spirits a bit as well.
The Michigan State/U o f M game yesterday was a bit of a letdown, but I think most of us Sparty fans knew the letdown game was out there, and were just hoping we were wrong.
We're off to church with the boys. This has been an interesting experience of late, as Caleb has taken to talking through mass and Joshua gets jealous of the attention Caleb gets, and acts up. We'll see if it's any better today.