robglazebrook.com

First, in reference to comments of post past: Ha! You’re so funny I forgot to post! ;) I haven’t posted for a bit because I usually do my blogging at work (bad, I know) but I’ve been really productive at work this last week. I was at the tail end of a big project that I really just wanted to get done, so I powered through ‘er. Well, am powering through, I guess. I should finish it today.

Before I go any further, I think I should mention I changed the look of the top navigation: it now lets you know what section you’re in. I was reading Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think! last night before bed and had gotten to the part about good navigation… as such, I couldn’t go to sleep until I fixed my site (second night up until 3am in a row). :) It was a really small change: I wrote a tiny (less than 300 bytes!) JavaScript to do most the work and made a few lines worth of changes to my CSS. Unfortunately, I’m still pretty much rubbish with JavaScript and that alone took over half an hour (a good portion of that was paring down the bloat). At least it works, and I have it now, so I’ll be able to use it elsewhere because I wrote it with portability in mind (grab here if you’re curious).

In new news, I got my new monitor. :) I went with a 19″ widescreen LCD. It was one of the cheapest of the larger monitors Best Buy had at $299, but I actually preferred its picture slightly to some of the more expensive ones they had. Course, I just had to shell out another $20 at Best Buy last night to buy a DVI cable, as the monitor only came with the traditional type of monitor cable (which is analog instead of digital), and the refresh was making my eyes ache. I went with the widescreen because my laptop has a widescreen display, so I figured I might as well be consistent. Still, it’s tough going from a 1600×1200 resolution to a 1440×900 one (which, according to my calculations (shaddup Eric, thank you) is only around 2/3 of the space I had before. Ah well. 1600×1200 or better on an LCD would have cost me a very pretty penny.

In cool and non-nerdy news, I caught a bat on Monday. Bat as in a furry flying creature of the night. Caught as in with my own little handses (whilst wearing gloves). It turns out they’re pretty easy to catch when they’re not moving. The basic story is, I was leaving Dana’s apartment when I saw something brown laying in front of their apartment building’s door (on the inside). I nudged it with my toe and it spread out its wings, which was a pretty good indicator of its batness. It pulled itself across the floor for a few inches and came to a stop again. I decided it must be injured, so I let it be and opened the door to go. At that point, it took off in the air, came back at me, and ran into the glass beside the door. Then it did it again. And again. Sonar my ass.; I’m sticking with what I got. At that point, I took pity on it, cause I realized if I left it around someone would probably kill it. So I put on my gloves, walked over to where it’d given up on escape, and grabbed it. The bat gave a mighty screech and dug its teeth into my thumb, instantly making me happy about the gloves idea. I took it outside and tossed it onto the air, where it flew away happily, presumably out to find more glass to headbutt. I took a picture of the bat… I’ll try to remember to post it later.

In less cool news, someone broke into my car yesterday. I guess “broke in” is probably the wrong term, because it was unlocked. My car is always unlocked. I come from a small town where everyone knew everyone, and I grew up thinking a locked door was rude. I’ve always felt that if I trust people enough to leave things unlocked, they’ll honor that trust by not being a dick. In general, this has been true: in the seven years I’ve been in Ames, this is only the second time I’ve had a problem. Still, it’s very annoying and disheartening to know my trust has been violated.

Luckily, despite the unlocked doors, I have the best anti-theft device around: I own nothing of value. Anonymous Thief emptied my glove box onto the passenger seat, dumped out my ash tray, and left the center console open (and possibly rifled through my trunk… hard to say, as it was already messy), but as far as I can tell, nothing is really missing. I could be wrong still, I guess (it was dark and I was in a hurry), but I really don’t keep anything of value in the car. A.T. left the change in the center console, left my registration tag (which I’ve forgotten to stick on my license plate (which was arguably the only thing of value in the car)) in the glove box, and left my camping gear (yah!) in the trunk. Maybe they were looking for something specific. Luckily, I only own things in general.

My car is currently locked. Stupid humanity.