This is an exercise in taking two different concepts and bringing them into togetherness and love. Please keep your divs inside the allotted browser window. No malformed code allowed, not even in the comment box. Today’s post is brought to you by the letters “ooooooooh” and the word “lovely”. Lets now commence with the sense making.

Rage

For the past few weeks I’ve been watching my good buddy (you know the one with too much spare time) whenever he can pull himself away from the PSP as he manuevers the incredibly hot (and viscious) Kratos on his quest to kill Ares the God of War . What a sentence.

Now some of you might be thinking things like “that’s got to be boring” or “normal people would prefer to play the game themselves”. Not at all. This game is awesome and has only been made more awesome by the fact that I don’t have to worry about being eaten by Cerebus puppies and can pay attention to things like the lovely tilework and the fact that in a certain room you get three warnings before the floor opens up and you fall to your death.

Also it can rest heavily on someone elses concious that we missed the sex minigame or that to progress past a certain point requires “the ultimate sacrifice”. I rather enjoy the decapitations and breaking of necks and the ripping off (and out) of vital body parts. I even think it’s humorous that Kratos can kill the innocent run-around-in-the-middle-of-the-fight-with-my-hands-over-my-head bystanders for some more rage. but the sacrifice thing would have probably taken me a couple hours to figure out and sort of threw me off. The really odd and addictive part is that we’ve got to be almost to the middle of the game and and I’ve learned more about the story from the splash page on the game site than from the 8 or so hours of (watched) gameplay.

It does cause a tiny bit of anxiety that Jordan’s method of gaming is to go immediately to the most obvious next step (say killing all 600 medusas) and never look back whereas I tend to explore every accessible unit of space before weighing my options (ooohh you mean I can get past them without actually killing them all?) and moving on. Jordan has been very good about sensing my anxiety when it reaches critical points and going back to explore. Over all it’s a pretty synergetic mix of running commentary, sarcastic interjection and proper appreciation that reminds me of the good old days of web dev.

The Technology

In other news.. I have joined the masses of people in Tallahassee (and around the world) that own a cell phone. I’m rather happy about it even though it wasn’t my idea and left up to me would have probably never happened. But it wasn’t left up to me and I picked it up at Greyhound package express almost a week ago. I almost have my number memorized.

It’s a lovely little flip phone with no camera, no keyboard, no intergalatic remote control… it’s just a phone. And I love it that way. It does have the capability for instant messaging and web browsing but I’m not impressed. I’m currently doing both of those things quite well on a 19 inch flat panel monitor with a nice full sized keyboard and wireless mouse. The thought of switching to an almost-two-inch cell phone display with a number pad is not appealing.

We’re using T-mobile and my phone is Samsung and between the two they have the worst user manual and written documentation ever. Ok it’s not the worst ever but kinda bad isn’t as dramatic. Basically I’ve been trying to figure out how I need to enter numbers into the phonebook so that they work when I try to call them. Seems like it should be a pretty basic need but I appear to be wrong since no help exists on the site or in the rather thick (and mostly useles) user manual for the phone. Such is life.

In conclusion…

So thats the news from Lake Sparkalyn. Where all the women are geeks, all the men are obsessive and all the cell phone manuals are a waste of time. Images taken from ign.com and samsung.com respectively.

A few months ago I spent a long weekend cursing margins and padding and css layout and computers and also Google (*gasp*). The reason I was practicing my invective was about 12 pixels of innocent space that decided to take up residence between my header and my content. It was definently NOT supposed to be there. The div above it had zero margins and zero padding. The div below it was likewise zeroed out. I checked everything from font size to line spacing. I eventually deconstructed my entire page and commented out every style in my style sheet and then painstakingly reapplied everything only to have that damned space show up as I uncommented the last style.

Ok… no problem.. I can’t be the first person in the history of the internet to have this problem right? So in a fit of genius, (which is the fit I have most often) I turned to my dear reliable search engine. After googling everything from “overflowing box model” to “stupid space won’t go away” I had about half a handful of articles. The ones that were exactly related to my problem were all written before the age of dinosaurs (around 1998) and the rest were random references to the original CSS definitions over at W3C.

Thanks to some wonderful individual I finally managed to muddle through the problem. I would give you his link but my firefox profile crashed last week destroying all of my bookmarks… but that’s another story. Anywho… I vowed to write an article documenting my box model woes so that no one else would ever spend a weekend staring at something that shouldn’t be there. But then Futurama came on.

Months later (as if he were reading my mind) the illustrious Eric Meyer did a much better job than I would have ever done – even if I weren’t a lazy bastard. I figure that since he did all the work, the least I can do is try to bring it to the attention of Google.

So go read Uncollapsing Margins over at Complex Spiral. Save yourselves.

Well. I switched to Wordpress. It’s a lovely bit of application and so far I’m happy with it. The infamous five minute install left me feeling excited and full of a newfound respect for server-side installs and open source code. 1 week, several hacks and hundreds of search results later…. the feeling isn’t as strong as it used to be. (more…)

I like to think that I’m a very practical, level headed person. I’m not prone to swooning, fanatical adoration of anyone unless you count Michael Jackson late 80s and early 90s. (ok i admit… I still love him) But hell may have just experienced a cold front. You see I’ve developed a fascination for Andrei Herasimchuk of Design By Fire that borders on groupie type hero-worship.

The weird thing is I can’t really put my finger on why, possibly because there are so many um… well possibilities. Just go check him out. Be sure not to miss Design Eye for the Usability Guy.

< side note > If by some stroke of weirdness, the above ever reads this entry please note that by groupie type hero-worship I mean the kind that is flattering and none offensive…. not the scary stalkerish kind. No crazy people here… heh heh… kay? thanks. < /side note >

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I was a little bummed when I googled sparklit. Although I come up as the 12th result, some survey generation type tool has the first 11 hits. On the other hand if you google sparkalyn it’s all me baby. It’s a nice feeling to have something thus far unique in the mass existance of googlehood.

Speaking of google…. Many thanks to Sam & Alaina for the Gmail invite. Especially Alaina since it was your invite. ‘preciate it guys
And Sam… about that uber yahoo replacing web application thing for ASIT… consider yourself 2 bucks closer.

You, my adoring fans, can now send emails to sunshinelewis [at] gmail.com. Sunshine was taken but that’s not a big surprise (I bet sparkalyn wasn’t… I should have checked)

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I’ve been itching to do some personal projects for a while now. I want to attempt to reach Zen-ity. My bookmarks are so out of control I’ve given up attempting favorites organization. Whenever I add one I just stick it at the bottom of an ever growing list and pray I can find it later. I need to develop something (anything) for the root of my domain. I want it to be my portfolio / freelance info / web guru blog. But I also want it to be perfect. We all know the deal with perfection which is why there is nothing there. Jordan, I haven’t forgotten about our project either although it has done a little mental morphage.

Oh yea… and I was pretty pysched that I managed to install AW Stats and get it doing what I wanted to do with a minimum of frustration. Not that it was actually hard at all but the documentation assumes that you’re a web server admin which only happens in my dreams. Nothing a couple hours swearing didn’t solve.

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I’m waiting on feedback for the Embracing Life redesign. The Lu & Charlie’s redesign has been approved (finally) and is getting it’s content massaged so I can start coding. Hopefully when I finish this latest round of *cough*demands*cough* I can go back to lazing around on the couch all day and neglecting my personal projects in a different way. Oh and I threw together a little spidey-liscious graphical enhancement and copyright infringement as a belated birthday/christmas present for a freind. If it weren’t for MJ just ruining the picture I might like it and turn it into my desktop.. Anywho. You’ll hear about all of this again when it gets done.

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I have some pictures of Hailey and her parents from the christening… Note to self: add a photo album sometime in the next millenium.

Here’s to 10am meetings on work you haven’t finished.

Wow. Would you believe I’m tired? Playing video games 5 or 6 hours a day will do that to you. I beat Mario Sunshine. Well.. when I say beat I mean I dispatched Bowser and little Bowserino to whence they came. I only have like 73 shine sprites and I still haven’t beat one of the official episodes and hardly any of the special ones. I also can’t seem to locate the princess but I will admit I wasn’t looking too hard.
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