Reality Me

Month: July 2007

  • Today’s nonsequitir

    If your monkey has an itch, do you scratch it?

  • Programming challenge!

    I’ve submitted my question to the TinyMCE support forum. Can you figure it out before they can?

  • Stressed? See the Sheriff

    Nothing takes a stressful day and heightens it quiet like having a visit from the Sheriff’s department first thing in the morning. So we are late out the door to get Sarah to school. Evan, Molly and I lead out and I see a non-descript car sitting in the cove. Driver spots me and rolls over to the driveway. Oh hell. I prepare myself for bad news. Sure enough, it’s a deputy here to serve a summons to court on a bad debt but not for me. He gets out. Molly lunges and barks (brilliant!). He’s looking for my ex-wife and despite the number of times I have communicated back to the company trying to collect on her that she hasn’t been here for the better part of a decade, they still tried to serve her at this address. The deputy was very kind and polite and offered to riddle the records with notes that she doesn’t live here. He said hopefully the collection agency will stop bothering us.

  • From the mouths of babes

    Evan discovers the leprosy on my hands and declares: "EEEEeeeew!"

  • Of Being Dad

    What’s that noise? *splash* *splash* *splash* Sounds wet. Oh! I spin around to see Evan, having finished his cereal, patting his hand in the bowl. He looks at me with shifty eyes, "more."

  • Karma has a sense of humor

    Who knows if the picture is real or not but it’s funny.

  • Today’s Technical Challenge

    As a web application developer, I am often asked to put a WYSIWYG editor into the application so that the end-user can use the application without having to learn HTML and CSS. There are plenty of free and commercial wysiwyg editors available. (Note to developers: bookmark that link!)

    These editors are designed to be customized for your application. You can typically control what buttons appear, what the interface looks like, and so forth. My challenge is to not only change the appearance of the editor, but when the end-user begins typing I need to have that type appear in a default font family (Arial), font size (12pt), and justified to the left. That means if they cut and paste content the defaults need to be applied.

    The editor I chose for this project was TinyMCE. I find it far easier to implement than the ever popular FCKeditor (and no..those are the developer’s initials). My editor of choice is typically Xinha.

    I have found numerous references to setting content_css : "defaultcontent.css" in the tinyMCE.init and this does change the text as the end-user is typing but the font family select and the font size select menus remain at their default values. When you save, the font family and font size are not saved. Very frustrating.

    Interesting!

    May 3, 2007 – Adobe, to embed FCKeditor in ColdFusion 8

    Adobe has chosen FCKeditor as one of the great new features of its next major release of ColdFusion, code-named Scorpio. Some reviews of it can be found on the web.

    For ColdFusion programmers, it will be as easy as defining a tag to see FCKeditor displaying all its power on their pages, right out of the box.
    [Source]

  • From the mouths of babes

    Evan, 2 years old: "AOOooooh NooOOooo!"

  • To Kelly

    Here Kelly. You want attention? Ok you got the attention of the handful of Reality Me readers. I don’t know what you’ve done to screwup Blogger commenting but its a good one!

    So, did you ever go see the school counselor? You know, the one your tuition pays for. The one that you can see anonymously without your parents, the Internet, friends, foes, teaches, and future employers will never know you’ve seen.

    Counseling is part of how we get along in life. Some find counsel in a scout master, their priest, their brothers, an elderly man in the park, a bartender, a teacher, and professionals. There is nothing wrong with seeing a professional counselor and it may very well change your outlook on life.

    Do you want to fix things or do you want things to magically fix themselves? Answer that question for yourself as honestly as possible. Then come see me.

    "The urge to quit will be greatest just before success." -Chinese proverb

  • Today is a good day for videos

  • Witches!

    I always thought they’d fly faster. I guess standard transportation is more efficient which is probably why we don’t see more of them flying around.

  • Flashback to the Arcade

    Thanks to Instapundit, I just had a little flash back to hard earned quarters being sucked into the video game vacuum cleaner Dragon’s Lair with its exceptional graphics and somewhat kludgey game play. I spent a lot of time and a lot of money on that game!

  • Good Fortune

    I find it very cool to be experiencing 07/07/07 07:07:07.07!

    {Insert insightful post here}

    Update: At 07/07/07 07:07:07.07 I was at a Panera that was serving customer 77. I know..I should have taken a picture. The manager claims it was a coincidence that they are always serving customer 77.

  • My Rock Star

    Accoustic Guitar from morguefile

    I just took a little one on one time with Noah to teach him the notes on a guitar, the strings, and how to tune. We used a keyboard to drive home the explanation for when to skip a fret and when not to skip a fret for the correct note. He was a good study. In the end, he put the guitar down because he didn’t want it out of tune when he took it to the grandparent’s house to play with Uncle Danny! That Unc is really important to these children!

  • MySQL and CFMX7

    I’m jumping the hoops again on another server.

    Update: After beating my head into the wall, bleeding on my keyboard, restarting a server and having it almost not come back to life, I realized that "commysql.jdbc.Driver" and "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" are not the same thing. Oh the angst that can be caused by missing a period!