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Picking Parental Battles

My 15 year old daughter left the house today wearing Teva sandals (similar to the Open Toachi). They are cool looking and rugged shoes. She wore no socks. The only problem? This morning I had to scrape ice from the windshield, puddles in parking lots were frozen solid, and my long sleeve and jacket wasn’t enough. I desired a sweater in addition to my other layers to be comfortable. In short, it is cold!

I could have fought with her and demanded that she wear regular shoes or at least put on socks. However, this has natural consequences. She can learn her own lessons without being distracted by me.

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Knoxville Polar Bear Club

I have now been outside, in a bathing suit, playing in cold water for the second time in January 2009. I returned home from Knoxville’s first Geek Breakfast to find the dogs outside frolicking in the mud. Dharma looked like she was doing an impersonation of a happy pig on a hot sunny day. So I stripped down and changed into only a swimsuit and my Teva Mush flipflops. Now, Molly, a 110 pound German Shepherd, is rather obedient but still doesn’t like being soaked in cold water so I get a little bit of a back exercise from her. On top of the existing pain from my trench war, I’m left unsure that I can do anything with Dharma but when I call her she approaches obediently. I’m impressed and hopeful. I hit her with the water and it turns bad quickly. Dharma howls like a werewolf in pain. She fights and twists. Holding her by the collar just won’t work. I grab her firmly by the scruff of the neck. She howls louder and tries to wrestle free. I fear that if I let go she’ll run from the yard and disappear. The blister on my thumb from the trench wars peels off leaving painful raw skin. Dharma jumps up on the lawn chairs and I worry that she’ll break a nail or hurt a leg. I wrestle her away form the chair and she knocks it over giving her access to the glass top table on the porch. She gets two paws on it and I expect to go crashing through but manage to pull her back and regain control. She sits but howls as the postman drives up to the mailbox. He waves but I know he secretly wanted to film the hilarity. "See anything interesting on your route today Bob?" "You wouldn’t believe me if I told you." Thank goodness that snow never came!

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Flood update

The 8 gallon shop vac had sucked up 4 or 5 gallons of water. Using towels, I had dammed off most of the water and prevented serious damage to furniture and other belongings. The shop vac was doing a great job of keeping the floor dry without me standing over it so I decided I should go outside and tackle the root of the problem head on. Silly me. I should have emptied the 4 or 5 gallons of water first! I don a swimsuit, a pair of socks I don’t care about, a ratty t-shirt, and some boots I’ve been meaning to throw away that have holes big enough to stick a toe through. I remind myself that it is January and pouring rain outside but in 3 minutes it won’t matter if I was naked; I’m going to be cold.

working the trenchesStanding in the rain I seriously consider just going back inside and working the symptom instead of the problem. The problem of course is a trench that hasn’t been completed nor maintained. Water is pooling instead of flowing out and away from the house. I decide to throw myself at it and see if a little dredging will do the trick but I have to remove six inches of leaves just to get to what should have been dirt. It looks more like quicksand and I sink deep. Trudging through this mess is like walking in watery cement just ready to pour, or a runny oatmeal. The shovel moves half dirt and half water. I fling it over my head to the mound that originally was in the trench. Half of what I throw pours back down on top of me and into the trench. The walls collapse and the pool gets deeper. I realize I didn’t ask anyone inside to keep an eye on the downstairs. Yikes! The shop vac has filled up and is no longer maintaining the floods! The levees of towels have become over saturated and are failing to hold back the waters. Worse yet, there are no dry towels left! I cannot go inside to help because my repair has worsen the situation and I must finish the job. My fingers start to blister. I slip and fall in the mud. My headlamp is weak and barely lights the "ground" in front of me. To make it worse, when I exhale all I see is fog making it nearly impossible to decide where to dig. The simple goal is to make the puddles flow and drain. One end of the trench must be higher than the other.

Muddy shoesAfter 3 hours of digging, dredging, chanting, singing, and fighting the urge to give up, I am startled as I hear a splash and rush of liquid. The dam has burst and the waters are flowing out of the trench and away from the house.

The danger and problem is far from over. The shop vac cannot run all night. The ground is still supersaturated. And along I made vast improvements to the trench, it is still puddling in places and really needs a small backhoe to be completed. For nights like this, we should be allowed to buy small dosages of serious pain medicines without a prescription. Typing this entry, hurt.

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Flood!

Eons ago I began a trench around the house so that I could reseal the block wall, and install a French drain to assure no water would ever come in the basement. Well, one thing led to another and I never finished. In the Fall, the leaves come off the trees, decompose a little and clog up the moat. So, on the night the grandparents are on their way over here and I’m supposed to be cleaning the upstairs, the basement floods. This one isn’t as neat as the last one but isn’t as horrible as the first. So what I do? Blog it.

Update: I think the flood is contained. Doesn’t look like we took any permanent damage. Everyone is going to be drying off after baths with hair dryers and paper towels. I think all bath towels were commandeered for the flood.

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Another attempt at jQuery modals

Not long ago, I attempted to use jQuery to ease the pain of creating a modal popup for editing user data. One challenge is that the user data is edited from a tabular list of users. Since the page is not refreshed after the update, the changes must be dynamically reflected in the table. That’s an interesting challenge but not a huge problem. The problem I ran into was the jQuery modal plugins I tried using to make my cross-browser programming faster and easier was that none of them seemed to accommodate my lengthy forms.

jQuery has dozens of modal plugins and options including Dialog built into the UI. Which is your favorite? Have you had success with a modal allowing scrolling and still supporting IE6?

Update: jqModal, Facebox, SimpleModal, and Thickbox, direct link to SimpleModal, and Dialog. Think I’m going with Dialog.

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LOST Characters Find Twitter

Note: There’s been an onslaught of people copying the SpoilerTV concept resulting in many duplicate names. I’ll update this post later to reflect the originals versus the imitators.

If you are a LOST fan, you’ll love being able to interact with Jack Shephard, Kate Austen, Sayid Jarrah, Sun Kwon, and Hugo ‘Hurley’ Reyes. They are each on Twitter now!

You may want to follow @abcinnercircle also. You can follow me on Twitter @djuggler.

Update: Apparently this post created some attention for Sayid. His response:

@djuggler Your link boosted my followers. A suspicious number of them, in fact. If I notice anything else… I might have to pay you a visit about 18 hours ago from twhirl in reply to djuggler

Update: In case anyone is curious, the LOST Twitters are part of a role playing game started on Spoiler TV.

Oceanic Six Twitter Project

Postby Gideon on Tue Dec 30, 2008 4:28 pm
All right guys, I know I’m new around here, but I had a pretty cool idea that I think some of you may want to participate in. Essentially, Twitter accounts will be created for the Oceanic Six (minus Aaron, obviously), and we’ll use them to follow the events off-island in this season as if we were those characters. Need for information? Keep reading!

What’s Twitter?
Twitter is a social network/micro-blogging service that is absolutely free to sign up for. You can see the example I’ve set up here. The amount of characters you can input for one "post" is limited to 160. This means sometimes you have to be smart to say all you want to say.

Who can participate?
Anyone can participate! Just post here with the character you’d like to post as, and I’ll help you set up an account if you need any help. I would like for you to make a commitment to this, however, and continue with your character at least until he or she makes it back to the island.

So what/when do I post?
Just post whatever happens to the character on the show! Act as if you are the character, not yourself commenting on the character. Think of it as role-playing. You can post whenever you like, whether on Wednesdays after the show or any time throughout the week, but please do not post more than once a day, simply because people will be "following" you and we don’t want to flood and annoy them. Also, please post at least once a week.

[Source, Spoiler TV, Oceanic Six Twitter Project]

Sayid is being played by Dreyesbo. Kate is being played by Jess. Sun is being played by Mellow. Hurley is being played by PenguinJosh. I’m not sure who claimed Jack but I am guessing Gideon. Charles Widmore is being played by DarkUFO. Vincent the dog is being played by bigsimpsin. Desmond is being played by RobinTWP. Frank_Lapidus is played by Anis Ben Amor. mhawking is being played by ???. Benjamin Linus is being played by ???. Claire Littleton is being played by ???. James Ford is being played by ???. John Locke is being played by ???. Miles Straume is being played by ???. The second Kate Austen is being played by ???. The Island is being played by ???. Jack Shephard (the second) is being played by ???. Juliet Burke is being played by ???. Sayid_Jarrah the second is being played by ???. Walt Lloyd is being played by ???.

See also. Here’s hoping ABC doesn’t make the Mad Men mistake.

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Always more to learn

No matter how long you do something, there is always more to learn. You’d think that since I’ve been doing HTML coding since around 1993, I’d pretty much know every in and out and every little tag and peculiarity regarding HTML. Not so. See, we form habits. We get into patterns. Specs change but we retain earlier hacks and assumptions. Today I learned an absurdly simple thing. Maybe I knew this and forgot. I rarely use tab orders on my forms. Most of the forms I create are very top down so the natural tab order is sufficient. In computing, counting starts at zero. But in HTML tab order, zero means exclude that form element from the tab order.

To exclude an element from the tab order, set the value of tabindex to 0. [Source, Webcheatsheet.com, How to Control Tab Order in HTML]

Because of my computer science studies, programming in PHP, JavaScript, C and so on, my inclination is to always begin with zero. Of course, my favorite web application language is ColdFusion and it always starts at one. I can only assume the Allaire brothers were originally targeting non-programmers.

HTML is about to become HTML 5. Funny enough I just traded my HTML 3.2 book at McCay’s a few weeks ago. Maybe I should have kept it and re-read it.

Update Jan 12, 2009: Ian Tempest noted in the comments that zero does not exclude an element but rather moves it to the end of the tab order. From the W3C HTML 4.01 specification:

Those elements that do not support the tabindex attribute or support it and assign it a value of “0? are navigated next. These elements are navigated in the order they appear in the character stream. [Source, W3C, 17.11.1 Tabbing navigation]

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Start the year off with professional development

Is training and professional development something you are going to get around to one day? Why not make it today? Resources abound for honing our career skills. iTunes has free podcasts from iTunes University. A quick Internet search should produce abundant articles and videos useful to whatever your line of work.

I am taking the next 30 minutes for professional development. In my case, I am going to begin learning Eclipse so that I can move away from Notepad++ and CFStudio5. This will be a step toward moving my development environment to a portable hard drive so that I can work on any machine anywhere I go. I know learning to use an editor sounds silly. In my case, shouldn’t "professional development" be about learning about new software testing techniques, algorithms, or another programming language? Not necessarily. Anything that you learn which makes you more efficient in your career or makes you more valuable to your company is professional development. Even if you already know and use Eclipse, watching these videos make teach you something you don’t realize you are overlooking. Retraining on a tool you already use and know can help break bad habits or reveal better ways to use the tool.

Update: See Darren Schall’s discovery on Eclipse workspaces as an example of using a tool for awhile and then discovering its hidden power.