Catartis

DSL Report

Into day three of DSL service. What a difference from dialup...Woo Hoo! And talk about easy to get up and running. Took me about 15 minutes, and most of that time was taken up navigating in the jungle of cables and cords that lurk behind my desk. [I was much to lazy to pull it out from the wall to dust, clean and straighten wires.]

May not be as fast as Comcast Cable is supposed to be here, but from what I have heard, their record for downtime is miserable. I wouldn't hand them a plug nickle for the type of service I have heard they have in my "neck of the woods."

Hopefully, Earthlink will serve me as well with DSL as they did with dialup.

Off to zip around and download something large. lol!

If you are on the edge deciding if broadband is worth the difference, all I can say on day three is DO IT!

Signed,

One happy puter camper!

ReUseit Design Challenge

Have you ever complained about the plain jane look of Jakob Nielsen's useit.com and used it as an excuse to avoid accessibility and valid coding?

Here's your chance to try redesigning that site to a more visually pleasing level:

http://www.builtforthefuture.com/reuseit/

No one says it will be used for anything, but might be an interesting exercise. I know I could use some practice in that direction. How about you?

Farron

Quiet Week

It has been a quiet week here at the Cathouse. You would think I would have taken advantage of that to work in tweaking and cleaning up this new blog toy, but no, I have been watching hummingbirds & butterflies and playing in the garden...which cost me a pulled muscle in one leg thanks to a typical klutzy move. OUCH!

I did go grab the domain name *catartis.com* just because it was there. For the moment it is simply parked at the registrar's host and if you use it you are redirected here in one of those icky frames. [All the better to hide my messy coding a bit deeper though....lol, think positive thoughts.] Rumor has it that my current host will be upgrading soon and subdomains & parking will be part of the package without an extra fee. Since I really like them, I am holding out without tooooo much whining.

Other events during the week:

Earthlink [who I also really like] has finally gotten DSL service in my area. Package is ordered and modem, pieces and parts should arrive tomorrow. Yippee!

Looks like a trip to the beach is going to happen on or around Sept. 9th. It was offered, I accepted....let's go. I am not one to turn down a trip to my favorite stretch of emerald waters and white sands. I will be there for real one day soon....bank on that one!

Of course, since classes will be in session by then [Check out LVS Online Learning if you haven't already!], the ancient lappie will go with me. And I will no doubt be running up "paid dial-up hours" immediately since my limited dial up access will go into effect right when I leave. Great planning, huh? Ah well, we shall adjust. And if that and the cat's vacation upkeep are all the trip costs me, I will be one happy camper.

Off to piddle elsewhere, now....TaTa til later,

Farron and That _^..^_

Which Sci-Fi Character are You?

I am NOT an online quiz fan, but this one caught my eye and I had to give it a try. What a hoot! And it's short as well.

http://www.tk421.net/character/

Give it a try and let me know which sci-fi/fantasy character you are.

Grin,
Farron
[aka Luke Skywalker...before I cheat]

Hummingbirds , Pesky Websites & CSS Text Images

In my travels around the web while sipping coffee and watching the new little humming residents of the patio garden, I spotted a tidbit that may be old news to many of you, but part of it was news to me. Knowing that it concerns a site that many of us have had major complaints about, I thought I would pass it along.

We all know about the death of Netscape by now, old news I had also heard that, although CSS and standards guru, Eric Meyer had not been one of the first heads to roll in the AOL layoffs, he had decided to leave and go out on his own. What I had not heard was the news that a certain major website that has caused more howls since their redesign that Carter has [had?] little pills was one of his redesign clients.

Check the August 1st entry in his weblog here: http://www.meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2003c.html#t20030731

to find out which major website has set their eye toward accessibile CSS. Yippee!! Of course, if he gets things set in his normal manner, older browers will receive the information in plain vanilla, style free fashion, but that is far more acceptable to me than the rude, "upgrade your brower" lockout page that is there now. [smile]

Another tidbit I have located that may be of interest because several of us have been discussing and trying the orginal article/technique of accessible Image Replacement in CSS. I think we had pretty much agreed it was a wonderful idea, but not quite *there* yet. According to the August 8th entry in Zeldman's blog there are a few alternatives in the works.

http://www.zeldman.com/

Still not quite all together, all together, but getting there.

Enough of my rambles for a Sunday morning. Time to refill my mug with a bit more of that nice strong New Orleans style, chicory coffee, hug a cat and watch my newest friends, the hummingbirds.

TaTa for Now,

Farron

Note: Photo was taken on the first morning the feeder was hung. It is of poor quality since it was taken through a window so I would not disturb my new little friend. As they are becoming more comfortable with we large, lower lifeforms invading *their* new turf, I am hopeful that I will be able to catch some outdoor shots soon.

First Real Issue with MT

Okay,

So far, as I start to see how things work, I am starting to really like MT. Except for one thing. Seems some of the functions in the editing panel are IE specific. Shame, Shame, SHAME on them. The most annoying one I have found to date is when you are trying to rebuild a page or a template. Often, over in Mozilla [or from what I hear on the boards, Opera as well] the "rebuild" or cancel buttons are below the bottom of the popup window. Which is not resizeable BTW. You are stuck, can't use the function without backing out of your browser of choice and heading over to messIE.

Now can it really be that difficult to either enlarge the window, or make it resizeable....or better yet. Drop the pop and put those buttons on the actual control page? Can't be THAT difficult to do.

I've heard some other beefs about buttons for underline, italics, bold, etc not working, but that's not much of an issue to me. Especially when I hear that they generate old, deprecated tags like < bold > and < i > instead of the accepted < strong > and < em >.

That's my little snit and rant for the evening. Ahhhh, grumbliing feels good sometimes. [smile]

Farron & That _^..^_

Farewell to the Rose Bushes

I have cut away the last of the rose bushes. The little white *almost wild* ones always seem to last the longest. They would last longer if my little nemisises, the dreaded Japanese Beetles, had not started appearing in Tennessee a few years back to gobble them with wild abandon.

The other day, when I was trimming out some of the last of the branches, I decided to grab a camera and catch a shot of one of the last of the little monsters. He had many friends on the roses that day, all munching away and having little buggy sex on my flowers. Ahhhh, one consolation is that they are were all only bug-juice under my nails and on my fingers shortly after the photos were taken. Did I mention that they are slow moving little monsters? They make me miss ol' Ellis the turtle who lived with us for a short time last year. He found stunned Japanese Beetles to be quite a tasty treat. lol

As my buddies & partners in crime will realize by now, much of the reason for this post is to test adding images, using a bit of coding rather than a straight text post, taking up space to see if it blows the layout & adding categories. [grin]

As a side, blog creation related note, for future photos, I believe I should either add them as a link or in the extended entry section to cut down on the weight of this main page. But I wanted to try it this way for the first shot. I also found it easier to upload the image via my good old ftp for the moment. Trying to send if via the built in feature gave me a setup I still needed to edit a bit and it created a new folder inside images/ that I did not specify. As in, it gave me images/photoname.jpg/photoname.jpg. I am quite sure that was caused by some goofy user, but it is NOT what I specified as the code path. It added that blakety blank folder all on it's own. booger! haha

Farron
[aka Squasher of Bugs]

Back and Fiddling

I am finally getting back over here to fiddle tonight.

I couldn't come up with "daBigIdea," so I asked THE Cat for advice. Guess what he demanded? [Read the "Why the Name" link to find out.] I am mainly using this rather out of character layout for testing purposes.

I think I have found most of the templates that control the look of the pages. Still haven't spotted the one for the search page. Britta???

Right now the test is to find out what is on the extended entry page and see if I need to change something. Slowly but surely, I am beginning to get a vague idea where to look for things related to the look of the pages and how to work on them. The very basic parts that is.

Just to let you know, the only category active at the moment is General Chatter...the others do not have any links/pages yet.

Back to it to see what happens now.

Farron