So I’m plugging along in my html course (web design here I come), and one of the assignments is to create an image map & link to a bunch of…whatever. Just download this little free trial sofware and get your homework done. So, boutell.com here I come, download mapedit….and the little geek in me goes “ooooo. this is soo cool! I wanna do this again! ” Wonder how they made this work….
and for only $10 I can own it!
bwahahahahaha
Magda and I were looking at what her visa means (like how long can she be here, can she leave and come back, etc), and I saw this on the main page of United States Visas.
A Message from
President Bush:
“America is not a fortress; no, we never want to be a fortress. We’re a free country; we’re an open society. And we must always protect the rights of our law — of law-abiding citizens from around the world who come here to conduct business or to study or to spend time with their family.”
— 14 May 2002, President Bush Signs Border Security and Visa Entry Reform Act
This is one of the biggest LIES I have ever heard/seen/known of. I mean, I WAS IN THE ROOM when the guy at the embassy told Magda that they had to assume that EVERY person who applied for a visa had to be suspected of trying to illegally emigrate. I gotta send a letter to my senators, and to my two former senators about this. I’M SO PISSED.
But it’s not like he tells the truth or anything. I mean, he can’t even talk. Look at the editing job up there. He couldn’t even say “law abiding” without thinking about it. Sheesh.
Pete & I have been planning to remodel our kitchen ever since we moved in six years ago. The place is 30+ yrs old and was built in the housing boom when plenty of folks decided to move to California. So the cabinets were thrown together – nails protude from either side of the shelves inside of the cabinets, the dishwasher is going, the stove is going, and as an additional insult, there’s lovely 70’s wallpaper on the kitchen walls, ceiling, and door to the washroom. There’s also four different types of flooring in about an 800 sq foot space – spanish tile for the entryway & bathroom, fake wood for the living room, carpet for the dining room (?!?) and a different tile in the kitchen/washroom.
We met with a designer to look over cabinets, discuss layout, ponder functionality. We tramped the showroom floor for an hour and a half reviewing counters, wood type and space saving ideas. Our first floor was measured. Now we’re also doing the bathroom.
Our designer took a week off to get her daughter settled into college. Then she had jury duty. Now her mother-in-law has passed away. We’ll wait on the kitchen design, but we have the quote for the flooring. I’m looking into a home line of credit.
And so it begins.
A college football game caused ESPN to move the México at USA World Cup qualifier this weekend from ESPN2 to ESPN Classic, a channel I don’t get. So no English language football for me this weekend, just fútbol over on Telemundo.
The bonus part about Telemundo, I get an hour pregame show! In Spanish.
Geez, what a whiny little pootyhead that “Overbooked” is. Email her & tell her so.
*snicker*
Time for bed….
It is eleven days until September and six days until the kids go back to school. My year has sped off without me.
I made a big decision months ago to go back to school and learn web design. I’m working as a consultant doing web content management for the company that laid me off 3 years ago, and winding down my bookkeeping gig of 2 1/2 years. (I gave a four week notice the first week of July, but my replacement wasn’t found until the last week of my employment, and then she only lasted three days. So can’t I please come back to help out???) The grandfather clock has just struck midnight, and I’ve finished all my readings and quizes but not my final assignment on Unit 2 (2 of 6 units for the course). At this rate, December 21st, the deadline to finish the course, will come all too quickly.
Did I mention that I’m the fundraiser for my daughter’s Junior Girl Scout troop? They don’t only sell cookies in the spring, but magazines & nuts in the fall. And there’s talk of some other fundraiser to ensure there’s enough money for the trip they’re planning in three years. (They’ve got to sell plenty of goodies before they’re no longer small & cute, but big & pre-pubescent.)
I’ve signed Merin up for volleyball, Sean up for soccer. Sean may do cub scouts. Merin has a knitting class in mind for November. (Start by making your own knitting needles, learn to knit & they can also choose to do carding, weaving, felt making or even spinning fleece they collect from angora rabbits.) Both Sean & Merin are bugging me about playdates – they miss their friends, why am I not scheduling sleepovers?
I know I’m not alone with a busy life. It’s just that any time I try to cut something out to give me more time, or allow me to do something else, my time evaporates. I’m not a tv buff – the only show I’ll watch regularly is The Daily Show. Movies? I gotta remember to cancel Netflix since we’re not using it much. Although I do dream of getting a maid service to deal with the housecleaning, the looming kitchen remodel and the associated bills have me scampering away from that idea like an angora rabbit. Kids do the chores? Well, yes, but that doesn’t necessarily save me that much time if I have keep hounding the kids to do them.
And I’ve promised Pete that I would can my spicy vegetables this weekend.
Somewhere there are two hours a day I should be able to reclaim. If you find them, let me know where I’ve put them….
Tonight Patrick fell asleep to me reading him part of Star of the Sea, an amazing book by Joseph O’Connor. The writing is really incredible. It’s not like Stephen King, an author I’ve read over and over again without hesitation for more than 20 years. When I recently read Black House (2001), the sequel to The Talisman (1984) co-written with Peter Straub, I again enjoyed the incredibly easy flow of character and plot. With Stephen King you just go on this amazing ride, losing yourself in the words— and worlds — of his novels.
With Star of the Sea, I found myself remembering reading things like Bleak House, Wuthering Heights, and Middlemarch. Books I know I enjoyed, but I was forced to read them at a slow pace. Slow. Each and every word was carefully chosen, making each sentence burst with descriptions stronger and deeper than anything cranked out by the current day’s most popular authors. (My hero Mr King has found a wonderful middleground to make his stories rich with content but still easy to digest.)
Joseph O’Connor has been able to type up a story that would be great to read by a warm fire on a cold evening. This kind of recreation is similar to enjoying a 12-ounce rib-eye steak with a specially-selected red Pomerol wine. Even if it seems to take an awfully long time, you love absolutely every minute of it.
There have recently been articles in the June 26th issue of the Sunday Tribune and also in yesterday’s Features section of the Irish Independent. Of course, as already mentioned on the blogs of other folks, lots of newspapers still don’t put much online.
As if that weren’t enough, she was also on a radio show this morning! She was interviewed over at the Ballyogan Recycling Park and Landfill, and told everyone listening all about it.
(The link to the show will only work for the next week, but we’re going to find out how we can get our own copy. I use RealPlayer as the default app for firefox to play the SMIL audio file given from the radio show link.)
Why do people persist in saying “ATM machine” without realising they’re really saying, “Automated Teller Machine Machine”?
If dogs are so much smarter than cats, why don’t cats also chase cars?
How is it that people who’ve never been parents always know exactly how children should be reared?
If lawmakers who determine Minimum Wages had to live on the same amounts, would they set them any higher?
Why do people agree to appear on “reality” tv programmes?
In a starving world, Western preoccupation with diets, fitness and slimming borders on the obscene.
Anyone who says s/he “owns” a dog or cat is delusional; evidence clearly shows that it’s the other way round.
Given that most global news outlets are now controlled by conservative-minded multinational conglomerates, where’s their credibility?
If even half the governments who claim to be concerned about poverty and human rights actually meant what they say, Third World Debt would have been eradicated decades ago.
Where did Adam and Eve’s daughters-in-law come from?
Who was the first person to look at a lobster and say, “I think I’ll eat that”?
The world would be so much nicer if we humans were as forgiving of each other as our pets are of us.
What ever possessed Noah to put two mosquitoes onto the Ark?
Could anyone who ever voted for George W. Bush pass a standard intelligence test?
After some effort figuring out zen’s new home, I think I’ve managed to reconstruct our weblog. There are still a few tweaks I need to put in from the old weblog tree (like all the work to block spam), but this is 90% of it back and functioning.
We owe heart-felt thanks to Brian Fant and box2 technologies. Our dear friend Pati told him about our troubles, and he jumped to the task. Less than 48 hours after zen.org’s previous home had been savagely attacked by a massive tree (I’ll let Sven make that post), I received email from Brian offering their help and facilities to get zen.org back on its feet. (To make it even more exciting, we were on the other side of Ireland visiting friends at the time, racking up their phone bill while I stayed dialed up talking to Sven in IM and working out the logistics of relocating our domain.)
Brian’s company has been responsive and willing to do a wide variety of tweaks and fixes to help us get everything going. Email accounts and aliases, DNS, mysql, SSL where we wanted it, imap & pop3 & webmail, spamassassin, mailing lists, restoring mail folders, the works. While their company does a wide variety of things other than Web hosting, I’m happy to endorse box2.com to anyone looking for a good hosting service, wherever you may be around the world. Speedy, reliable, and helpful.
The next time we’re in California, dinner’s going to be on us. 🙂
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