Apparrently, i’m not there and have no interest in going unless it’s a personal invite from Miley.

My lady is dissappearing at the weekend for various reasons so i’ll be all alone, what do i do for entertainment now . Give’s my a chance to wrap her Xmas presents though, really good gifts, unmatchable you could say.

Was asked by a friend to code him a temporary webpage, I’ve done so quite succesfully making me a fully fledged Freelance Web Developer After my January Exams i’m thinking of taking it up more, sort a little examples site out and develop PHP knowledge.

What do i do without my lady with me?

Идея, реализовать пользовательскую систему заявок назревала очень давно, уже как год наверно. Ни о каком подобии хелпдеска речь не идёт. Необходима самая простая система. Собственно, начал по тихоньку писать первую версию… ну как писать, халтура конечно… Если что то из этого выйдет, буду постить об этом тут.

November 9th 2009 is Firefox’s fifth birthday. Firefox and WordPress have grown up next to each other so we’ve always felt a brethren spirit with their team as we work toward the same goal, making the web a better place, from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Just out of curiosity, I wondered how Firefox was doing in our browser stats compared to the posts I did in 2008 and 2007.

1. Firefox — 45.7%
2. Internet Explorer — 38.7%
3. Safari — 8.75%
4. Chrome — 5.2%

This is the first time I’ve ever seen Firefox pass IE in market share for a mainstream audience like WordPress.com has.

As you can see, competition in the browser market is still alive and well. Of everything available, Firefox still continues to be my primary browser for every day usage. (And Thunderbird for my email.)

Take a few minutes and wish them a happy birthday.

(The statistics were tabulated from server access logs and include WordPress.com users as well as visitors, as we no longer run Google Analytics across WordPress.com.)

Coda è F A N T A S T I C O per lavorare con i CSS e un po’ di HTML (ma supporta anche PHP e altri linguaggi).

Potete anche non avere intenzione di comprarlo (in effetti 99$ non sono un’inezia) ma vi assicuro che vale almeno la pena provarlo!

Panic – Coda – One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X.

Un consiglio: provatelo un giorno in cui avete un progetto da realizzare davvero, non solo per cazzeggiare. Se lo guardate con diffidenza e/o aria di sufficienza, potrebbe non catturare la vostra attenzione. Usatelo seriamente e vedrete Peccato solo che non abbia nulla per “iniziare da zero” e vincere il panico da “foglio bianco”… ma per quello potete comunque farvi dare un’input da iWeb, o dai mille siti di template (più o meno gratuiti) che circolano in rete.

Наткнулся тут на интересные темы в стиле Halloween, для Zimbra.

Put your Zimbra in a Costume » Zimbra :: Blog

The web is full of awesome websites. But most of us never come across many of the ‘out of the box’ kinda websites out there. Being a web designer I like to keep checking what the best designers out there are upto. One of the effects that fascinates me is this latest trend of making dark websites. When I say dark, I don’t mean then traditional black websites. These websites have awesome shades of brown grey and black. And hey they are functionally some of the best websites around. That’s what good web devs do, Great Design.

Versions.

I love this website! Just look at it! It has one main page that does the 2 main things the site needs. Catch attention and give information. Its a really simple website with hardly 3-4 pages in it. Web devs will notice that it does not hav much dynamic content and can be emulated with just HTML if need be! It gives you all the info on the front page and lets you buy it right off the main page. Simple. Awesome.

Daniel Cork.

Daniel Cork is a Manchester based designer. CorkingDesign is his online portfolio. And The most striking feature of this website is the texture in the background. The smart lines to delineate spaces and brilliant colors to accentuate the textures is a feature that you will notice on all his works displayed on this website. Soccer fans please note that he is the guy who made the LiverpoolFC website! Check it from his profile.

GapMedics.

This is a site with a cause, so its all the more splendid to see the kind of amazing design in such a site. The first thing that will hit you when you enter the site is the strong colors used here and you stop to wonder if you could ever imagine that these colors would blend in so nicely in one place! The Gap Medics site, to me exemplifies the new wave of dry styling in the web world. It is striking and keeps you interested enough to browse through the whole stuff. There are some tech specs about the site that devs would really appreciate if they visited the site. In all this is new wave blisssss.

Mulletized.

This is designer Brendon Grobler’s Portfolio site. I have no words to descibe the absolute crazy but effective styling of this website. This is again the quintessential new wave design with dry styling and a crazy mix of subtle coloring and in the face shades. See it, experience it.

Ok people, hope you like my collection and review of the sites. Please drop in your comments about my reviews or suggestion on what you want me to review! Thanks a lot!!

IEs have an interesting behavior around forms that may drive pixel-perfect designers and implementers nuts.  In certain conditions, IE6, 7 and 8 will “enhance” the form functionality by showing you which button is the submit button by drawing a black, 1 px border around it.

If you’re like most web-devs, you style inputs, textareas, and especially buttons to match the look-and-feel of the overall site.  Usually that entails setting properties like background-image and border.

The issue can be reproduced when the following criteria is fulfilled:

1. use a form in your site
2. use the standard <input type=”submit” /> button to trigger form submission
   • OR use the <button type=”submit”> to trigger form submission
3. style the button visually using CSS

My test page can be downloaded here: test page

In this image, we see a standard form in IE7 with one text input field and one submit button.  Both the inputs are styled with a 1px solid #ccc border and #eee background-color.  Pardon the horrible render; MS Paint doesn’t have a lot of options for export.

In this image we see the same form in IE7 with focus (by clicking into the text input field).

It’s a subtle change, and most won’t notice it.  It only becomes an issue if your UI/UE team gets really antsy about visual changes that they didn’t want.

Two simple fixes come immediately to mind.

1. Change the <input type=”submit” /> or <button> to a simple button and trigger the submit with javascript.
2. Implement a CSS fix that tricks IE into not displaying the border.

For solution 2, the fix is a pretty straightforward one with some caveats.  Add this bit of CSS to whatever style cascades down to the submit button:

.fixIE {
filter : chroma(color=#000000);

}

“Filter” is IE-specific.  “Chroma” will set to transparent whichever color is cited, so in the above case, if an element has or inherits the “fixIE” class, anything with the color #000000 (or black) will be set to transparent.

The caveats should be obvious.  Not only will the extra border be transparent, but if the default text color or background-color is #000, it will rendered transparent.

There’s a slightly less-obvious caveat as well to this.  Even as the color itself is rendered transparent, IE will still draw the border around the button.  The net effect is that as the form receives focus, the submit button will act as if  a 1px margin was applied around the element, and it will visually contract.  It will expand back out to the previous size if focus moves to some other element in the page not contained by the form.

Pretty ugly hack, and I’m inclined to tell you to just use fix 1.

Have you been writing your JQuery javascript code and suddenly found the next time you test it some of your event bindings are no longer working? This happened to me today, and it took a fair amount of debugging to find out what was going on. Turns out that if you are calling the JQuery AJAX functions, you need to rebind you events.

So the easiest solution for me was to call my own function in the load function’s anonymous function, like so:


$("#remotetableload").load("file.php", function(){
myFunction();
});
function myFunction(){
//my bindings
}


The main trouble I had with solving this problem was coming up with the right search terms to find an answer in Google to be honest. Eventually found the answer in the JQuery FAQ, there are a few other solutions other than the one above, so check it out.

Its been a long time coming but I’ve finally got a hosting package and brought the name mattbridgeman.co.uk. Its currently under development (integrating wordpress in an interesting way basically) but check it out here anyway!

Compulsory Election Holiday on 13th October, 2009

The Government of Maharashtra, India, has declared a compulsory holiday on the 13th of October in the event of the upcoming General Assembly Elections to be held on that day in the state. The state of Maharashtra will observe an exceptional Public Holiday to ensure that citizens fulfill their responsibility of voting for the candidate of their choice. All the shops, commercial establishments, restaurants, multiplexes, malls, and industrial establishments will remain closed on the day so that the citizens get a chance to exercise their vote. Complying with the norms, Agile Technosys will have a holiday on 13th October, 2009. Albeit, this imposing does sound a little undemocratic and unconstitutional but we have no other options but to comply.

We at Agile love to work and keep up to the deadlines but certain situations such as this one puts the process on a backburner.  We would like to request all our clients to understand this unforeseen, unplanned event and trust we will do everything necessary to cover up the time lost.

—————————————————————————————————————————————–
Agile Technosys (agtech) is a premier web development, web application development, software development and web design services company. To know more about us – visit us at http://www.agiletechnosys.com
—————————————————————————————————————————————–

While Apple Inc. provides XML parsers based on open source XML parsers, but they don’t for HTML.

One of a good parser I found is Element Parser and its source codes is host at GitHub. However there is no good explanation about how to use it.
So, I took a look at its sample source codes, and its FAQ page. My impression was that it would use CSS selectors.

So, if there are HTML tags like this :

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.1" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://icodeblog.com/wp-content/themes/bluez/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/rss/" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://icodeblog.com/feed/atom/" />
<link rel="pingback" href="http://icodeblog.com/xmlrpc.php" />

To retrieve information for CSS links, search pattern should be :

link[rel="alternate"]

There is a good explanation about CSS selectors at Selectutorial:CSS selectors

Recently I stumble upon another glitch with IE. IE is well known as the most unstandard web browser on earth.

Consider this simple HTML code snippet

<input type="hidden" name="input" value="this is a secret message" />
<input type="text" id="input" value="you should see this if you use a sane browser" />
<input type="button" value="click me" onclick="doSomething()" />

<script language="javascript">
var doSomething = function() {
	var elem = document.getElementById('input');
	if (elem) alert(elem.value);
}
</script>

What do you expect to see when you run this? I expect to see an alert box with “you should see this if you use a sane browser” as the message. Apparently in IE you’ll see “this is a secret message”.

What happen exactly is that IE “cleverly” add an ID attribute to our input element (yes it only applies to input element) to be the same value as the NAME attribute. How did they decide this “clever” feature in the first place? Where is it documented? I guess it will remain a mystery to us. Maybe we should start a campaign to Kill IE (there’s already one for IE6 http://www.ie6nomore.com/).

So next time you encounter a problem in IE you might want to check if it’s “IE Auto-set ID Attribute”.

There’s an amazing thing going on.  It’s a small little product release that few folks outside of the techworld cover.  The release and tech uproar over Google Chrome Frame.

Why do I say this?  Oh, well, some folks at Google woke up and realized there are such things as platform dependencies and you pick the platform that makes it efficient to produce and distribute your product.  So… it produced a WRAPPER for the platform most widely distributed (windows/IE) AND reduced its dev costs (produce a runtime that runs on anything.).

We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind,” argued Lars Rasmussen and Adam Schuck of Google’s Wave team last week.

Beyond Google making such an aggressive move to stash Chrome inside IE as a stab at Microsoft, this move demonstrates  that BROWSERS determine a BIG PART of business on the Internet.  Netscape was right, just way too early.  The browser is the new OS – both in user function and business line.    All the players are pitching users on various propositions.  Do you care about security? compatibility?  native software?  cool features?  It can be bought, sold, and managed just like any other piece of commercial software.  The browsers are not immune to real business.  The require real capital to build and real support to maintain.  Firefox is hanging on… but how long does it have with its main benefactors producing competitive products and forging competitive alliances?

Basically, the browser as a community project – Free Software Thing – is losing ground to browser as front door to lots of revenue.

It’s well known, and extremely frustrating, to many software vendors that whatever ships with the computer is what wins and trying to get a mass of users to install the platform is a losing battle.  As a result Google is trying very hard to make Android and Chrome OS a default shipping system, but it’s not there yet.    If Google is to ever grow as big as MSFT it MUST own the default software on the majority of systems.

I predict eventually Google has to ship hardware – perhaps in deep partnerships (tmobile MyTouch with Google is just the beginning).  It will definitely start shipping Google branded hardware that has Google OS and Google search, Google apps capable of doing real work and real entertainment.   Apple, PC Makers, Cell Carriers and others will divorce Google slowly over time as Google takes more and more of their core business.

As a very interesting side note…. the biggest eyeball engine every created still doesn’t have enough advertising revenue growth to power long term business growth.  That’s right… SELLING ACTUAL STUFF IS STILL WHERE BUSINESS LIES.  Just hawking someone else’s stuff isn’t enough…. and so it goes.

Welcome, Internet, to long term business.  Reality bites.

OR

Maybe I’m completely wrong and this helter-skelter game of pushing open source and community projects strategically can disrupt competitors enough to keep growing and further distribute the Google eyeball engine… hmmmm….

Well, someone had to find one eventually…:-)

IE8 Standards-Mode Only:

.test { color /*\**/: blue\9 }

All IE versions, including IE8 Standards Mode:

.test { color: blue\9 }

You should probably use conditional comments instead, but sometimes a good old-fashioned CSS hack can get you out of a bind (especially when you don’t want to have to grab another external stylesheet).

The hacks should be cascaded like this for best results:

.test
color: green;

.test
color /*\**/: red\9

.test
*color: blue;
_color: pink;

Well, someone had to find one eventually…:-)

IE8 Standards-Mode Only:

.test { color /*\**/: blue\9 }

All IE versions, including IE8 Standards Mode:

.test { color: blue\9 }

You should probably use conditional comments instead, but sometimes a good old-fashioned CSS hack can get you out of a bind (especially when you don’t want to have to grab another external stylesheet).

The hacks should be cascaded like this for best results:

.test
color: green;

.test
color /*\**/: red\9

.test
*color: blue;
_color: pink;

According to php.net, “there is no installation needed to use [json_encode() and json_decode()]; they are part of the PHP Core“. While it’s certainly true that they are part of the source code, many of the binary packages available for RPM-based platforms (like Red Hat, CentOS and Fedora) have them disabled by default.

There are a number of extensions (PEAR and otherwise) available as RPMs in the official repositories, but sadly not php-json. To enable these functions on CentOS (and by nature, RHEL) 5, the process is simple but not immediately obvious:

1. Make sure you have php, pear and the necessary development packages installed:

   $ sudo yum install php php-pear php-devel
   $ sudo yum install gcc make

2. Use PECL to download the json package:

   $ sudo pecl download json

3. Owing to some odd default memory settings we can’t download and install the package with PECL, we have to use PEAR:

   $ sudo pear install json-1.2.1.tgz

   PEAR will then trundle through and handle the configure, make and make install commands for you

4. Create a new file in /etc/php.d called json.ini, containing the following:

   ; php-json package - http://pecl.php.net/package/json
   extension=json.so

5. Reload apache:

   $ sudo service httpd reload

6. Test your work:

   $ php -r 'var_dump(function_exists("json_encode"));'

   All being well, that’ll return bool(true)

…and there you have it.

Note: There’s a chance you’ll run in to an error that looks like this:

/bin/sh: bad interpreter: Permission denied
Cannot find autoconf. Please check your autoconf installation and the $PHP_AUTOCONF
environment variable is set correctly and then rerun this script.

… most likely, this is because your temporary partition is mounted with ‘noexec’, check the output of mount and look for the line that refers to /tmp to confirm the presence of ‘noexec’ in the mount options. In this instance you’ll either have to re-mount /tmp without noexec (by removing it from /etc/fstab or untar, phpize, configure, make and make install manually.

No caption necessary

When I started this blog, I have to readily admit, I did it as a therapeutic exercise.  You know, a place to vent anonymously and say, if even just to myself, the things I so desperately want to say to others but cannot.  Societal constraints against offending people are apparently too ingrained in me to allow me to jump up into people’s grilles and exercise my 1st Amendment right to free speech in their faces.  With profanity.  And possibly spittle flying.  The reasons I cannot overcome these genteel conversational rules are simple and easily enumerated:

1. I was raised a polite person by parents who, whenever they weren’t beating the evil out of me for torturing my little sister, wanted to instill superior etiquette rules and behaviors in their only son
2. My health insurer advises against me doing so
3. I’m chicken

So, this blog serves as a dumping ground for my less polished emotional outbursts.  Just like reality TV, a blog is a great place to do it because others are entertained by bearing witness to some stranger’s misery.  Just like those people who slow down when driving by an accident.  Just like those people who go to Nascar races.  Watching someone else’s life pile itself into a wall in turn 4 going around a brazillion miles an hour is somehow strangely entertaining.  Anyway, I figured if I gotta unburden myself, why not do it where others can vicariously view it and then feel better about themselves primarily because they aren’t me?  In essence then, this blog is a freakin’ public service…and just like Civil Defense facilities, this thing outta come with its own air raid siren or at least a backyard bomb shelter.

However, I digress.

I have determined that it requires only 1/2 workday of my existence to pile up enough material to produce one, probably-longer-than-necessary blog entry.  As it is around mid-day, that makes it half a day…so let’s see what I have so far:

Euroranger [11:44 AM]: So…wanna hear what I’m doing?
ShadesOfGrey [11:44 AM]: ya
Euroranger [11:45 AM]: Okay…so, since Day 1 with the new job, we’ve been working from an XP box that’s located in the boss’ living room. He’s running IIS off it and that’s actually what the sites are running from as well. A real sketchy setup, right?
ShadesOfGrey [11:45 AM]: ugh
Euroranger [11:45 AM]: So, I’ve been telling him about hosted solutions (because his alternative was to drop around $10K in hardware alone and then co-lo that).
ShadesOfGrey [11:46 AM]: k
Euroranger [11:46 AM]: Anyway, long story short, he asked me a month back to research viable CF hosts.
Euroranger [11:46 AM]: So I did and sent him an email with a couple of options…this, however, was CF8 with MySQL5.
Euroranger [11:46 AM]: …naturally, him being the boss, he did nothing with it.
ShadesOfGrey [11:47 AM]: of course
Euroranger [11:47 AM]: So, a few weeks go by and we hire Dumbass.
ShadesOfGrey [11:47 AM]: I remember it so well
Euroranger [11:47 AM]: Now, as has become exceptionally clear, Dumbass, despite his claims to the contrary, knows jack and shit about MySQL.
Euroranger [11:48 AM]: So, out of the blue, about 2 wks ago, suddenly we need a hosting solution…oh, and it needs to be using SQL Server…
Euroranger [11:48 AM]: …I don’t participate in any discussion about this…as really, I could care less, I’m equally capable in either db.
Euroranger [11:49 AM]: However, rather than even speak with the recommended hosts I researched, boss (probably aided and abetted by Dumbass) pulls some hosting solution out of his ass and purchases a contract with them.
Euroranger [11:49 AM]: …that was 2 weeks ago.
ShadesOfGrey [11:49 AM]: oh lawd
Euroranger [11:50 AM]: …I got called in yesterday PM to see if I could figure out how to get our server set up and running.
Euroranger [11:50 AM]: Now, Dumbass has been supposed to be doing this since Monday…however, I discover not only hasn’t he done it, he hadn’t even logged on yet.
ShadesOfGrey [11:51 AM]: makes perfect sense
Euroranger [11:51 AM]: Still, me being the great guy I am, I work out all the RDS kinks and late yesterday I managed to successfully log onto the box.
ShadesOfGrey [11:51 AM]: why would he do the work, when he can wait and you will do it for him
Euroranger [11:51 AM]: Now, this box is Server 2008…something I’ve not seen before.
Euroranger [11:52 AM]: …however, the way this host is set up, I need access via a web control panel interface to set up the database…which, I was advised, was on another box…which is normal.
Euroranger [11:52 AM]: So, to briefly recap, I logged onto the box and set up the site, moved files and created and tested the FTP connection. The last element is…the database.
Euroranger [11:52 AM]: …and who better to leave THAT to than Dumbass…our “expert”?
ShadesOfGrey [11:53 AM]: so.. did you set up the db yet?
Euroranger [11:53 AM]: Oh no…check it…choice exerpts from the chat transcript with the boss this AM:
Euroranger [11:54 AM]: BossMan [11:25 AM]: when you try to setup a Data source in coldfusion using any account it errors and says Connection refused
Euroranger [11:55 AM]: Euroranger [11:21 AM]: He (SALESMAN AT THE HOSTING PROVIDER) was telling me you guys had installed a SQL Server instance on the 240.107 (THE CF SERVER) box. Is that not the case?
BossMan [11:21 AM]: Yes
BossMan [11:22 AM]: Their hosted SQL would only handle 500megs (OUR CURRENT DB IS BUT 210MB…AND AROUND 3/4 OF THAT IS LOG FILES AND GARBAGE TABLES)
Euroranger [11:55 AM]: Euroranger [11:27 AM]: Well, one step at a time…
Euroranger [11:27 AM]: Is there a database on the new SQL Server deployment you guys added?
Euroranger [11:27 AM]: Something like XXXXX?
BossMan [11:27 AM]: YYYYY
Euroranger [11:28 AM]: Okay…and the user account you’re trying to set up the datasource under…does it have access to that database?
BossMan [11:28 AM]: yes
Euroranger [11:29 AM]: Is is the default “sa” account?
BossMan [11:29 AM]: have tried all accounts. sa, ZZZZZ, and a new one we created
Euroranger [11:29 AM]: Hm.
Euroranger [11:56 AM]: BossMan [11:30 AM]: the crazy this is the server cannot resolve “localhost” you have to type in the IP address of the server
Euroranger [11:30 AM]: Do you have access to their shared SQL Server database (THE SOLUTION THEY SOLD US)?
Euroranger [11:57 AM]: BossMan [11:31 AM]: no
Euroranger [11:31 AM]: No, you can’t access it?
BossMan [11:32 AM]: no we were never give that because we told them from the beginning we would install our own (WHAAAT????)
Euroranger [11:33 AM]: Oh, I see. (COMPLETE FUCKING DEPARTURE FROM ANY SANE WEBSITE DEPLOYMENT)
ShadesOfGrey [11:57 AM]: lol
Euroranger [11:58 AM]: Wait for it….
Euroranger [11:58 AM]: Euroranger [11:37 AM]: Want a suggestion?
BossMan [11:38 AM]: I think I know what the issue is
Euroranger [11:38 AM]: They host CF, they host SQL Server and they have people right there…tell them to configure it so you can use it. Have them set up default passwords and then when they’re done, we change them to something else.
BossMan [11:39 AM]: this is a vertual server. probably shares a NIC and thats why it goes off server and back in to the IP Address
BossMan [11:40 AM]: virtual
BossMan [11:40 AM]: or atleast appears that way
Euroranger [11:41 AM]: I’ve never dealt with a virtual server before…
BossMan [11:42 AM]: what was the name of the hosting company you sent me
ShadesOfGrey [11:58 AM]: brb
Euroranger [11:59 AM]: So, to recap, I sent them a perfectly viable hosting solution with more than enough database space. Dumbass comes along and, because he’s a fucking liar and because my boss is apparently too dense to notice, we have to change the fucking database product from MySQL to SQL Server.
Euroranger [12:00 PM]: But, as if that isn’t enough, our existing 210MB database will apparently be too large to fit on the allocated 500MB of space on the shared SQL Server deployment this host normally offers. Again, I detect the effects of a Dumbass conversation.
Euroranger [12:01 PM]: So as to make this entire situation a complete disaster-movie-worthy epic fuckup we go out and BUY SQL Server 2008 and then install it on the same fucking box as CF8…
Euroranger [12:02 PM]: …on a hosted machine…
Euroranger [12:02 PM]: …which is running in a virtual server environment.
Euroranger [12:02 PM]: …which, surprise surprise, none of us seem to know anything about…especially our database “expert”.
Euroranger [12:05 PM]: I’m wondering if there’s an entity even more omnipotent than God…and whether he too hates me.
ShadesOfGrey [12:09 PM]: lol
Euroranger [12:10 PM]: I mean…man…you can’t make this up.
Euroranger [12:10 PM]: It’s just CF8 and a fucking database…how much more complicated can you make it you ask? Who knows? But stay tuned and find out.
ShadesOfGrey [12:11 PM]: he he he
Euroranger [12:11 PM]: I swear, I fully expect to be told next “hey, the server’s language pack is just Sanscrit…can we work around that?”…

You see, I’m a man of normal temperament just trying to do my job, get paid, take care of my family, get lucky every great once in awhile with Mrs. Ranger and pretty much just live my life in the most calm and personally pleasing manner possible.

May he rest in peace...in a heavenly home for the hard of hearing

However, omnipotent deities everywhere obviously have it out for me as there’s no way, not even taking into account I may be suffering the karma accrued in a previous life by someone like Adolf Hitler, Vlad the Impaler or Billy Mays, I should be receiving this much cosmic torture.  You, gentle reader, no matter how much you think your job sucks, should feel better bearing witness to what it is I have to put up with on, what is becoming obvious to me will be, a daily basis.  Unless yer that poofy tiger-trainer fella in Vegas who nearly got eaten a few years back, chances are your job is merely mildly annoying and not enough motivation for you to know that even if you hawked all the shit you owned you still prolly wouldn’t make bail for all the acts you contemplate committing on your “co-workers” everyday…not that I’m admitting to anything like that…just sayin’ is all.

For instance, today it’s the Friday before a long weekend.  I have friend from Canada coming into town tomorrow.  He’s returning home from Florida and he’ll be stopping nearby with his family for the night and wants us to come visit him right in the middle of the day.  He has a daughter around the same age as my own (9) and they’ve chosen the hotel they’re staying at (around 25 mi away) as it is close to a store his daughter wishes to visit.  Now given the demonstrated proof of supernatural interest in turning my life into a blooper reel of sitcom outtakes superimposed on images of suicide victims, what store could you imagine he wants to visit?  On a long weekend (which means I can’t flee town to the hills as I would normally be doing)?  On the first Saturday of college football (the first universally accepted “man day” on the calendar)?  When I have a standing invite to attend a friend’s all day college football party wherein the games are viewed on a home theatre with surround sound and whose screen area is best described using the word “acreage”?

American Girl Doll Store…that’s where.

I look normal on the outside…it’s only on the inside that I’m crying.

My name is Euroranger and I approved this message.