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Today Brenda & I got up to Brainard Lake for some snowshoe hiking. It’s nice to be able to access some of the trails we liked in the summer, and snowshoes allow us to do that. We got our snowshoes all the way back in October, and we used them exactly once – long enough to figure out that we needed some waterproof pants to enjoy ourselves up there. Between then and now, we had lots of blizzards and Brenda was very busy with work, so we have not gotten a chance to get back out there until this weekend.

You may have noticed, I changed the site’s style. Based on this style, it’s been a joy to add pages and look at the elegant php code the author used to create this style. It has renewed my interest in the site, in fact. Between the new WordPress version and the new style, I have a lot to play around with, here.

(The wedding page. Yes, after a *long hiatus, our original wedding page has returned to the site!)*

Future home of all things lighting. Light, Light transport simulation, Radiance, HDR photography. It’s gonna be awesome. For now, this:

Future home of aviation content: trip reports, checklists, and more!

Future home of a homebrewing & beer reviews page.

It’s been hanging over me like a dark cloud, upgrading to the latest version of WordPress. After reading the directions 1,000 times, I decided to just go for it. It was easier than I thought. (yawn). -The links (“blogroll”) feature has been revamped, and the code that places my links on the home page no longer works, so that’s a work in progress.- But everything else seems to work. Yay. (yawn.)

Outlook Sucks. The reason for its suckiness is unknown. (Right click and select “View Image” in the image below to read the full error message.) It’s sad when it takes such a large dialog box to say “our software is garbage and we don’t even know what’s wrong with it.”

• Pull down every menu, force-clicking on the stupid short menus that Microsoft thinks is doing you a favor by clipping, so you can see all the menu items. Don’t find anything.
• Open up “help”, type in “headers”, and wait for shitty, slow-ass, web-based help search to come back at ya with some results.
• Delight that four down on the list is a “showing email headers” help item.
• Wonder what is mentally wrong with the Microsoft “Help” file editors who thought it made more sense to tuck the actual “how to show them” part of the entry yet another hyperlink away, and fill the main page with endless babble about email headers. Poor Joe Average Outlook User has no idea what the fuck an email header is, and I think most people who land on this page are looking for the how, not the what.
• Click the damned extra hyperlink and read that you need to go to View… Options to get started.
• Go to View menu, to find there is no Options entry.
• Think to yourself how shitty Outlook is.
• Return to the “Help” page, and read the note about how “if you do not see an Options entry, to make sure you are reading an email message in a separate window, rather than in the preview pane”.
• Think to yourself how this is something you rarely do, since it’s simply a step that makes no sense in your day-to-day use of email – if the message can be read in the preview pane, why double click the message to open the same shit in another window, to be closed later?
• Mark #10 as a key to understanding the Microsoft programmer psyche, the people responsible for making a word processor that requires gigabytes of disk space.
• Open the fucking email in a separate window, while watching a small piece of your soul dissolve and fade away.
• Go back to the View menu and then realize that now there’s ANOTHER View menu, in the individual message window.
• Open the second View menu to discover the long-sought-after Options menu item.
• Select options, giddy with excitement knowing your menial little task – previously a one mouse-click operation now riddled with complexities on the scale of the Normandy Invasion – is almost over.
• Finally look at the message headers – crammed into a short, narrow window with a scrollbar that is wholly unsatisfying and difficult to look at, especially after the process required to get there.
• Squint at tiny type and try to follow header lines that cannot be read all in one shot without scrolling, which is like trying to read the ticker board at the New York Stock Exchange as if it were a sentence.
• Discover no clues in the headers that would explain the latent delivery of the email.
• Write this post.

Well, shit. Molly Ivins, my favorite Texan, has died. Losing her third battle with breast cancer, one of our greatest bastions of clear thinking and best practitioners of humorous-while-pissed-off writing is no longer around to comment on the bullshit that politicians do.

I came across this very interesting art piece, by way of Kottke’s website. It upset me.

Here it is, folks. The State of the Union Address. Sadly, this is a rather accurate depiction of what we’ve got going on in Washington.

A couple of weeks ago I posted an innocent little blurb about riding my bike in the snow to deliver some christmas presents to the post office. I included a picture of my beloved singlespeed “townie” bike that was used for the purpose. The thing is, the bike’s frame is whimsically called the “Il Pompino”. It’s made by a company in the U.K. called On-One, and it’s a great, bombproof bike frame, perfect for the task. Perhaps because the company is in the U.K. they don’t realize this, but the phrase “Il Pompino” means “blow job” in Italian. Eh, probably they do know.

It ain’t exactly “U.S. Marshals”.

Repeat after me: “Maxxis Locust CX tires are the greatest thing since coldcuts.”

OK, that’s quite enough already, with the fuckin’ snow. I get it. I live in Colorado. But the shit’s only useful in the mountains, which is apparently where half my office is headed today, to ski. I wouldn’t know, but hopefully by next weekend I will understand what this snow fever is all about. Right now, to me, all it is is a friggin’ nuisance.

Well, I just go back from the barbarian’s office, sans tooth #32. That hurt a lot, and it’s starting to get worse as the Novocaine wears off. At least it was fast. This is gonna get worse before it gets better, but the good news is my office is closed tomorrow through Tuesday so I can lie around and complain in the comfort of my own home. Brenda will be thrilled.

Well, if this ain’t the most non-standard Christmas I’ve ever experienced, I don’t know what is.

One time, in high school (not band camp), my friend Brian Scargill called someone an “assbutt” in gym class. I’ll never forget it. I thought it was brilliant, to call a guy an amalgam of slang phrases for the posterior. While I never forgot the moment, or the expression, I’ve never, ever used it. But now I am forced to do so, for fear of calling this idiotic moron something far worse.

Well, shit. That took longer than I thought. Delayed by a holiday party video project and thwarted by my webhost’s computer being downed by the horrid weather and resultant power outages in Seattle last weekend, I am now moved in to a new home at dreamhost.com, and my email is slowly trickling over to the new home on a more regular basis. In the meantime, I went to a roller derby contest (no shit), made a movie (no shit), read a book (well, I started it, anyhow) and prepared for the upcoming Christmas holiday (as best as one can). All worthy of talking about here, and in earlier times I would have talked about all these events in realtime. All I can say is that it feels good to have finally gotten my website moved to a new home and out of my friend’s hair, I’m looking forward to the holidays, and I’m fully planning on tweaking my site and – most importantly, posting more often – in the new year.