Greasemonkey, that funky monkey

I have a new toy … well, actually it’s not new. I had actually first installed Greasemonkey about a year ago, but uninstalled it due to an extension conflict. (I don’t remember now what it was).

Greasemonkey is basically a Firefox extension which lets you to add bits of DHTML code, or “user scripts”, to Firefox in order for it to interpret or change certain webpages and/or program functions/behaviors.

So far, I’ve only added a couple: Google Ad Remover and Amazon Ad Blocker.

When Greasemonkey is installed, you get a cute little monkey icon that sits in your status bar, so I can turn the scripts on and off whenever I need.

Yay! :mrgreen:

High School meme

Couldn’t sleep … Jim left this morning to go play some golf. Some nudnick called and woke me up. I figured since I was up, I’d catch up on my reading … found this interesting, so I snaked it from Michael:

1. Where did you graduate from and what year?

Corner High School, 1993

2. Who was your significant other?

Johnny L. (I honestly cannot remember his entire last name … all I remember is that it was French and started with an L)

3. Was your Prom a night to remember?

I remember feeling miserable. The date I wanted didn’t want to go, and the date I had (a friend) decided not to go the day before.

I should’ve saved my money and stayed home, because after prom I had to leave for Mobile … had a visit and orientation that next morning.

4. What was your favorite song you danced to the night of Prom?

I didn’t dance.

5. Do you own all 4 yearbooks?

Yeah, but I think they are at my mom’s house.

6. What was your favorite movie in high school?

Most likely something with either Bruce Lee or Arnold Schwarzenegger in it. Or Keanu Reeves.

7. What was your number 1 choice of college in high school?

University of Alabama … unfortunately they did not carry the courses for my major, so my second was University of South Alabama at Mobile.

8. What radio station did you jam out to in high school?

I-95 and Classic Rock 99.

9. Were you involved in any organizations or clubs?

SADD, Spanish Club, and the “Hide in the back of the library” Club.

10. What was your favorite class in high school?

I had several: Computer programming, Art, Spanish, and English.

11. Who was your big crush in high school?

Allan Warren — but more of an admiration than crush for reasons I won’t go into.

12. Would you say you’ve changed a lot since high school?

Yes.

13. What do you miss the most about it?

Being able to fit into a size 0. LOL

14. Your worst memory of HS?

I have several; and I don’t want to go into any of them, thanks.

15. Did you have a car ?

My senior year, yes — my mother’s Chrysler 5th Avenue.

16. What were your school colors?

Black and gold.

17. Who was your favorite teacher?

I had several: Mrs. Dunn, Mrs. Wallace, Mr. Parker, Mrs. Dawkins.

18. Did you own a cell phone in high school?

I’m dating myself here: I didn’t know a single person who owned a cellphone in high school.

19. Did you leave campus for lunch?

I wish, LOL!

20. If so, where was your favorite place to go eat?

N/A

21. Were you always late to class?

Not really. Corner was a small school, so getting around to classes was rarely a problem.

(Though I went back recently and EVERYTHING is expanded!)

22. Did you ever have to stay for Sat. School?

Nope, but came close once. I called one of my teachers a nasty name and cried my way out of trouble. I’m not proud of it, but it makes for a funny story now.

23. Did you ever ditch?

Nah, I didn’t start doing that until college.

24. When it comes time for the reunion will you be there?

Did the 11 year already. (we missed the 10th) Will most likely do the next one.

EDIT: This is me on my graduation day, dorking around with my baby brother.

Christmas loot

I’ve been too tired, stressed, whatever lately (and have been fighting off the cold that seems to have caught up with me today) and had been meaning to post my ‘loot list’ that I’ve put off ’til now…

Jessie made out like a bandit this year, LOL. She had pretty much Barbie everything, including an electric guitar, vet/pet shop play set, Dr. Barbie vet doll, Teacher Barbie doll, Barbie’s computer desk playset, and a ton of Barbie-related stocking stuffers and candy. I had also found a set of The Three Stooges cartoons on DVD, and one of those electric swirly thingy lamps in blue (her fav color!).

The topper was the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire game for PC. She’s halfway through the game already.

That’s my girl …

My folks gave her a huge lapdesk easel, a nice art box full of colored pens, pencils, markers, crayons, etc., some sketch pads, and a ton of candy. My grandmother sent her a huge 4 ft teddy bear, and my other grandmother sent her some dolls, a cute tshirt, and some candy.

Jim got sweaters and shirts from pretty much everyone, including me. I also gave him several Dragonball Z collectibles that he’d been drooling over.

He gave me a Harley Quinn Barbie doll that I had been eyeing. (Isn’t she PRECIOUS!?) She’s always been my fav ‘bad guy’.

I also got a plush foot massager with teddy bear heads where the feet go, it’s so cute. hehehe

He also gave me a Rainbow Mothra collectible. I want that Burning Godzilla next!!! :twisted:

Jessie gave me some lavender bath stuff. (my fav!)

My family actually gave me what I asked for this year: gift cards. LOL

Seriously, I asked my mother NOT to buy me any clothing. My brother gave me a really pretty sweater — dark red, another fave. My mom also gave me a really pretty Alabama sweater, which I had been needing, and some crimson Alabama slippers. They’re plush and UBERcomfy. :mrgreen:

The biggest gift card I wanted was to Books-a-Million, so guess where I’ll be this weekend … that’s right, getting my geek on.

Tonight Jim and I are supposed to go out with some buddies to celebrate his birthday (31st), but I’m not so sure right now I’ll make it. My throat has been killing me since yesterday, and I’ve had that tickley “sick feeling” all morning. I was up with Jessie at 5am, and I’m about to go back to bed … think I’ll take some NyQuil and see if I can sleep some of this crud off.

They’re joking, right?

I snaked this from Michael’s post:

A company called Silktide rates websites based on ease of use, navigation, downloading, etc. They are a web dev firm based out of the UK.

Here’s how I did:

Overall, it looks like my site did well until I read the expanded report which says: “This website appears to be in violation of the British Disability Discrimination Act”

What the hell?

It goes on to explain: “All pages were found in violation of the current W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. This website is probably unlawful in Britain from the 1st October 2004. The British Disability Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to discriminate against a disabled person by refusing to provide any service provided to members of the public – including websites.”

My offense: not using the “alt” tag on images.

You MUST be joking …

I guess I’ll be adding some alt tags to see if that 7.6 ups into a bigger number.

WP warning

I knew it was coming … I had seen on a coupla WordPress related blogs last night that WP 2.0 was out (or soon to be).

Sure enough, just now when I logged into my Admin section I was greeted with a great big bright orange warning:

WordPress version is out of date, please upgrade.

Hah! One more thing for me to fuck up today. :mrgreen: hehehehe …

Nah seriously, I’ll probably wait a couple of days before doing any upgrades … There are a few things I want to research before diving in head-first.

Annoyance

ARGH!

I’ve just spent the last 4 hours working on something stupid …

I had noticed something in my installation of Firefox here at home: when tabbing between fields it would not tab into/onto drop down lists, radio lists, buttons, etc., just text fields. Plus, the focus seemed to be out of whack … the focus would seem to move too early on some sites, or not at all on others.

A minor thing … but a huge annoyance, and it was driving me crazy!

I knew that my install at work was behaving fine, and since I use pretty much the same set of extensions there as I do here, I was pretty sure that it couldn’t be an extension. But I couldn’t be TOO sure because I had just noticed it in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve gone on an “installing spree”.

:oops:

Ok. I uninstall all of my extensions. Nada. Then I uninstall all of my themes. (Hey, you never know…) Still nothing. This tells me it’s most likely in my preferences somewhere, probably the prefs.js file.

Oh joy…

Ok, I get the bright idea to uninstall Firefox and reinstall it. Nothing … and what’s worse, I’ve uninstalled all those extensions — a couple of which I’ve lost the “patched” versions and cannot update until either the author fixes them, or I get lucky and find the patched versions again.

I am such a dumb ass sometimes …

Time to switch to Plan B. I downloaded my prefs.js from my work install and do a quick lookie-loo in CSDiff … ugh, the AdBlock preferences and block list are stored in there. That made comparing them a little messy and somewhat tedious.

I got the bright idea to create a vanilla (fresh, like new, no tweaking, changes, etc.) profile and see how it behaves. Ok, the vanilla install behaved fine … but at this point I still had no farggin’ CLUE what was causing this odd behavior.

As a last resort (and what should have been my first stop!), I stopped by the MozillaZine forums to see if I could find anything there. I did a quick query on “tab between fields” and instantly saw a dozen posts from people having problems similar to mine within the last two weeks!

A quick refine and I find that all I needed to do was tweak my accessibility.tabfocus to 7.

Yeah, that’s my “I’m a goober” moment for this week …

Merry Christmas!

Just a quick note to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas. I’ll be out and about for the next day or so, but will be back online during vacation next week.

Have a safe holiday!

Oh yeah …

Almost forgot … this is actually why I logged in to post earlier …

Added a page to stream the RSS feed for the Fair Tax yahoo group.

I’m thinking of changing the layout of my site (yes, again) and might incorporate that somehow.

I would like to include the Alabama listings, but the group is set to all msgs being private so I made a request to have it opened so I can stream the feed … hopefully they’ll agree. There’s a LOT of interesting information posted on these lists.

Work rant

I’m in a ‘ranty’ mood today. I didn’t sleep much over the weekend, stayed up working on websites for clients and playing with a Coppermine install that doesn’t want to behave.

Actually, I’ve been in a mood for a few days now, but it’s work-related. I found out Friday that one of my clients proposed a new document system to the owner and it was approved and training already started. Ok, no big deal. So what if it negates several months’ work into a system I had written that we are currently using. If it’s easier to use and faster, good, do it to it. What I *DON’T* like is that the owner didn’t consult with me or Jim about the software, or it’s questionable security. What I *DON’T* like is finding out by the client calling me up with “Oh yeah, we’re going to XYZ software now. ~Owner~ is up here training on it, and you should get to see it next week. Yeah, and you’ll be supporting it too.”

EXCUSE ME? What the fuck?

I love this … I’ve gotten 3 calls on it already and I haven’t even SEEN the fucking software. Plus the owner has been out of town, so I haven’t been able to discuss my concerns … not that it would matter because once he decides to do something, there is no talking him out of it, no matter how bad an idea something is. (unless it proves *VERY* costly to continue)

This is not the first time something has been implemented before consulting with me or Jim to see if the implementation is going to even WORK.

Par for the course is: “Hey, we bought this and have already told all the clients that we have it and it is now available … now we need to make it work like I told them it would.”

I can’t get it through to them that if they would only consult with us beforehand, it would cut down on overtime, support calls, and issue handling. We need time to figure out how to best implement something BEFORE implementing it, not after!!

I need a new job … these people are going to give me an aneurism.

Uncontrollables, and I’m no Grinch

I’ve been having a lot of wild dreams lately … mostly nightmares.

I have nightmares when I worry, and when I worry about work, family, money, etc. they almost always involve tornadoes or some other natural disaster. I had read somewhere that tornadoes signify the things I worry about in my life but have no control over. That kind of makes sense, natural disasters: you can worry about them, but not be able to do anything to prevent them, they’ll happen anyway.

I always get like this around the holidays anyways. It’s getting harder and harder to just enjoy them because of all the crap that comes with … like family gettogethers: why do we force ourselves to spend a day (or evening) with people we can’t stand? Take my grandmother’s family gathering last weekend: honestly the only reason I went was for GG. She’s headed up to the mountains for Christmas and won’t be back in time for each of us to do our gift exchanges, so she thought we could all get together and do them at once. That way she both gets and gives gifts to/from each kid, grandkid, and greatgrandkid.

Or, that was the theory anyways …

Daddy started picking at me as usual, which pisses Jim off, so Jim didn’t want to be there. I think he also felt a little left out because my aunt Donna and most of her family doesn’t speak to us unless they HAVE to. (Jim doesn’t like her either … I knew I have a smart man! ) Plus we didn’t get to take Jessie, so that made it a little of a downer too. She would have loved to seen and played with all the other kids there.

And to top off the proverbial cake: my aunt Donna and her kids all decided to do THEIR gift exchange, and do the gifts to THEIR kids, which of course leaves all of my family out and GG is just sitting around watching them do their thing at her party.

Excuse me? This is GG’s day, not yours. Assholes.

Oh well, at least Christmas is almost here. I’ll feel a lot better when this shit is over with.

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