Not only is today a holiday, but the students all left town over the weekend.

What does this mean?

It means I can drive ANYWHERE I WANT! Traffic will be pleasant and manageable until August!

YIPPEE!

Any suggestions of what I should do to celebrate this automotive freedom? The plan for this afternoon is to go to the movies. But beyond that? I can go ANYWHERE!

Remember! Elliot “Spike” Maynard is buddy buddy with Don Blankenship.

Keep that in mind when voting for State Supreme Court of Appeals.

Even though I like to do laundry, I don’t like the turn laundry right side out. I will fold your clothes inside out of they come that way out of the dryer.

I don’t mind cleaning the kitchen, but hate cleaning the bathroom. (Most likely because kneeling [as in to scrub the tub] hurts my knees.)

In general, I don’t like cake. It’s too dry.

I don’t like answering direct questions; I almost always tend to answer questions with a question. I know it’s frustrating, but I can’t help myself.

I don’t like the smell of marigolds or tomato plants.

So what have I been doing for the past day?

Well, yesterday it poured rain in the morning, so I washed the curtains. As I’ve made (almost) all the curtains in the house, I know they’re safe to be washed, so other than the ironing (the price I pay for using 100% cotton) it was relatively painless.

The, the weather cleared and Michael and I mulched some of the flower beds. We went through four bags of mulch and barely touched the beds at the bottom of the hill.

Then I rushed inside to make pizza, because at around 8:30, my grandmother had a surprise visit from my aunt and uncle.

That was the best part of the day. Since it was a surprise, we didn’t hold dinner, but the pizza was still warm when they got here, and I made oreos for dessert, and then we talked and played dominoes until midnight.

Pretty awesome day.

And no flower pr0n, because it’s raining again. Which is why I ended up falling asleep on the sofa instead of doing anything today.

I’m washing the curtains after (embarrassingly long time).

If anyone wants a cat, I’ve collected enough fur to make a decent sized feline.

Let me know!

I know Go Fug Yourself isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but really, you must go look at this outfit.

It’ll only take a second.

I often joke about not being able to tell if something is a belt or a skirt. But I didn’t think I’d ever really have to seriously ask that question.

Today was Derek’s last day. He started out working here as a work study, and then when he went to graduate school, became a graduate assistant with us. He’s worked her for longer than anyone but me, and I’m going to miss him, even if I am glad that he gets to go be an excellent physical therapist.

So congratulations Derek!

I walked by a computer in the open lab, and some guy was watching a frelling pr0n video!

With a LOT of detail.

(shudder)

I freaked out and ran away, and when my boss looked, creep boy was gone.

EW!

EW! EW! EW!

Anyone have some brain bleach I can use?

I’ve got a big project at work, and need to thoroughly clean the house when I get home.

Talk amongst yourselves.

Meanwhile, this is the wallpaper on one of my monitors at work. (It displaced Batman’s Tumbler.)

I’m going to be insanely busy at work for the next couple weeks. We’ve got a new software package, and I’ve got a month to learn it and write the documentation.

In theory, it’s interesting, but what I’ve noticed mostly is that it runs really slowly, which could be a problem. We’ll see.

But mostly, I’m all but counting the hours–it’s finals week, and students are already leaving, and so soon we’ll actually be able to drive around town. Woo!

Came home to discover that my new mixer had arrived!

It’s so shiny and pretty!

New mixer next to the old mixer. Poor old mixer.

Look at the beautiful color!

The mixer settled into it’s new space.

Now I feel like I should make cookies or something.

HA!

I just discovered something that makes my life much easier. Microsoft added “Conditional Comments” into their browsers, so I can do all the cool CSS stuff I want, and then just have a boring page that doesn’t use the cool stuff that IE (and only IE) doesn’t support.

Simply create a style sheet only for IE, that doesn’t have all the neat code supported by every other browser out there, then the following code (where IEsucks.css is the name of your less cool style sheet) to the head section of your HTML page:

<!–[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”IEsucks.css” />
<![endif]–>

That’s it! I can now use fixed positioning with impunity! MUAHAHAHA!

(See here for what I can do if I get to ignore IE not following the rules.)

ADDENDUM the First:
Get comment code doesn’t show up when you post it. Funny that.

(sigh)

Code is now fixed and visible.

Got an e-mail “Statement from WVU President Mike Garrison” in response to the faculty senate vote last night.

He doesn’t address the vote or issues of the faculty senate at all, and if you read between the lines, he pretty much says, no way am I stepping down, I don’t care what you all say.

If he loves this university, then he should be considering what is best for the university, not what is best for him. And I didn’t get that from his e-mail.

Internet Explorer sucks.

I’ve been tweaking my site over the past couple days, and it has renewed my absolute hatred for Internet Explorer, and through it, Microsoft. Why? Because Microsoft can’t be bothered to follow the w3c‘s guidelines and standards.

I primarily write my code by hand. I’ll use Dreamweaver to simplify tasks involving content, but when it comes to layout I always work with the code, be it for HTML, CSS, or php. (Different web design languages.) Thus, I know that I am following web standards, because I’m writing the code myself (and, I admit, I have multiple reference books I check to make sure I’m writing things correctly.)

What ticks me off is when I write correct code, and IE ignores it.

Here is the front page for my website. I created pure CSS menus that appear when you place your mouse over an option. (Starting with the Cats option there are no menu options to appear, so it’s not broken.) This hover menu works in Firefox, Seamonkey, Netscape, Safari, and IE7. But not IE6. (I think they worked in Opera, but I no longer have Opera installed on any of my computers.) When I saw that this was fixed for IE7, I was delighted, thinking that Microsoft was finally going to follow web standards, especially when I discovered that IE7 also supports fixed positioning (see here for an example).

But no, I was wrong, IE7 still doesn’t follow all web standards. So the menus in all my book pages work in Safari, Netscape, Firefox, Seamonkey (and I think Opera) but not IE6 or IE7. Considering the amount of work I put into creating and maintaining those menus, this really irks me.

And, I discovered yesterday, that IE still screws up layout; I’m assuming it’s still rendering margins incorrectly. So I had to tweak a perfectly constructed layout, to fix the fact that IE was overlapping layers.

So it’s not the products per se that bug me, but Microsoft’s arrogance in refusing to follow the web standards used by every other web browser. So whoever is behind that monumentally bad idea has best stay out of my way, or I’ll kick them soundly in the shins.