Guess and Check

I was driving home from work today and found myself in a little bit of evening rush-hour-like traffic. Just sitting there, listening to the radio. I hear a siren of an approaching emergency vehicle. I’m amazed when I discover that there’s an ambulance trying to make it’s way down the very packed street that I’m on. I’m even more amazed when four lanes of stopped traffic manage to quickly make room for the ambulance to get through. This is curb to curb I’m talking about, with no where to pull off. The vehicles on the two outer lanes just somehow made room for the vehicles in the two inner lanes to squeeze in.

I’m proud to say that I was a part of such a traffic event.

Yes, I am keeping up my pledge to not be lazy around here. You just… can’t tell yet.

That is all.

I checked out the WordPress IRC channel today. I asked about my floating problems, and was quickly directed here and here.

Now I just need to figure out how to implement that stuff. It should be an interesting adventure.

So I think I’ve been slacking off a bit in terms of the website. Putting in a lot of time this weekend working on another (work related) website has kind of gotten me motivated to work on tompreuss.com. The work was nothing fancy, of course, but getting everything to validate and work right in a couple browsers was kind of a boost to the ol’ self-confidence.

So I’m going to kind of divide my time over modifying WordPress a bit and then working some other non-blog content.

I’ll do that.

Today (meaning yesterday) was a half day at work. This allowed me to run a bunch of errands in the afternoon. Such fun.

My brother and sister-in-law are down visiting this weekend. They provide for some amazing conversation. It’s nice to be able to talk with people about cool stuff.

And I’ll leave you with an abstract thought. Is a penguin a bird or a duck?

I was just poking around, and I discovered that Googlebot visited my page recently. Anywho, guess who’s the top search result for “tompreuss“? I’m not doing as well with “Tom Preuss” (no quotes) though. I’m somewhere around 210. Adding the quotes puts me at twenty-one. “Guess and Check” (with quotes) comes up around 353.

Not that I’m counting or anything.

As this week winds down, I think back to a few short days ago. Back then, I knew very little concerning certain aspects of analytical chemistry. Now I know much more. Real-world experience makes quite a difference.

Also, three times this week on my way to and from work I’ve had to slow down because on animals on the road. One rooster and three deer. And for those of you who may not have noticed, this was my attempt at posting something more interesting. I’m thinking it didn’t go so well. Yeah.

Work today was good. I did much more work on the SEM. So cool.

I really have to start cleaning stuff up around the house. I’ve been far to lax of late.

I also might want to think up some better stuff to post. Like funny stuff. Stuff someone might want to read. Or I could just talk about what I do at work. Hmm… maybe funny stuff will happen to me at work. I can only hope.

Day two was quite good. I learned how to use the SEM and by the end of the day was even left unsupervised for periods of time. Now I have a bunch of stuff to get done early tomorrow morning.

I’m going to need more sleep though. I’ll get started on that soon…

Well, I managed to get a comment on yesterday’s post. Yay for me. Thank you, Max.

So today I started my summer internship. It was great. So far. We’ll see about tomorrow. I have to be in the lab at 7:30 a.m. to start working. I suppose I might as well get a jump on being a morning person again.

Looks like I’m going to be spending some time tweaking stuff a bit more before I get some real content up. Or maybe I’m just lazy after a day at work. We’ll have to wait and see.

One of the great things about using WordPress is the ability to add on to it using plugins. They seem to be getting better every day. I can’t really decide which ones I would even want to use. However, what I’ve been doing is checking out a bunch of the blogs of some of the heavy posters over in WordPress’s support forums. Some of them are absolutely amazing. Here are some of the good ones: Alex King, Max Thrane, Podz, Nick Momrik, and Matt Mullenweg.

And then there’s the hacks. So much good stuff I’m going to have to look over. I actually went ahead and tried one of these out, to kind of test my ability to edit the proper files. You might have noticed that all the links in this post have the “title” property set. That is thanks to this hack right here.

Once I’ve had a chance to really look over these other blogs, I’m going to go ahead and try some plugins out. And even though I pretty much have the layout how I wanted it, I’ll keep tweaking it. Those three pixels keep bothering me. I think it has something to do with how I’m floating the menu. And of course, I also have to work on the other pages of the site. You know, I’ll have an “about/info” page, and a “photo” page, and maybe some other pages. It’s going to take some time, but if I did everything all at once I wouldn’t have anything to blog, right?

Well, it might have taken me a little while, but I managed to fix that error I talked about earlier. Seems that the problem was in the default CSS that WordPress gave me. The div class for the “Comments” link didn’t have it’s “clear” property setting right. It was clear: all; and all I had to change it to clear: none;. Turns out “all” isn’t even a valid value for the clear property.

Now the menu is three pixels too low in IE. Still looks great in FireFox though. Download your copy today!

Yeah, so after publishing that last post, I checked in IE again, it seems like that big gap appears after the first div in the content and pushes the second content div down below the end of the menu.

Now that I know what’s happening, I just need to figure out how to fix it.

Well, I just looked at the site in IE for the first time, and there are a few quirks. There’s a big gap between the two day’s posts. Oddly enough, it’s before the comments for the second day. Also, the margins for the menu and the content divs show up differently. Not that bad though. The acronym thing that WordPress uses doen’t show up at all, however.

So nothing that bad, as I had feared. I’ll keep working on it.

Okay, so now I feel the need to explain why I’m starting this little thing up in the first place. I’d like to think that while not that many people are going to be reading this now, someday people are going to go through the archives from the beginning. They are going to find this little nugget of a post right here.

So yeah, I kind of always like the idea of having a blog. I read a few quite regularly. It gives me a little bit of insight into those people’s lives. I kind of like the idea of giving that kind of insight to others. And it gives me something pretty cool to work on. Learning all this stuff is really nifty. I already tweaked the layout quite a bit. How the site looks now is nothing like the default layout. Tweaking the CSS to get what you see here was an interesting process.

Another thing I need to do is figure out how to use all the nifty features of WordPress. That’s the personal publishing system I’m using to present this thing. I chose it over some of the other systems out there mainly because it used PHP and MySQL.

Okay, that’s going to be all for now. In the meantime, why not check out The Homestar Runner Wiki? It’s an authoritative knowledge base on everything Homestar Runner. “Everything you ever wanted to know,” as they say.

Well, that last post incorporated that “TrackBack” thing perfectly. I wasn’t really sure what it would do. I was amazed to find that my post shows up in Joey’s comments for his post. Or something like that.

So this is my humble blog. I just came up with the title, “Guess and Check”, a few minutes ago. I think the tagline will be “I’ll keep guessing, you keep checking.” Yeah, I like that sound of that. Anyway, I’ll probably be updating like mad these first few days, so be sure to check back.

Well, I’m going to stick with FireFox 0.8 for a little longer. A few more days, at the least. My buddy Joey seems to have had a little trouble upgrading to 0.9, but being the devout Open Source fellow that he is, his sticking with it. I’m putting a “TrackBack” from his post here. At least I think I am. We’ll see how that goes.

All in all, a good first post.

Testing
Numero Uno.

Welcome to WordPress. This is the first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

(July 5, 2004) Test trackback for Matt Read. Begin.