Confession: Not a rocket scientist

I have a confession - lately, nothing makes me feel as uneducated, incapable, and dumb as Blogger.

My B.S. degree (which means Bachelors of Science, not Bull Sheep even though my undergrad alma mater was and still is completely out of touch) is in Computer Science. My boring day job is "Webmaster". I've also earned decent money over the years as a web designer/consultant providing sites from the ground up (concept, design, coding, implementation) to people, organizations, and offices large and small.

Yet, somehow, Blogger baffles me. The problem may be that I know too much. That's not a brag. It's the truth. Certain HTML tags that I use every day are disabled in Blogger. Things that should work, nay, WOULD work on any other site, do not work here.

Hence, my code for my pretty button yesterday did not work for everyone. And I can't seem to get Feedburner to play nice, even though I've written my own custom RSS feed application in the past for other sites.

And I can't make my images have a border or not have a border (let's not talk about alignment!) based on how I code the img tag here, despite the fact that I am inputting valid HTML or CSS.

It's frustrating and the biggest reason I avoided Blogger for so long. I'm a control freak. And since I know things are technically possible, I want to do them. When Blogger doesn't cooperate, I want to have a hissy fit.

But the biggest reason I finally succumbed to Blogger was the sense of community. The tools for following and growing relationships is amazing. And with such a massive audience on Blogger, it would be silly to ignore this.

So here I am, coding and cursing all the way. And enjoying most of it. But also sometimes feeling like a complete idiot. For technical reasons, not just reasons relating to logic, silliness, inexperience, or my foot in my mouth.

Six Word Saturday

Happy Six Word Saturday, now with a shiny new button and a new extended description in the link above. But the short version is this: give a summary of your life in only six words.

Exhausted but happy for extended daylight.

I swear, this entire week has been me waking up cranky and dragging myself out of bed. I somehow survive work and come home excited for all the extra daylight in the evening. Then I can't fall asleep until midnight or later. Lather, rinse, repeat. I'm writing this post Friday night in hopes of sleeping in VERY late on Saturday morning. Please?

As always, please feel free to participate in the comments or by adding a link to your six words on your own blog by using Mr. Linky. And if you'd like, feel free to use the custom-designed (by moi) button - the actual code is listed in the entry above if you need it. Also, if you're the person who requested the button, umm, sorry it took so long that I forgot who you are. Not my best moment.

UPDATE: Apparently my button is not playing nice. Feel free to just upload it as a photo or link directly to it. I'll see if I can punch it in the face figure out the problem.

UPDATE #2: I put the code in a text box. I hope that helps the folks who had problems with the button today. Sorry! I swear, I have a Computer Science degree and on my super boring regular blog, I run all the code myself and I'm awesome. Here on Blogger, nothing is as it seems... Nothing makes me feel as dumb as Blogger. And child-proof tops.

Pass the popcorn

Muahahahaha, it's Friday the 13th. I'm not overly superstitious so I'm not sure that it matters much to me but I feel like I should at least acknowledge the day somehow.

My plan for this evening includes watching a scary movie after bludgeoning our project manager to death dancing around the graveyard in the backyard dinner. Specifically, we'll be watching Mirrors with Jack Bauer the Kiefer. (Yes, I'm aware reviews were bad but Jack said he'd torture me with a lamp if I didn't watch it.)

Which set off the hamster in my brain to spinning his wheel. Scary movies. Why do I watch them? They scare the hell out of me. I usually can't sleep afterwards. And I can't stand the sight of blood or gore. Some day I'll tell you about how one scary movie actually caused me to search my shower for chicken nuggets (true story!).

But I love these. Even the bad ones. Blair Witch, Saw, Forrest Gump, The Ring. I haven't seen many of the classics. Amityville (new and old), the first Friday the 13th, Poltergeist, a few Stephen King (Carrie, The Shining), Psycho. But no Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Beaches or Exorcist.

And so I keep watching, eyes peeking between my fingers, my nails dug into Joe's side, holding my breath and waiting for it to be over. Then we watch an episode of The Office or 30 Rock before going to bed or poor Joe knows he won't be sleeping that night.

So what about you? How do you feel about scary movies? Love 'em, hate 'em, favorites? Share! And don't break any mirrors or spill any milk today. Just in case.

Reason #257 why Joe and I are made for each other

Short and sweet today! You're welcome!

A recent conversation with SomeMonkey:

SomeMonkey: so guess what middle-monkey's latest project is.
me: crack dealer?
SomeMonkey: I'm going to pretend you didn't say that about my daughter.
She convinced me to buy her a simon and garfunkel cd
me: your kid has interesting musical tastes
SomeMonkey: so i pick up a used every-song-they've-ever-done box set
that came with a lyric book
she's memorizing as she walks around the house
me: that's awesome
she's gonna be SO popular at school
did they do... that whole get a new plan, stan?
nm, that's paul simon
SomeMonkey: lol
me: oh, wait, simon and garfunkel
SomeMonkey: yes
me: IS that paul simon?
lightbulb moment
paul simon was in simon and garfunkel!!!
holy crap!!!

Later that same evening:

me: been talking with Joe

me: you know paul simon?
Joe: uh huh
me: did you know he was in simon and garfunkel?
Joe: really? same person? cool! I had no idea!

SomeMonkey: omg
you two are made for each other

Am I the only one (besides Joe) that did not know this?

Some day I'll share some of the other 256ish reasons. But not today.

A brief affair

On Saturday, I finally set up Feedburner on this blog. I know next to nothing about it but since I'm mildly interested insanely obsessed with who is visiting, this seemed like the best way to measure people using RSS readers or other feeds. (As opposed to Google Analytics for actual site visitors, which is awesomeness).

Setup was simple and almost immediately it seemed to be responding. Except for one small thing - I don't subscribe to my own feed so I didn't really know what the messages looked like when they went out. Until I spotted my feed in Joe's reader. It looked like this:







Post title and an ad, no content. Great. Especially once it prompted this comment yesterday from Lora:

your feed is kinda effed up. in my google reader your feed is totally empty (not even partial) except for ads about jesus. it's happened for the past ten posts or so.

true story.

She claims to be amused by my Jesus ads. I'm just not amused at Feedburner.

My preference is to do the "short" feed. This probably annoys some people but I've noticed that for me personally, I'm way less likely to comment if I can read the whole post in my Google reader. Pure laziness on my part. So that's why I go with the short feed.

My preference is definitely not to send out an "advertisement only" feed. So I apologize for the nuttiness this week if anyone (besides Lora the Observant) noticed and I've broken up with Feedburner after less than 4 days. If someone can clue me in on what I'm doing wrong (or if it's their fault, maybe they can fix it or at least respond to the related messages in their Google group?), I may rekindle the old flame.

Or just sit around and make bad jokes. That's probably more my style anyways.