Perpetual Smile

You remember the age-old debate, “everyone else is doing it,” right? I decided to start posting all the nifty little tools I find on the internet since, well, everyone else is doing it. For the first time, there won’t be anyone saying to me, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?”

On to the good stuff.

You know how it always feels like you have a million things to do and no way to get them all done? Ever feel totally unorganized? Yeah, that’s me. I write lists all the time… and they get lost. If they don’t get lost, I forget about them and consequently forget the things I’m supposed to do. Well, I’ve been using Tweeto, this great online to-do list. You add all of your to-dos and Tweeto lets you organize them by color, tags and you can even drag and drop them into order. There’s also an RSS for your list (things recently done and things to-do), and you can email it to yourself and friends.

Tweeto is created and run by Frozen Sheep, this little web applications company in Manchester, UK. I found Frozen Sheep while browsing blogs (one of the blogs I stumbled on was one of the guys on the Frozen Sheep development team).

This simple little tool as helped me out so much in the last few weeks, so I thought I’d pass it on.

I don’t ask for much in life. Some ice cream here, some code to work there.. Just the basics.

As you may have noticed, I have my Twitter updates in the sidebar here. I think it’s pretty freaking neat. Well, I also set up a Twitter account for Letters of Love. I installed the exact same plugin I have here over on Letters of Love, and inserted the exact same code. I even tried inserting the same working code I have on this site, using my personal Twitter account, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t understand why.

It won’t work, and I am way too tired to keep screwing around like this. Sigh.

Earlier today I posted about grown up things, like politics and money. Now it’s time for nerdy things — specifically, Visual Basic.

I first came into contact with VB when I was either 15 or 16. My then-boyfriend was actually very smart, even though all he did was get high. Heh. One day he surprised me with a disc and told me he made me a present. If my memory serves me well, I thought it was a CD and tried to play it in my boombox. Turns out, it was a CD-ROM with a little program he’d made on it, to display RGB and hexadecimal values when I made colors. Web design was just a hobby for me back in the day, so I didn’t have anything as neat as Dreamweaver or EditPlus. I worked with Notepad and coded everything by hand. If I wanted a particular color, I had to Google for it.

The program he made me was so simple and yet very helpful. I asked him how the fuck he’d done something so cool — because doing things wasn’t normally his thing, you see — and he said he’d been playing around with Visual Basic and had made it for me using that software.

That ex-boyfriend is long gone, but my curiosity about Visual Basic never left me. When it came up that I had to take some kind of programming class for my degree, I didn’t hesitate to take the Visual Basic course.

This is my last semester. I’ve taken plenty of Flash/ActionScript classes, so I’m seeing a lot of similarities. Oddly enough, so far VB seems a lot easier to use. You really don’t have to do a lot of memorizing. Of course, I say this now and maybe a couple weeks down the road I’ll be eating my words, but hey.

Maybe it’s my history with other programming languages, but even the lab assignment — with virtually no instruction — is going to be a piece of cake. The egomaniac in me is hoping I’m the only one in my class who gets it done.

Edit: After writing this post, I went to do the lab… and discovered the instructions are in little charts. So much for my egomania.

Why, oh why did I think it would be a good idea to stay late today? I normally work from 9 in the morning until 1 in the afternoon, but since our offices were closed on Monday I agreed to put in extra hours today and Friday. Normally, I wouldn’t really care but a) Indianapolis is not gonna pay for itself and b) I need to catch up on work. Here I am.

It wouldn’t be so bad if what I was working on, well, worked. My task is to create image rollover effects using just CSS and XHTML, rather than clunky old JavaScript. In theory, this is easy. I tried doing it from scratch and it wasn’t working entirely right. I believe that Google was made for a reason, and I proved myself right again by finding something relatively simple that I could build upon. Well, all is working fine and dandy.. except now the images are displaying vertically, instead of horizontally. In my mind all I can think of is, I have all. day. to work on this and get it right. Oh, shoot me. I basically picked the worst day to stay late. Sigh.

Anyway, Everett contacted me and told me that the wake for Liane will be at Woodtick Memorial. He’s not sure of the when yet, but he said he’ll keep me posted. I’m going to try like hell to go. I still feel sort of guilty for not going to Devon’s wake or funeral, and I’d hate to miss Liane’s. Personally, I hate funerals and wakes. The last funeral I went to was for my Grandpa Wish. It was more of a memorial, because he’d been cremated, but it was also a military funeral and it was really hard to get through. Before that I went to Chef B’s wake. That sucked, too. It was open-casket, but he just looked so.. different. All of the light and personality was just gone. So it’s kind of a double-edged sword for me; I love the few memories I do have of Liane, and I’m not sure if I want my last of her to be in a casket, but at the same time I wish I’d gone to Devon’s wake/funeral, so I could have had that goodbye.

One thing I do know is, my friends need me. I have friends who were much closer to her than I was, and I know they are all taking it hard. I really would like to be there for them, even if it’s sucky for me. Another sucky part of it is, I haven’t seen some of these friends in a while. I feel kind of guilty for letting it go this long, only to be reunited because of a mutual friend’s funeral. It makes me feel like a bad friend. I felt the same way at Grandpa Wish’s memorial service. I hadn’t seen Grandma Wish or him in a few years, even though they were like grandparents to me growing up. I haven’t seen Everett since New Year’s Eve a couple years ago, and I haven’t seen Leena since Sandy and Bearrin broke up. I don’t know if Sean S. is going, but I haven’t seen him since I worked at Toys R Us. Mike saw him a few days ago.

Sigh. Well, I’m going to take a smoke break now. 3:00 is forever away.

Sigh. I’m trying to get the NextGen Image Gallery plugin to work here but I’ve been having problem after problem with it. I uploaded a zipped folder but it didn’t work, so I ended up importing a folder from the server. That worked, but there is no way to see the pictures. You can’t see them from my home page and I can’t edit them (add captions, etc) or anything. So I decided to add the widget to the sidebar, and it worked.. but it deleted everything else on the sidebar.

Grr. So now I’m running late because of this stupid thing. I gotta go get in the shower. I guess the Penis Party pictures will have to wait.