Beware of Squanda

Today Paul Kim complimented my new blog design and I mentioned that I was thinking about replacing the bird at the top with a squirrel. A few minutes later, he sent me the new header above with what looks like a cross between a squirrel and a panda which he called a squanda.

I really like it. Thanks Paul!

Blog Redesign

I just finished a redesign of my blog and I’m pretty excited about it. I’d been using the previous theme for several years and felt it was time for something new. I’d also gotten a number of comments that the font was too small and hard to read on the previous theme. I decided to go with something the opposite of my previous dark theme and use a white background.

I found a great theme by Randa Clay that I ended up making a number of changes to — mostly with the width of the layout. I also redid my tags and categories and went through every post I’ve made and tagged it appropriately.

I added a favicon, rewrote my blog “pages”, and added my Twitter status to the sidebar. I’ll probably start blogging more often for a bit since I’m excited about it now.

Dr. Horrible

There’s an awesome miniseries out right now called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. The first act came out earlier this week, the second came out today, and the third comes out on Saturday — but they’ll only be up until Sunday unless you buy them on iTunes.

I suggest heading over to drhorrible.com and watching them now - they’re fairly short but awesome. They’re created/directed by Joss Whedon, the guy who made Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly. They star Neil Patrick Harris and 2 people I’ve never heard of.

Thanks to John for the link!

Handsfree iPhone calls

I had been looking for an adapter for my iPhone so that I could connect it to my cassette adapter and play music from the phone in my car, when I came across the Shure Music Phone Adapter. It’s meant to allow using an iPhone with any set of headphones and has a microphone and button built in so that you still have the functionality that the iPhone earbuds have. I decided it was worth spending some of my Apple Store credit on and ordered it.

I was eager to try the adapter out with receiving a call in the car, because I assumed the music would fade out, I could use the button to answer the call, and take the call over my car’s speakers with the adapter microphone and not have to use my hands. Of course, this one time I actually wanted people to call me while I was driving, I had to wait several car rides before it happened. When it finally occurred, everything happened like I was expecting and the reception on both ends was perfect.

So, if you’re looking for a way to make handsfree calls with an iPhone and be able to listen to your music at the same time, I suggest this adapter.

Gmail IMAP

I’d heard that some people had IMAP support start showing up in their Gmail accounts, so I’ve been checking mine frequently. A couple hours ago IMAP showed up for me, and I quickly changed my iPhone from POP to IMAP. It’s great. I’ve hated Gmail on iPhone ever since I got it and I’m glad that I’ll actually have a reliable counter of unread emails on my phone now.

Alohomora!

Thanks to the Internet, I found out what happened in the last Harry Potter book a good bit in advance of the release date. It was cleverly hidden around every corner in images and jokes. I haven’t been keeping track of when the next book is coming out, otherwise I might have been on guard to what happened a little while ago. I decided to visit the Something Awful forums for the first time in awhile and found a plot spoiler as the name of a forum. I don’t want to know if it’s true or not, but I’m sure I will be seeing more of these in the coming weeks as it’s apparently almost release time.

In other news, I got my iPhone last weekend in Palo Alto. It’s really awesome for the most part. I’m not too happy with the built-in Gmail support. It pulls the last 25 emails from Gmail, regardless of whether they’re in the inbox or archived. I also learned that the picture the camera shows you after you take a picture is not in fact the picture it took. Several of my pictures of the Kwik-E-Mart we went to are blurry because I thought they came out fine.

I was really busy at work this week, and next week will be even worse, but hopefully rewarding. The week after that I’ll be in Portland for OSCON.

Visit Home

I’ve spent the last week in Baton Rouge visiting family and friends and working from home, and will be heading back to Mountain View tomorrow. I have a really long post about my Tokyo trip that I need to finish but will eventually post.

I suspect I will give in and get an iPhone pretty soon, although I’ll try to hold out as long as possible.

More like tstupid

I spent a half hour trying to figure out why my site was rendering perfectly in Firefox, but not at all in IE7. I went through the trouble of finding the Microsoft Script Debugger (did I mention Firefox comes with a Javascript/CSS Debugger?) to find that it wasn’t a JavaScript error. I resorted to the Google, which led me to my solution. I vaguely remember encountering this problem a few years ago as well, but apparently didn’t learn my lesson.

You can’t add tr’s to a table in IE. You have to add it to a tbody. ERGO, this does not work:

var table = document.createElement('table');
var tr = document.createElement('tr');
var td = document.createElement('td');

td.innerHTML = 'IE sucks';

tr.appendChild(td);
table.appendChild(tr);

You must do this instead:

var table = document.createElement('table');
var tbody = document.createElement('tbody');
var tr = document.createElement('tr');
var td = document.createElement('td');

td.innerHTML = 'IE sucks';

tr.appendChild(td);
tbody.appendChild(tr);
table.appendChild(tbody);

Indeed.

it has a purpose!

When I was at the San Jose airport on Friday to check in for my flight home, I arrived at a Continental kiosk and got out my e-ticket and prepared to enter the ticket number, when an attendant came by and said that if I had my “id”, I could swipe it and it would bring up the trip. I was skeptical that a Louisiana driver’s license would do anything at an airline kiosk in California, having never swiped it for anything ever. I tried it, and it immediately brought up the information. I was shocked.

1-800-GOOG-411

I briefly read about Google’s new directory assistance service last week and had a reason to use it today. I was eating at Macaroni Grill with my parents and aunt when we decided we’d like to find out when a movie was playing. I called 1-800-GOOG-411, said my city/state, said “movies”, and got a listing of all the theaters and was connected to my choice for free. The voice recognition was excellent, and the service and call were free. I highly recommend it!