Categories
Critters Diversity

The lion walks tonight

Today I took Zoe to the vet for her six months checkup, both for her rare seizures and her slightly enlarged thyroid gland. The doctor and I talked about putting Zoe on Phenol Barbital, a small risk anti-seizure drug for cats. However, roommate and I are hesitant to start her on a lifetime medicine when her seizures are about one every two years.

We spent a fairly long time chatting, which unfortunately made the doctor late for her next appointment. In the office afterwards, paying the bill, a large, heavyset man stormed out of one of the waiting rooms into the reception area, complaining bitterly about having to wait 20 minutes for the doctor.

After he stormed away, I apologized to the receptionist and she said not to worry about it; that his behavior wasn’t uncommon with men, especially middle aged men, as the place is very female centric and this brings out the male need to assert their dominant status.

I hadn’t noticed before, but the cat clinic does have a strongly feminine environment. All the doctors and assistants and other office workers are women, and the décor has a very feminine, feline feel to it–not to mention that all the cats that wonder around the office are also female.

All except the newest addition to the office — an eight week old orange tabby kitten that jumped up on the receptionist’s keyboard when she was making out my bill (”Well, your bill is now 362.00 dollars”); and then jumped up on the counter and immediately planted it’s tiny paws on my chest, gazing at me with eyes gold and round and very intense.

Entranced, I stroked and coo’d, which he seemed to take as encouragement, for it launched itself down from the counter to the floor (me catching it halfway, because that was a heck of a jump), and he immediately went over to Zoe’s carrier and started batting at her with his paws through the wire.

Zoe was hunkered down in the corner in misery, as she always is when at the vet’s and ignored him at first. But he was having none of this and after about a minute, she was nose to nose with him, each softly batting at each her, she as charmed by this wonderful little character, as I was.

I asked the receptionist who the new kitten was, and she said he was another abandoned kitten, dropped off at the office. The clinic won’t turn any cat away, and after making sure they’re healthy and nicely social, the workers manage to always find a home for the orphans. It took every ounce of self-control — every ounce! — not to pop up with, “I’ll take him!”

The receptionist turned back to the bill, dropping the eight blood tests that the kitten had added with his dance on the keyboard, while I watched the kitten gambol about the room. Suddenly, we hear a door slam, and heavy footsteps stomping down the corridor.

It’s the Big Man again, and he enters the room, drawing his breath to start huffing and puffing about his importance and how his time is valuable. However, the kitten spots him from across the room, makes a mad dash straight for him, and then with a flying leap, plants his tiny little kitten claws into the mans polyester pants, and starts climbing his leg, for all its little worth.

The man was startled, and sputtered out in surprise, looking down at this little kitten hanging off his leg, looking up at him. After just a moment of man and kitten staring at each other, the kitten jumps down from his leg, and glaring equally at me and the receptionist, the man storms off without saying a word. The kitten watches after him a moment, and then starts its mad dash around the room again.

The receptionist and I look at each other, both trying not to laugh; a resolve I couldn’t maintain when she turned back to the bill, casually tossing out about, “…knowing who’s the dominant male in the place is now, don’t we?”

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Why Wordform needs active users

Wordform is not being developed in isolation, specifically because I hope to capture input from people who could be considered the potential users of the product. It is more fun to go ‘Ta Da!’ and have the application all finished, to ooohs and ahhhs; but an inherent problem with this is that each of us brings our own interpretation of what is an oooh, and what is an ahhh.

A better approach, then, is to communicate as you develop (rather than after), keep your mind open, and solicit feedback as much as possible. And for this, I need active users — people who are willing to step up and say what they want, and how they want it.

For instance, when Marius points out the polished interface to the textarea within Blogger, saying that this is more meaningful than the Quicktags within WordPress, we can quickly show him a screenshot of the prototype for the Wordform edit page, currently in development. This is using the beta of HTMLArea, which is a very rich text editor currently being tested with Mozilla-based browsers, such as Firefox. It, as with Blogger, will work with IE and any of the Mozilla browsers. Unfortunately, it won’t work with Safari; but then, neither will Blogger.

The PHP program will test browser and insert quicktags, HTML tags, for browsers that can’t work with these rich text editors. However, Blogger’s switching back and forth between WYSIWYG and HTML tags, is a very nice feature. Luckily it’s already included as a feature within HTMLArea — just click the button labeled “<>” to toggle between HTML source and WYSIWYG.

As a sidenote, the new Comment Edit window in Wordform will also have a rich text editor, but I’m removing the HTML capability (HTMLArea is completely customizable). Why? So that I can ensure that tags are properly closed and that nothing harmful is added, while giving commenters a very rich editing experience.

Oh, and HTMLArea has plugins that will allow me to add in spellcheckers and various other nifty goodies. Don’t you just love open source?

Categories
Stuff

Mindless spot on eternal lack of sunshine

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am not one to do movie reviews. I rarely write on a movie I see, and when I do, it’s usually favorably. But I feel compelled to write about Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, primarily because I disliked this movie so much.

I found my reaction to be somewhat disconcerting, too, because it seems to be such a universally beloved movie. I don’t think I’ve read one unfavorable review of this movie, either by webloggers, in comments at Amazon and other online sites, or by professional critics. However, I disliked the characters from the first five minutes, and my loathing for them only increased as the movie progressed.

This movie is “urban angst” taken to an almost pure artistic form. It’s like walking through a showing at an art gallery consisting primarily of photos taken of reflections from car door handles.

The premise behind the movie is that the lead characters are so shattered by their breakup that they have all memories of each other wiped out (or start to have them wiped out), so they won’t have to suffer the pain of loss. Yet the lead character, played by Jim Carrey, finds that he can’t let go of his former love (played by Kate Winslet), and tries to hide memories of her here and there, to protect them. The concept is extremly novel and the execution intelligent and creative. But it failed with me.

I’ve found through personal and difficult experience that the loss of love and the bitter and hollow disappointment that can come from such, is a rich, and even beautiful experience, albeit best when viewed from a distance. It is just this loss of love, or love unmet that forms the inspiration for much of our art. I have a hard time understanding how a person would want to eliminate even one second of this experience, no matter how painful.

Of course, Carrey’s character finds this out as the erasure is taking place, and this begins the real journey featured in the movie. But by then, the necessary connection I felt you needed to have with his character before this journey takes place just wasn’t there, at least not for me. He irritated me. His girlfriend irritated me. Even the lady in the waiting room crying into her hankie irritated me.

The filming was clever and ingenious, but I sometimes think that this movie was a case of a director wanting to try different techniques, and then finding a story that would connect the dots, so to speak. Maybe if I had accepted it as such when I watched it, I would have at least appreciated the dots, if not the journey between them

Categories
Photography Places

Pink sapphires and diamonds

Yesterday was sunny and cold and I specifically headed out to a place that suited both conditions: The Castor Shut-Ins at the Amidon Conservation area.

In a book I read, the author mentioned how during cold weather the water around the rocks would freeze into crystalline formations, adding to the beauty of the place. It also mentioned about the road leading in being unpaved, so I know I needed a clear road with no snow.

The road wasn’t bad, mainly a gravel road with some steep hills. I wasn’t surprised to see that I was the only one traveling it, being a weekday and very chilly. When I got to the trail head, I couldn’t hear any water, which I thought odd considering the shut-ins supposedly weren’t far from the trail head. The trail itself was pleasant, a gentle walk through hills full of trees that have lost their leaves.

After about a quarter mile, though, as I turned around a corner, I could glimpse a patch of pink and could hear the water and started to hurry forward, only to step out into a scene that left me breathless.

What makes the Castor shut-ins so unique is that they’re the only pink granite shut-ins, not only in the state but I believe the world. You can imagine what it’s like, then, to walk through rusty reds and pale grays of Missouri winter forest only to come out on a scene of bright pink and rose boulders, crisscrossed with brilliant aqua blue water, spotted with feathery strands of pale green lichen, and white glittery ice — all framed by the rusts of the summer trees, with here and there, a lone evergreen.

“Oh my”, I said to myself, and repeated it over and over again as I dashed about the rocks, overwhelmed into incoherance.

It was like walking in a jewelers window heaped high with pink saphire necklaces, in among white diamond earrings and aquamarine broaches, and turquoise bracelets–with here and there a hint of beaten gold and copper. And I had it all to myself.

Unfortunately, the sun was behind the hill, casting dark shadows across the stream and the rocks and the ice, but i managed to grab some photos (though they do not do the scene credit and I will return to do the job properly).

The trail to and from the shut-ins is a one mile loop, made into two miles with all the explorations. I had my trusty walking stick, and being aware of the rivlets of ice that streamed across the rocks, I bounded about, around and on top of them, taking photos and sometimes stopping, just to experience the beauty. Of course, ‘bounding’ isn’t necessary the proper term, because I am hesitant at stepping over boulders, especially near sheer drops into cold water. Still, I was pleased that I didn’t back off from any of the paths I wanted to take. The beauty overcame this fear of falling I have seem to have developed during the summer–enough to get me out on the rocks, albeit very slowly at times.

But who would want to move about this place quickly? Who could possibly want to look for a few minutes and then want to move on without a backward glance or some hesitation? Do you touch velvet with a click flick of a finger; or do you run your hand slowly and softly along its nap? This was a velvet scene.

(“Oh this is a beautiful place. Look. Look. Photos. I must leave it now, quickly, and go home and weblog about it!”)

The trail away from the Shut-Ins was equally lovely, though I’m glad there were markers or I would have lost it among the rocks and the dead leaves. It was invigorating and just challenging enough to be fun, without being too strenuous. Best of all, even though I strained at times, I could hear no evidence of humanity — just the breeze through the trees and every once in a while, the call of a bird. Cardinals and bluejays; hawk and finch.

I had to stop along the way, not to catch my breath but to grab at my exhultation, which threatened to run away with me at times. I wanted to trip down the path, but with the half buried rocks, knew that was folly. Still when I got back to the parking lot after an afternoon spent in among the beauty of this short little hike, I turned my CD player on and put in the newest CD I burned and I danced about the parking lot, in joy at what was an almost perfect experience of sight and sound, touch and taste. And feel.

The birds must have thought me mad.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Adapting Admin for extensibility

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Many of the earlier changes I’m making to WordPress will be behind the scenes, in the administration pages. In fact, when I finish these changes, I probably will release a copy of the product as it will then be sufficiently different enough from WordPress to have earned status as a separate product.

One change I started coding a few weeks back was to make the administration pages more adaptable. For instance, rather than hard coding the post and comment status into the administration page, I’m adding these as database values and building the options list dynamically. With this developers who want to add new statuses for each can do so with an update to the database, leaving the code untouched for future upgrades.

(The post status can be passed to blog header, for processing for preview, display, etc. The comments files will also handle different statuses, as I already do so in my current comments pages.)

In addition, the menus and submenus of WordPress are built from a file, and this again makes it so that those who create extensions either have to modify the file or using some kind of DHTML to add options. A more adaptable approach, which I’m building into Wordform is to load the menu options from the database, rather than from a file.

A third area of adaptability is to modify the buttons below the text for a post to add options for what can be done with this post. With this, when I wanted to post a full page preview of a post (using the same stylesheet as the weblog), I wouldn’t have had to hack the page — I could have just added an option into the database and the functionality as a plugin.

All this cuts into the space in the page. What I’m thinking, and looking for feedback on, is to drop the in-page preview, since I’m providing a fullpage preview. I’m also thinking of making slug and trackback that display below the post into buttons that open small windows for each and doing away with separate simple and advanced edit pages. (See diagram of specific changes.)

I had also considered making the category into an option to open in another window, similar to how Movable Type handles it. The category hierarchies don’t display well in the page, and cut into text edit space.

However, is all of this too many window openings? Should I leave the categories as is, but open windows for some (or all) of the others?