The Other Side

I recently saw this in someones tag-line in a forum.

“Never argue with an idiot, they’ll bring you down to their level and beat you on experience.”

There is some serious wisdom in there. But why then, do we let ourselves get caught up in these arguments? Is it because we don’t realize they are idiots before we engage? Nah, that’s not it. Oftentimes I already knew they were idiots Read the rest of this entry »

Today I read a blog that somehow I thought needed my observations.

(read it here) jonsonblog » Blog Archive » Male workplace restroom etiquette leads to scientific breakthrough

While I realize that some of his post may have been slightly embellished to make the post have more entertainment value, it does bring up a subject that is rather awkward–what is proper mens room etiquette?

For instance, when you walk into a mens room, there are normally a row of urinals on one side and a row of stalls on the other. The length of the rows can vary wildly from one of each to places like stadiums that may have 20 or more of these porcelain wall decorations lined up side by side.

Let’s say you walk into an empty restroom with three urinals. Which do you chose? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if this happens to everyone or if it’s just me, but you know what it’s like when you are trying to do something that you really want to do, but it just won’t work? It becomes a challenge and I get more driven to make it work, particularly if I know that others have done it before me.

Well, www.arnieholder.com has been that challenge lately. You see, I put the page up about a year ago using a site builder tool that my hosting company provided, and it was okay, but limited by what the tool creates. It didn’t let me learn any layout, design, much of anything. Well, I really wanted to do some different things, but not anything that the dozen or so templates provided, so I have been thinking about doing something myself and starting from scratch. Now the big problem here is that I’m not much of a designer. I think I’m too left brained. I can figure out the technical parts, but making it pretty isn’t really my cup of tea. It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s that I just can’t come up with any ideas on my own. But, that’s not been the challenging part…yet.

The challenge has been in trying to import everything over to my own pages, add new pages and content, and make them all link and run, and not break. I also have several things that are PHP now. If you haven’t messed with PHP, it’s definitely different than HTML. I can see that it is going to be incredibly powerful, but there are so many little things to watch out for that it’s not just like drawing a table and shoving some content into it. Once I get started on something like this, I find it hard to stop and sleep becomes less and less important until I solve the current problem. Well, the last two nights have been that way and I’ve been awake too long trying to figure out dumb, dumb things. The sick thing is that today I just happened to click around on some setting pages and found a couple of things that I had spent hours playing around with the code to change. C’est la vie.

Speaking of challenges, do other people actually find graphics editing programs like Photoshop and Fireworks, easy? I’m embarrassed to say that I spent hours building the damn buttons on my home page and adding them as rollovers. Of course, the third time I did them I realized that saving them as a template would mean that I didn’t have to repeat my effort every time. Who says you can’t teach an old dog…?

I have to say, for the past few years I have been watching all of the people with their blogs and wondering what is the appeal? I certainly have opinions on everything under the sun, but that doesn’t mean that I necessarily want to share them with the whole world. Fortunately, my page doesn’t get that many hits so the world shouldn’t be much of a problem.

Fact of the matter is that I doubt I’ll stick with it…but time will tell.