New baby, books, WoW. Oh yeah…I did decide to do another redesign on this site. Of course, if you’ve been a reader of this page for any length of time, you know that I get bored of any kind of graphical design after a few months, and need to change stuff around. I started by looking around for a configurable theme that was at least close to what I wanted, and found this one. It has a tremendous number of options, and allows you to do alot of tweaking out of the box. On the other hand, I had some other ideas about how “boxey” it was, softened the edges, made the backgrounds in posts transparent. That turned out to be easier than I thought it was going to be, and its even (mostly) cross-browser compatible now. There are lots of articles on the web about it, here’s one.

I redid the background graphic as well. Its a tile-able adaptation of a much older graphic I did a long time ago. Since my old KTP3 (et al) filters no longer work on Windows 7 (one of the very few things I’ve found that doesn’t work on win7), I had to find a new Seamless Tile type of thing. I ended up installing the very nice Redfield Seamless Workshop, which has some really nice options to it, and also works very well with even very large textures. I’m pretty happy with the results. Slap on an edge softened version of my original masthead, and I’m back in business. I do still need to reintegrate Gallery 2. I never really was happy with the way Gallery and WordPress played together. Perhaps this time I’ll find a way to get it to be a bit cleaner.

I added my WoW RSS feed at the top. Right now it just looks like my top post. That isn’t intentional. I probably will still do some additional tweaking to make that more obviously a separate section (not a post). We’ll see how that works out. I do like the idea of it, though. RSS is grand, yo.

I had some ideas about making an item upgrade utility for WoW. I recently made a nice spreadsheet that would allow you to list all the various gear in your upgrade path. Since that typically is a lot, I also added in some Excel Macros (OMG. Did I really just write code in visual basic, breaking my TWENTY year rule not to do so? Yes, yes I did.) that would allow you to hide various gear types… for example, anything that required a 25 man dungeon to acquire. Click button, hidden. Anything acquired through Badges? Click, hidden. That gave me the ability to really easily see just the gear that was obtainable through one particular method (say, running 5 man heroics). My thinking now is that that same method should be able to be applied to a webpage using block hiding. I’m going to do some testing later and see how well it behaves in practice.

Madeline turned two this past week. Yes, two. Amazing. Its so strange to look back on all her pictures and compare here to even six months ago. She’s definitely getting big, and fast. 2 year doctor visit went fine. 50th percentile for height and 30th percentile for weight. Perfect, as far as I’m concerned. She blows away (by 6 months or more) the expectations around language and development. It appears we’re doing something right, anyway. She got a whole mess of presents. a dressup trunk (boy’s and girls costumes, cowboy gun and indian hatchet removed). A big wheel, which she can not quite reach the pedals on yet. She likes wearing the little biker helmet around the house. Tom got her a great rocket ship from Thinkgeek, which she is very much enjoying. Also, a Noah’s Ark Playset. She definitely likes taking things out of containers and putting them all back in again. She knows all the colors already, matches shapes and stacks stuff just fine. Fine motor is all great.

Can’t think of anything else at the moment, so I’ll wait until later to post more…

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