Eighty-six years is a long time

The Red Sox have won the World Series. I had faith in 'em.

It's been 86 years since their last one; prior to that they had won 5. They've appeared 4 other times, and lost in Game 7 every time. Swept the series against the Cardinals in 2004, though. Will they do it again? Can they do it again? Doesn't matter, not in Boston right now.

The best part, though, is that they will receive their rings in the first game they play next season, in Fenway Park - against the Yankees.

Is it done yet?

Website update again.

Fixed some display bugs and added all three stylesheets, and a javascript to support alternate stylesheets for IE. Play around, let me know what you think.

Ever just want to SMACK somebody?

I was woken up at 8 this morning by William calling to ask if I could come in to work for him. I was groggy, but conscious enough to realize that William still being at work meant that Brandi had not shown up - again.

It seems to be this bad habit among the girls lately to show up late - like 30 minutes or longer late. I had to come in for William one day at 9:30am so he could go got class. Brandi showed up at 10 that day; she came in at 9:45 today. She, and a couple of the other girls, are sorority chicks, thus, have this great social life, apparently. Brandi said she had "gone into hibernation mode." I called her house several times, letting the phone ring repeatedly. I finally got an answer at 9am, and her roommate, who herself I must have woken up, had no idea where she was.

But why do i complain? It will do no good.

Return of the... Sox?

The Evil Empire has fallen.

The Red Sox have won the American League Championship Series, putting them in their first World Series since 1986. Not only that, they beat the Yankees. The New York YANKEES. At Yankee Stadium. Is it possible that the Curse of the Bambino is finally over?

Impossible mission completed

What in the...?

Ever since coming back from the wedding, I've had this on-again off-again pain near my right kidney. It doesn't seem to be a muscular pain, as far as I can tell. There's no knot, or tension there. It flares up when I laugh, or talk too loudly; class Tuesday was fun, let me tell you. Thankfully I had Drew to help me out. So I called my mom, a renal nurse, and she gave me some suggestions.

Bridget's loan has been approved, and we'll have it in a few weeks. Definitely help a whole lot, with the bills, moving the school, and tuition, of course.

Mmmm... CSS...

New update on the school website.

Very different color scheme. Added about 4 lines of HTML, and struggled with smacking the CSS around for a little while. I like it. I'll probably set this one up as the primary stylesheet, with the other as an alternate.

Operation:Matrimony 4

The wedding this past weekend went pretty well. Of course, the bride's family is kind of crazy. All of them seemed to have a different idea of how they wanted the wedding to run, it seemed. In the end, though, everything went fine. They got hitched, there were no major mistakes that were unfixable, and we even had a laugh-out-loud moment when I (as best man and one of the witnesses) had to ask aloud for a pen to sign the license with.

The groomsmen's presents were GREAT. He got us all, and himself and the usher, bokken, wooden practice swords, with our initials hand-burned (by him) in the handle. Beautiful, absolutely gorgeous. I'll try and get some pictures up.

The Big Talk

We had a big meeting today at the karate school, to tell all of the students about the move. I had typed up letters and maps and stuff, and we handed them out, and I spoke briefly about the benefits of the move. Everyone seemed pretty excited about it.

I've been pretty nervous about that, for some reason. I didn't quite know how everyone was going to take it. I mean, it's not like I could see real reasons for them to really complain about it or anything. But what if they did? Thankfully, of course, don't have to worry about that.

Was supposed to have a new student start today, but she didn't show up. Hopefully she'll be here Thursday.

I'm going to my friends' wedding. The groom is my first, well, only dorm roommate from college. We shared a room for two years - great guy. Love him to death. He and his soon-to-be-wife lived with my wife for a little while, meaning I lived there too, really. And I'm the best man. I'm very much looking forward to it. I was married in June; was a groomsman for my karate instructor in July; attended my wife's sister's wedding in July; and now I'm the best man at this wedding. Yay! For Marriage.

Butterfly Effect

Rented it tonight for part of my and my wife's "date night" - what a screwed up movie. My wife, the psych major, of course loved it. Great movie. Very different than I thought it was going to be. Although I -still- want to know, what comes first, the blackouts, or the memories? ARGH!

We Believed a Man Could Fly...

Christopher Reeve Dies at 52

"You'll Believe a Man Can Fly" was the tagline for the original Superman movie. And we did - how many people can hear his name and not picture Superman? Or even the other way around? He brought to life a character designed to inspire us to greatness - to embody truth, and justice, and hope. He brought us hope even after his accident. I cried when I saw the Super Bowl commercial that featured him walking.

I believed.

Reeve really was
'the man of steel'

Tribute from superman-v.com

Some great newspaper cartoons on his passing

Rats and Frats and Rabbit Dragons

At least, I think that's how it goes...

I've been unable to use the internet on this laptop tonight until just a few minutes ago. It was very odd - it started out okay, and then after 2 pages or so Firefox told me it had reached the max redirections for this URL or something. IE, when I tried it, would just keep infinitely being redirected somewhere. I rebooted, logged in as a different user, left it off for a while, took out the wireless card, but nothing worked. Finally, I turned it off, unplugged it, and removed the card. THAT finally took.

Great news! The plan for the dojo/hotel union has gone through - we'll be using the Conference Hall starting November 1. I'm also recoding the school website. You can see the current version here, and the new version over here, at my school account. Let me know what you think.

A-HA!

Seems that Mozilla's rendering engine is just much more strict than IE's. The problem wasn't that the "em" was different, just that I hadn't specified a margin between the element and other elements. IE took this to mean it was 0, Mozilla applied a standard margin space apparently.

Now that I know that, we'll see how things get rolling.

Fifty Dollars

I'm holding in my hands right now fifty dollars.

And not just any fifty dollars.

Fifty one-dollar bills, freshly wrapped. Never circulated. IN SEQUENCE. This is that stack of money the guys in the FBI are always trying to pawn off on the bank robbers and kidnappers to track them. I wonder how Jay ended up with it?

I have resolved my issues with IE, mostly. I gave way to its almighty weight and went with a less grand scheme than I had wanted. It's "em" measurement is larger than Mozilla's, it seems, which is odd, as it is supposed to be one of the two "fixed" measurements in CSS.

Almost time for my shift to end. Been a strange night - hectic and slow at the same time.

Stupid IE

IE has LOUSY CSS support. So in attempting to write a site using CSS, I need to flip back and forth between Firefox and IE, hoping the view is at least somewhat similar. In many cases, it is not. As far as I can tell in the CSS community, Mozilla's rendering engine is great with CSS, and IE's is not. Should this be a surprise? Not really, I suppose. For the past few years, IE has been the only browser on the market. 95% market share, can you believe that?

Get Firefox if you haven't already. What's one of their slogans? "Safer, Better, Faster," I believe. Less system integration, better standards compliance, a brilliant rendering engine, and a bag full of extensions. Gotta love it.

Victory is at Hand

Hmmm... see, already in a better mood. I just finished re-coding some of this blog's CSS. Not having much experience with CSS, I feel a bit victorious. Kind of like I used to feel when writing raw HTML. It's been some time since I've had that feeling. It's a good one.

Mild Annoyances

The school did a demo yesterday. Really wish it could have been better. It was a small-town festival a few miles down the road, and I knew it wasn't going to go well. We did this same festival 2 years ago, and brought about 8 students, I think. This year, it was me and two students, a 9-year old and a college-ager. We showed off some basic techniques, some forms, some forms application, self defense, weapons form and application, and some sparring. We started late, as we didn't know who to talk to about where or when to do the demo, and I had forgotten to bring several items that would have helped out significantly. The students did great, though, and we had a good time.

There is this group of people staying at the hotel right now that, as the title suggests, is mildly annoying. In fact, all of the guests that I've spoken to today are mildly annoying.

Hmm... maybe they aren't, really. I've just been in a bad mood lately. Maybe that's it.

Or maybe they are just really annoying.

Old Friends

An old friend came into town today. Hadn't seen him since my wedding - so it was very good to see him. I've lost touch with so many of my friends over the years. I can divide my life in to several sections by friends:

Late college: That is, now. My wife and current crop of friends, whom I can see losing touch with as our lives move on from this area and period.

Early college: All of my friends from this time have moved away; I still keep in touch with some of them. I can feel them slipping away slowly at times, though.

High school: I had few friends in this time of my life; two, really. And now I rarely speak to them. Two of the greatest friends of my life. I do try... probably not hard enough.

Pre-high school: I have this great group of friends that lives in Massachusetts, near where my grandmother lived, and I would visit there every summer. My best man is in this group, and two of them came to my wedding. I probably keep more in touch with this group than any other besides my current friends.

I fear losing friends, because I'm so bad at keeping in touch. I wish we could all just form a commune somewhere. Wishful thinking eh?