weblog@wonderwinds

Finally in my second training truck. A Freightliner Cascadia with a Detroit Diesel under the hood and a 9-speed Eaton transmission. Dunno the horsepower. We're down here in the Phoenix terminal waiting for repairs that Richard requested when he started his home time on the 23rd. They didn't bother to write down that there is a squeak in the front end that might be a wheel bearing, so they didn't bother to fix it. That doesn't bode well for how this company operates, and it isn't the first example of sloppy I've seen. They put me in a hotel in Phoenix for 4 days waiting for getting on this truck. Seems like quite a few folk were in the same boat. Problem with that is that I live less than an hour away. I don't know when Richard got my name and number, but he didn't call me until he was in the terminal. I had opted to check out after the third day and get a ride home. Okay no problem. Given that we didn't go anywhere yesterday what was the point of me getting on this truck now? Oh well eh? I suppose I should apply for other jobs but for now I'm okay with lowering my expectations to enable them to shine

My living room. Lori came up with the butter yellow for the walls, the red stripe is my idea of artistic. What else? I finally got my resizer plugin working the way I want. Had it but deleted it due to I'm stupid. I also set up the camera to take small enough pictures that I can go straight from the camera to the server secure in the knowledge that the server won't choke on generating thumbnails, and therefore also obviously resizing the way the house shot to the left was resized. Basically it resizes to whatever width you specify and retains meta-data if you tell it to. Next step along that path is to streamline the core such that a second installation of a plugin will automagically generate it's own code. At the very least it needs to tell you clearly and obviously that you have to give it a code, but that is dumb. It needs to rename the title and generate a code. It will one day but I dunno which day. (OOPS! Doing a preview just now showed me that the caption is not constrained to the width of the image above it. The solution is to add a style that displays:block and gives a width:whatever, which I better get doc'd on the forums.)

Follow up:

Quite a few changes made to Quam Plures lately too. Finally got an admin look done enough for v0 and a few other things that I can't remember right now. Cleanup of stuff mostly. Unfortunately I didn't get all the changes migrated to this installation. Heck I didn't get *any* of 'em moved over. Spent most of the time in the hotel trying to effectively catalog the diffs between what I'm running and what core is, and migrating the changes from core to my "master copy". One area that's giving us tons of hell is interfacing with TinyMCE. I personally don't use it but I can dig on why we need to have it working tight with the core. Most folk are gonna prefer a "smart" editor instead of seeing the damned html code, which is what Tiny does. Problem is Tiny does some stupid shit that we have to either accept as a limit of it OR do a damned work-around that we'll have to re-do each time Tiny fixes their shit. Oh well eh? Anyway we're on track for a 1/1/11 initial release so yay.

Finally got the paperwork for trying to keep the house to the mortgage people. They said 3 or 4 weeks before I hear from them again so we'll see. I thought that would be about the time I was getting my own truck, but 4 or 5 days has been shot waiting for a truck that doesn't need service. Oh by the way this new truck is awesome so far. Less than half the miles compared to the Classic and several generations ahead in terms of internal layout. Also, I got tenants in the house, which is kinda weird to write because the truth is they're both friends of mine who recently married and were looking to get out of the monthly hotel they had rented a room in. Through a mutual friend they learned I was interested in renting out 2 beds and a bath plus use of the house, so they got in touch with me. Technically that means I have a tenant, but in reality I have friends in my house who are helping me keep my house by giving me money each month.

Oh and the truck loan people caught up with me ... more or less. Not like I was hiding from them or something, but they finally called me again. They sold the truck for whatever, leaving me with a debt of ~18K. They offered a settlement of ~59% of that which I of course can't pay but hey if that's their first offer for a settlement it'll get better over time. The credit card people finally turned it over to a collection agency that leaves me a voice message each time they call. Piss off! I told my phone to send them straight to voice mail when they ring me.