Pneumonochrome

Today I have been experiencing the oddest emotional roller coaster I can remember experiencing. Not that it’s the largest, but rather the oddest. To explain… The first and only career I can really ever remember wanting was becoming a doctor. Sure, I fantasized about being an astronaut, and the President of the United States, and a lawyer, and a judge, and a firefighter, and a magician (a real one, that could actually use magic, and not just fool people into thinking he could use magic), a movie star, a theater star, a rock star, you know all the normal things that kids dream about. But the only one that ever really had my heart in it was medicine. So when I got old enough to actually make decisions about my future (this age appears to come sometime during the 10th grade, for people who grew up in my town and went to my high school), I told my high school counselor that I wanted to be a doctor. I think she probably rolled her eyes, because almost everyone wants to be doctor, or at least it often feels that way to someone in my current position. At any rate, she gave me some advice that was helpful enough that I don’t remember it at all now, and I felt like I’d made the first step toward fighting the evils of disease.
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Okay, I’ve been wanting to put an events calendar on the sidebar for a while now, and found a plugin I liked, but putting it on the sidebar caused my page to no longer validate. After playing with the code of the plugin and the instructions given at the original site, http://n0id.hexium.net/wp-plugins/, I’ve gotten it to validate here. The changes I made are listed, and the altered plugin file is attached to this post:

Modified Plugin

Changes:

1. Added the alt text to and self-closed the image tags on lines 188 and 193 of the plugin
2. Fixed spelling on line 186 (changed cellpading to cellpadding)

Instructions for installation:

1. Unzip the compressed file to a folder named “Calendar”
2. Place the “Calendar” folder in your wp-content/plugins directory
3. Activate the plugin
4. Add the following code to the template file where you want the calendar to appear:

<div id="calendar">
<? if (function_exists(’do_calendar’)) { do_calendar(); } ?>
</div>

You’ll notice that the only real change there is that I’ve removed the <ul> and </ul> tags. Including them caused immense problems with XHTML validation. You may need to include the above code within <li> and </li> tags if you put this in your side bar with everything else, as many sidebars are arranged as unordered lists.

Please be aware that I have no experience with php, and very little experience with XHTML or CSS, so I cannot provide support for this plugin in any way. I’m providing this post and this modified plugin only because I got it to work to my satisfaction and the original author has decided not to support his work. I thought it might be nice to offer what helped me as a suggestion for others.

Okay, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and upgraded to WordPress 2.0.2. I wanted to wait for a while to make sure that all the plugins I like to use would work, and that the bugs were out of the upgrade process. It seems that both of those things have happened, so I upgraded. The only small issue I’ve got is that it seems that Flickr badges won’t display in WordPress 2.x right now. I’m not sure why, as I don’t know enough php and HTML to really figure it out at this point. However, in the process of investigating the problem a little, I discovered that my pages don’t validate when Flickr badges are there anyway, so I won’t be posting flickr badges here any more.

For the pictures from my and Messy’s California vacation over spring break, visit my Flickr Gallery on the site and select the “California Vacation” Set.

FYI, there is a link to my Flickr gallery on my side bar under “Cool Sites.” Granted, this may be a little presumptuous, but I still think it’s a cool site. So there.

No, really. I’m not being Euphamistic here. I lost my pants! I’m not sure how I managed to do it, but I did. I lost a pair of khaki pants some time in the last couple of weeks. The really frustrating thing is that I think they had a USB flash drive on it with a few pictures I needed for work. I’m going to have ot retake them now. Grr. Okay, that’s not the really frustrating thing. The really frustrating think is thinking I’m stupid enough to lose a pair of pants. I mean, how did I manage to do that? I wear them, I wash them, I hang them up. Where’s the opportunity to lose them in that sentence. I didn’t lose them while I was wearing them, because I’m quite certain I’ve not been walking around naked any time in the last oh…. lifetime. I didn’t lose them hanging them up, because I’ve torn my closet apart multiple times looking. I can’t find them in the laundry room either. It’s just so… weird.

Well, today we spent a couple of hours in the morning on the beach. It was really a perfect day. We got there and decided to go through our Tai Chi forms while we were there, down at the point where the waves would finish creeping onto the shore. It was kind of fun, though the water was a bit chilly. The weather itself was beautiful. About 60 degrees Fahrenheit, a few clouds, light sun, and just a little bit of a breeze. I really enjoyed walking around in the cool sand and just spending time there. Below is a link to my small flickr album of those photos, with some descriptions.

Edit: Apparently my flickr badges broke with my upgrade to WordPress 2.0.2… I’ll investigate…

After that we came back to the apartment and cleaned up. I got an e-mail from one of my teachers back at the University reminding us of an assignment we had due on Friday that I hadn’t finished yet, so Messy took a nap and I worked on that assignment for a bit. Then we went to the “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” museum, and spent a couple of hours walking around. Some of the stuff was a little blasé, but I didn’t get bored, and neither did Messy.

When we were done there we went to an “international buffet” and tried all kinds of (mostly asian) food. I tried seaweed salad, stuffed crab, stuffed shrimp, fish balls, sushi and sashimi, solefish, octopus salad, a Chinese “peach bun,” and lot’s of other stuff. The service wasn’t great, but the food was decent, and I ate way too much of it. We came home and promptly fell asleep.

It was a fun day.