NewsGoat

March 2002 Archives

I’m trying new fonts on News Goat — what do you think? It goes against the print rules of serif for body and sans-serif for headings, but I tried that and didn’t like it.

I was almost finished writing about fixing the ceiling. Unfortunately, I just deleted it, thinking I was getting rid of an old copy. No, it’s not in the recycling bin. Fortunately, the old copy that I should have been deleting is still there.

The Mensa party went surprisingly well. Some new people showed up who I hope we’ll see at future events.

This weekend, Angela’s parents are going to visit. They’re going to help us paint the walls in the family room. Then, just after they leave, Angela’s sister & brother-in-law will drop by on their way home from Branson. It’s nice to get to see everybody without leaving the house… :-)

From the css-discuss list:

font-family: verdana, geneva, arial, sans-serif;
font-family: georgia, “times new roman”, times, serif;

Font suggestions, to insure a web page looks nice on all platforms.

Ever have one of those weekends that, when it’s over, you feel like you need a weekend to recover from it? Well, that’s the kind of weekend we had. Angela & I worked on fixing the ceiling. What a mess. We took lots of pictures, so I’ll post a fully illustrated how-to soon. Yeah, I know, add it to the long list of other things I’ve promised. I’ve been fixing holes in my ceiling, back off… :-)

I made some minor changes to the html & css for News Goat. Nothing, dramatic, just some clean up. But, since things are starting to fall into place, I thought it was time News Goat had the web equivalent of a bar mitzvah. Please direct your attention to the images on your left. That’s right — I’ve finally been validated. This is a proud, proud moment… :-)

Work’s going well. I’m getting to do CCM stuff again, which makes me happy. And Angela is doing some web development, which makes her happy.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to do, whenever this ceiling thing gets finished. I want to redesign Smart Goat and Crafty Goat. I also want to design a couple of new themes for the Mensa site. And, there’s about a half dozen new pages I need to create for both News Goat and OKMensa. Add to that the Mensa party that we, for some strange reason, agreed to host this Saturday. It’s a good thing all this stuff pays so well… :-)

Our various websites are coming along nicely. News Goat, as you can see, is working well. If you look closely enough at some of the old entries, you might find one or two with bad links. I’m going to go through and fix those. Crafty Goat is up & working in its new home. Even Mystical Meatballs is ready for visitors. I’m not sure, though, if the world is ready for Mystical Meatballs… :-)

Rebuilding The Mensa site was almost too easy. It took very little tweaking to put everything back in order. We were very lucky not to have lost anything.

I’m trying to be more active with the Mensa site — particularly now, while the judges are watching. My goal is at least one new story per day. Still haven’t found one for today…

The other thing we did this weekend is break our house. :-( We were trying to run CAT5 cable through the walls, and in the process, succeeded in burning out an electric outlet, cracking the ceiling, and breaking our cable fishing tape. Oh, and we never did get the CAT5 in place.

For those unfamiliar, a cable fishing tape is like a large measuring tape, except the tape is thinner and stronger. You run it through the wall in order to thread cables between floors. It has a red light on the end to make it easier to see when you get it to the right place. Well, no matter what I did, I couldn’t get it all the way through. When I finally decided to give up, I pulled it out, and the light had broken off. I looked in the wall (past the electric outlet I blew), and saw a little red light sitting on some insulation.

And, I left it there. What could I do? I’m sure it would be impossible to get it out, and even if I did get it out, it couldn’t be fixed. There was also no way to turn it off. There seemed to be nothing to do but leave a tiny red light glowing in my wall.

So, come visit the Mabray house — we left a light on for ya… :-)

I haven’t posted in a while, and with good reason — things have been busy! We were able to get the new Mensa site up in the nick of time. Mensa has a website contest, and the deadline for entry was March 1. We had planned to enter from the very beginning, but when we lost our web host, we weren’t sure if we’d make the deadline.

And now News Goat has its own domain. That is too cool. There’s more to say about all this, but it’s late, and I’m tired. Sleep first, then writing… :-)