2006

Happy New Year, everyone!
Welcome to 2006! (except Gord, who is still mired in measly 2005 as I write this. Heh.)

May it treat you kindly, and be filled with joy, luck, and happiness!

To all my friends, live, laugh, and love this coming year! You guys all rock!

… I just totally made my blog sound like that of a 15 year old girl. Oh well. :p

I’ve got lots planned for 2006; lets see how much of it I can make happen.

To Do:
-finish wedding plans
-graduate university
-find a “career” job
-move to wherever that job is
-invent something that stabs people over the internet
-actually get married
-keep business afloat
-don’t go crazy

Clothes to wear next year…

I bought my wedding dress! ^_^

My parents were in Guelph last week getting my dad fitted for his tux (he’s buying, not renting, since he wants to own a tux) and we went dress shopping. Found a couple dresses that we liked.
I was up in Kincardine this weekend, and my mom and I went dress shopping again, in Tara and Hanover, in two stores owned by the same people, apparently.

Found a dress I absolutely adore, and it so happened the one they had in the shop (that’s been there less than a week) was my size, so we just bought that one! No stupid waiting 6 months for me! I’ll still need to get the normal alterations done, of course (apparently, no women under 5’8 or with busts less than D ever want to get married).

I’d post pictures, but I’m still undecided if I want to let Josh see it.

Job Hunt Begins

This past weekend I spent a while on Workopolis and Monster.ca, carefully filling out all my info, uploading my resume, setting up job alerts, etc. Saying I graduate in April (and can thus start April/May ’06), filling out all my relevant employment history, the type of job I’m looking for, all that good stuff. You know.

Today, my phone rings and interrupts my studying time. It’s an unfamiliar number, so I let it go to voicemail.

I listen to the message.

It’s an offer for an interview!

…

… for a call center in Cambridge. D’oh.

As Josh pointed out, though, at least I know the system works, and that potential employers can contact me if they need to.

In semi-related news, I have a really cool Super Mario Bros. ringtone.
In unrelated news, I’m just going to assume no one who reads this blog still uses IE, since no one has said anything. Good.

Grrr… Layouts :P

So I’m trying to pull together a wedding website. Kinda lame, I know, but at least I don’t want one of those shitty pre-made fill-in-the-blanks and pay $100+ to some company for it sites you see, so I’m trying to do it on my own. Yes, I know this blog doesn’t even have a real layout yet. So sue me.
At the very least, it’ll help keep me organized, plus be a good place to put registry links, and maps/directions for our not-from-Kincardine guests.

I’m using WordPress, because I know the system and I think the backend is flexible enough to do the things I want, and in theory will take less work than building a plain HTML site from the ground up.

The trouble is the layout. I found a great open-source no-frills layout that I love and would be easy to tweak to have the look I want. Trouble is it doesn’t work in IE. Like, at all.
Not that I’m planning on having a big audience for the site or anything, and I’m pretty sure none of my friends use IE anymore, but I’d been hoping to send around the link to my family, most of whom don’t even know what a “browser” is, let alone that there are other ways to view the internet than Internet Explorer.
Firefox = Good. (and still looks good in smaller resolutions)
IE = Bad.
IE less than 1024×768 = Terrible.

Anyone happen to know any good WordPress themes that look roughly like this, that has cross-browser compatability?
Basic requirements:
3 column
100% width, not fixed
Clean, simple to alter

I’ve found a few that are kinda close, but they’d all require almost too much editing to be worth it. With this one, basically a colour change and a few images gives me exactly what I want.

Grr.

Sidenote: I may just end up using that layout over here in my real blog, though. I like it. Does anyone who reads this blog, at all, use Internet Explorer? Anyone? Beuller? Beuller?

Happy Hallowe’en!

This weekend rocked! For once none of us had any homework for a whole weekend, so we got to have some fun.

On Saturday we went and did a corn maze. That was pretty cool. I found out I’m actually pretty damn good at following a map on foot. So if you’re ever lost in a corn field, and the corn field has a carefully drawn map, you know who to call.
But it was really fun. ^_^

This evening we carved our pumpkins! Whee!
We decided on a Simpsons theme this year. I did Devil Flanders, Robyn did Kang, and Paul did Vampire Mr. Burns.

OMG N3wb!

Call the Waaambulance! Gah. Some people.
What the hell is up with everyone being so quick to take offence these days?

It’s kinda a long story, but please bear with me.
I belong to a forum for independent women small business owners. It’s a great resource, and we can all share advice and experiences. This forum has a “private” area, that’s only accessable by members, and not, say, Google or random customers. The point of having it is to be able to have discussion about ‘sensitive’ issues, without worrying about customers reading it. Issues that involve things like how much it actually costs to produce some products, discussions of future plans for the business, and the occasional rant someone posts about how an annoying customer has emailed them 47zillion times.
Lately there’s been some drama regarding who’s “allowed” to access the provate forums, originally stemming from one person copy/pasting posts from there and sending them to someone outside that forum, who then caused a big stink. Same ol’, same ol’.

So there began a discussion about how to make the private forums more secure Currently all you need to be given access is to provide your business number OR website address to the Admin. Since anyone and their dog can have a website, this was causing a few minor problems. Anyone and their dog can still have access to the public forum.

During the discussion, it was suggested that maybe also having a time/post count limit to join as well, because we’ve had instances of people joining the private forums only to snag all our personal info (which granted, isn’t all that personal: website address, maybe email) and then spammed everyone “advertising” their services. They have a “registered business”, but that’s not what the private forums are for, so someone thought maybe requiring members to have X number of posts, and/or have been a member for X length of time before they can apply to the private forums, to weed out the spammers and whatnot. I was one of the ones who voiced an amount of support for that idea, since I’ve seen it work quite well on other boards. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it requires that anyone new actuallyinteract with other members, and everyone can get to know them for a little while before they get to jump right in to reading more personal information.

Well.

You’d think anyone who supported that idea had asked for a human sacrifice. People started going on and on about how it’s soooo unfair to new people to exclude them just because you don’t know a thing about them. Or how what we’re really saying is that some of us think we’re better than everyone else because we have more posts (which is obviously the only reason we support such an idea, of course).

OMG, call the whaaaambulance! It’s an emo-gency!

The thing that gets me is that these are all GROWN WOMEN! Business owners! More specifically, grown women business owners who run online businesses. You’d think they’d never been online before, what with being so shocked that anyone might disagree with them.

Hallowe’en Planning Time!

It’s September! Time to think about… school? Nope! Hallowe’en costumes! ^_^

I originally wanted to do a Harley Quinn costume. I still do, but due to various things going on right now, I just don’t want to attempt to prance around in skin-tight spandex all day.
I thought about other “Batman” ladies, but they’re pretty much all skin-tight as well.
So I’m thinking maybe I’ll just feminize a male character. Why not?
I was thinking the Joker, ’cause he’s pretty recognizable. I just need to figure out what version to do.

The two I like best are 1: the Joker from Batman: the animated series that I gew up with, and the slightly sleeker Joker from the Justice League. They are pretty much the same, except they have different coloured shirts and gloves. OooOOOooohhh.

Thoughts/comments/suggestions appreciated.

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