the second phase

I upgraded to wordpress 2.5.1 today. weee…

My brother recently started getting some new tattoos and it got me to thinking that I should get mine re-done and maybe get some new ones. ( I know my girlfriend is cringing at this point. ). If you haven’t seen my tattoos yet, I’m sure there are some pictures in my gallery somewhere of them but in order to save you the browsing time - I like tribals. I like the clean, artistic design of them. I like how they stay nice and bold, even as the tattoo gets older. And if you know me at all, I do not simply like dragons, I love them. I collect them. Hell, the Tiger calls me the Dragon.

The problem with tribal designs is that they are everywhere and when they are everywhere, it means you get some really crappy ones and some really good ones. After about 3 weeks of scouring the web, I found Dali Rău. This guy is just amazing. And the best part, he’s into computers and technology. Hell, he has his own wordpress 2.5 blog. I mean, c’mon, how cool is that? Most tattoo artists around here are just into bikes and skulls and crap. Here’s a dude who actually knows what XHTML is and is pissed when his site doesn’t validate. ( FYI, my site doesn’t validate, due to some issues with how Wordpress displays the link categories.. ). The only downfall? He lives in Japan.

So, me and the Tiger are thinking of planning an excursion for sometime later this year to make the trip to Japan, drink lots of sake, eat lots of sushi and get ourselves some tattoos from the venerable Dali.

If you’re into tattoos at all, check his site out.

Alright, I know, it’s been forever since I updated. Almost a full month! There’s been alot that has been going on. So let’s get started.

First off, I’m still on P90X and I’ll post the photos in a second. I’m on Week 2 of phase 2. I should be on week 3 but alot happened last week and I wasn’t able to fit in alot of the workouts, so I’m repeating the week. I’m sorta disappointed because I’ve seem to plateaued a bit. I’m definitely getting stronger each week, but the body fat and the weight is staying about the same. Seeing that, I’ve decided to go back to working out in the mornings and then doing a cardio workout at night. I just need the extra calorie burn in order to drop the res of this weight!

Work is good and I’m in the middle of a bunch of projects. I’ve been talking to our parent company alot and I’m getting to know some of the sysadmins on their teams. That’ll be a bonus, especially if I ever decide to leave DI. We’re working on implementing sudo, network installations, configuration management and bunch of other cool infrastructure items.

As far as running goes, the tiger, I must say, has crushed me again. I just couldn’t keep up with his 3-4 miles a day, especially in the middle of doing P90X. So, my next diabolical plan is to get him onto P90X, then kick his ass. Maybe he’ll feel the pain I felt.

I’ve been learning alot of python recently, due to a recent project in creating a jabber bot for our company conference server. While the syntax is easy to get down, I know I’m not doing things in a python-ish way, nor am I probably taking advantage of good design concepts for OO programming. I’ve been trying to read up a bit about it so hopefully my code-fu will be masterful some day.

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Updates are coming soon, I promise.  I’m just trying to work on some wordpress features in the meantime, more specifically - new galleries.

so while messing with the style of this theme to change a few things, I ran into an interesting thing about CSS - Overrides. More specifically, proximity vs. id/class. In essence, even though I was specifying a closer proximity to the element via it’s outer class, because there was an element with an id with the same style, even though it was higher up the chain, it was overriding my style.

If you understood that, congrats, because I just wrote it and I don’t understand it. So I’ll try and go a little more indepth here. If you don’t care about CSS and web design, please, feel free to disregard this post.

So the sidebar ( the vertical bar over there –> ) has an id of #sidebar and it has a style for all the links. Now, there is the calendar ( which is also over there –> ) which has a class defined of widget_calendar. I wanted to change the style of the links within the calendar. So, using proximity, I said something like this…

li.widget_calendar a {
   text-decoration: underline;
}

Now here’s the rub. Since the sidebar is specified with an id and there can only be one id of that name within the page, that’s considered closer proximity than the fact that I specified a style for a class, assigned to element within the sidebar element. So, in order to fix this, I had to change the style to something that had an id tag and was inside the sidebar element. Lucky for me, the calendar also generates a div with a specific id. I was able to use that to assign my link style.

Confusing, I know. CSS is a love/hate relationship with me. There are so many cool things you can do to style your pages but some of it is so baffling and irritating ( especially with cross browsers ) that it becomes a nightmare.

In any case, the problem has been solved and I now, joyously, have underlined links in my calendar. Yay!

My buddie Jeremy has started his own site over at mardagan.wordpress.com. It is his own P90X blog, even though he’s well ahead of me in the program. So please, take a moment to visit there and leave some encouraging words for him!

Another ceritification under the belt.  This time it’s my RHCT ( RedHat Ceritified Technician ).  I passed the test with a score of, that’s right, 100%.

Now onto my RHCE, Advanced Diver and IFR Pilot.

A short update in the life o’ Steve. Things are still going very well with Marielle. She’s awesome and we’re having a good time. She’s been really good to me and I’m trying to be good back. We tied our last soccer game 5 to 5 in a thrilling game. We actually scored the tieing goal in the last 7 seconds, even though at times we were winning in the game and probably should have come through with the win, but I’m glad we got out with the tie.

Me and Bond have been doing development on a new Wordpress theme and I’ve been spending alot of time learning Wordpress and some of it’s quirks, which I’ll be detailing in a few articles once the theme is up.

Anyhow, I just wanted to post a short update on my life. Hopefully I’ll have some real content coming up soon.

Just kidding.  I’m not a jew.  Not really.  Sometimes I wish I was, but I’m not.  Maybe I’d have more money.

So yeah, what’s NEW WITH ME!?!?

Nothing.

Really, nothing is going on.  I still work at Digital Insight and The Tiger is still a homo kitty cat.  In other worlds, I fly planes, dance with hot women and eat $1,000 sushi.  But unfortunately, I awaken to a large german shepherd moving around on the bed and then deciding the most comfortable position happens to be the one where he places his ass on my head.  Quite a far stretch from beautiful gyrating females, but hey, it’s a step closer.  Sorta.

Anyway, I need to get back to studying Ruby ( I’d link the site but I’m lazy and I don’t know it off the top of my head. ).

Peace out yo.