eightface

Milk in bags

When you spend most of your life in Canada, you tend to forget that it’s kind of weird that our milk comes in plastic bags (via Cynical-C). To us it’s no weirder than picking up a jug or a carton full of milk.

It also never really seemed wrong to be leaving the bag open in the fridge. I guess it’s probably not safe if as long as you’re not performing some sort of science experiment.

Flickrfied Conform Project

The current Conform Project series just ended, so I decided to try a different process while I work on a new backend for the site. I’d like to take this moment and introduce you to the new Conform Project group on Flickr. The group is open to anyone who wants to participate (you can get a free account with 10mb of upload/month).

To take part, grab a conform image from the Flickr group (or the conform tag) or one of the first series images from the Conform Project site. Use that image as a base for the new one that you create. Upload it to Flickr, give the image the tag *conform* and add it to the group pool. Use your description or comments to link to the original image that you used as a base and/or add a comment to the original piece.

Oscar nominations are out

The Oscar nominations were released today.
Jamie Foxx is nominated for best actor and best supporting actor. As far as best pic goes, The Aviator is a bit too frantic to win, Clint Eastwood is depressing, I’m assuming Ray is a character piece, if the voters are in a sappier mood they’ll go with the feel-good Finding Neverland, otherwise they’re likely going through a midlife crisis and will go with the lighter Sideways.

Death From Above 1979

Went to the Death From Above 1979 show at the Grad Club last night. It was pretty solid, they sounded even heavier live, the building was shaking. When you look up at the tiny stage, it’s hard to believe it’s just two guys making those sounds.

I took a bunch of photos, most of them aren’t that great, but I put up a few of the better ones. It was nice to get out to a show, I don’t think I had seen any good live music in awhile.

Update: A better review of the show. Apparently, the lead singer for Nassau (one of the openers) was a former GBV drummer, although they’ve been through enough of those.

3-Column CSS Layouts

Man, it’s not easy to do 3-column css layouts. There are a bunch of guides and stuff around, I decided to go for the hack method. Basically, I just created a second el-sidebar-grande div, through the old sidebar and the flick bar as floats into that. Anyway, that’s my solution for now.

Hackjob

Did a little hackjob on the site, although it’ll change again soon enough. It seems like all I do is post saying I’m working on the site design. That and quicklinks. Quicklinks are my crutch right now, I should break them off onto the sidebar again. Or not. Blah.

On a separate note, I must express my utter disdain for web-based educational software packages. Namely Knowledge Forum and WebCT. For now, I leave you with this WebCT screenshot. Learning without Limits provided you’re using the right software.

Redesign soon

This is a hacked-up version of the Kubrick theme that meshed with my old layout. I need to change things up a bit and implement some of the neato things in WordPress. I was getting a lot of comment-spam, so I installed a plugin called Trencaspammers that generates a code that you have to enter (prevents a lot of the robots).

Now I just have to get rid of the spam in my referer logs, riz has provided me with his hacked together script, i just haven’t tried running it yet.

The Future pt II

Well, Drupal didn’t happen. But WordPress did.

I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble installing Drupal, it actually went fairly smoothly, despite some comments that indicate otherwise. My biggest problem was that I had about 1700 main log and quicklink entries that needed to be imported into the new system. It became a pain-in-the-ass with Drupal, but was pretty simple with [WordPress][3].

And I respected Riz’s comment, eightface forever! I’m thinking that davekellam.com will just be a portal for now, it’s kind of dumb to have it mirroring everything on eightface. They’re on the save physical server, so it’s not acting as a redundant backup.

Some notes, I decided to go with a CVS build, rather than the default install. So, I’m currently running 1.5-beta1, which has some nice aspects to it. The theming is pretty cool and it was pretty simple to get an asides/quicklinks style thing going. I ran into a problem with the quicklinks, mostly in relation to how I set them up in MT and imported them into WordPress. I could have come up with some sort of hack or legacy thing, but I didn’t. I’m going back and formatting each post with Markdown.

Markdown is pretty handy if you like working with text/text-editors. Basically, it saves a bunch of time by avoiding having to type out the same code over and over again. Some people like the mouse and clicking on a button to insert tags, this is easier (hands don’t have to leave keyboard).

Things might look a bit ugly around here as I switch over to the new system and templates.