Nem W. Schlecht

Tonight was a great night! First off, I finally got a PCI video card with Pixel Shaders that works on Quinn’s computer. Seeing the Bioncle game starting up was a great site. Of course, it was more satisfying to see Quinn’s excitement at finally being able to play some of his games. Unfortunately, getting him to finish his homework the rest of the night was difficult.

Dinner tonight was a Spinach & Cheese quiche as well as a bacon and potato quiche-like dish and a wonderful salad with Craisins (cranberry raisins). Wine and chatting followed, as well as a lot of looks at Dayna’s new puppy, Lily, while she slept or chewed on anything in sight.

More plumbing is to take place today. Finally, the plumber and landlord have agreed to tear out part of a wall to actually find the problem. With a great amount of luck, the water flow will at least be ebbed today (in both of the spots where it is leaking).

Went to Dayna’s (Mazz’s “bird”) house tonight for supper where she cooked up a wonderful Barley & Mushroom soup and some cornbread. I helped a little by chopping up some celery and mushrooms, but Dayna’s magic and skill made the meal.

In other news, Dayna’s son, Quinn, has been having computer issues that I haven’t been very helpful with. He’s got an older Dell Dimension 2300, a box that doesn’t have an AGP or PCIe slot – just standard PCI and he wants to be able to play several Lego games that require Pixel Shaders or some such. I think I *might* have found him a card that will work, but I’m not sure. Why does Lego make games that require expensive hardware? Even if they do, can’t you just turn off Pixel Shaders and play the game with less details?

I managed to find a very close recipe online from what I remember in helping to prepare it:

I was all excited this year because my folks were supposed to be coming up to Fargo for X-mas. Which meant that I could sleep in my own bed and not have to spend hours traveling. My mom, excitedly, e-mailed me yesterday and said that my sister is no longer on call X-mas day and we’re going to have X-mas back home again. She wrote it like I would be happy about this, which I’m totally not.

I’m actually really pissed off right now. The holidays are stressful enough in just dealing with my family without the changes happening days before Xmas. I’m planning right now on trying to spend X-mas eve with my sister in town and just go nowhere on X-mas day.

Must try making this soon: Home-made Ginger Ale. Links to other tasty goodness are at the bottom of the page.

’tis the season, I guess. Labby’s was packed to standing room only (Christmas parties) and the Turf is filled with rambunctious college students’ last day of classes celebration (although finals still remain). No beer for me at the Turf tonight, as I’m going over to Mazz & Dana’s place for little wine party. It’ll be a long evening, but a nice end to my sleep-depraved week.

Okay, so ever since the Geek Muse episode where we interviewed the authors of Foundations of Ajax, I’ve been doing some Ajax programming. It’s fun, looks cool, works great in Firefox, but sucks in everything else. Javascript, I hate you.

In the end, this is really bad:

mydiv.style.class = 'blah';

Firefox doesn’t report any error and continues working, Safari shows a ‘parse error’ (but doesn’t know where) and ignores all Javascript calls, as does IE 7, which just reports “Error”. This is what I wanted:

mydiv.className = 'blah';

Well, after over a year of having a leaky ceiling, plumbers finally arrived yesterday to fix the problem. Apparently my upstairs neighbor would point her hand-held shower head at or above the tub fixtures, which were not sealed properly, causing much leakage into my apartment. This morning there was still a hole in the ceiling, but hopefully soon it’ll be patched up and I won’t have to worry about my cat tipping over the various buckets used to contain the leaks. Ugh!

Tonight, at only our second attempt, Brian, Paul, John, and myself triumphed at Trivia night at the Turf. Our total winnings: $40 in Bison Bucks, 2 beer glasses, and a Take-Two Rent One, Get One Free coupon. The best part was the winning strategy. Whenever asked about African countries, assume the other idiots will wager something, while you do not. We were in second place, but moved to first after the final question. Only thing is now, there won’t be Turf Trivia again until the 9th of January.

It was a fun day, especially since it celebrates the 1st anniversary of three of my ordinations (the first being December 2nd). Eventually I’ll perform a wedding or some other ceremony, so I’m not taking my year of only performing the forgiveness of sins as a sign of my future works.