At least that’s what Ace Ventura would say if he was a blogger.

A few site updates to mention:

• I’ve converted the majority of the categories over to tags. At the bottom of every page is a tag cloud of the tags I’ve used here. Slowly, I’ll start tagging old posts.
• I’ve spruced up the comments a bit to give them just a bit more colour.
• And I now include Gravatars in the comments!

I’m dragging this blog kicking and screaming into the latter half of the Aughts…

Just a quick note to the readers.

I’ve been tweaking the stylesheet for the site over the last few days, making it a little more efficient and readable hopefully (i.e. making it more about the “C” than the “SS”). There’s a lot about CSS that still throws me for a loop sometimes. I seem to have a hard time with styling technologies in general (but that’s a different story).

I didn’t have too hard a time of it this go around, I think mainly because of the new Web Inspector in Apple’s web browser, Safari. DOM/HTML/CSS inspectors in web browsers is not a new idea, and Apple wasn’t the first to the table with the idea. In fact, their inspector has been around for a couple of years now, in various forms.

It wasn’t just the live-updating of the CSS that helped, but also how it shows the different style rules in play and how they’re being overruled by others, and lastly the ability to see the final computed style. It’s still a little clunky and could use some more features, but it’s definitely usable the way it is now.

If I didn’t find Firefox as a whole rather clunky on my G5 (but only on my G5, for whatever weird reason), I’d probably be using it with Firebug, which looks awesome. Actually, if I was back in the business of coding web pages to make a living, I’d definitely be using that.

Anyway, if you’re still reading this, you shouldn’t really notice too many changes. I’ve pretty much kept all the styles the same, I’ve just reorganized how they cascade in the stylesheet. The biggest change I just implemented, is switching the main font over to a series of various Lucida variants from Verdana (which I’ve used for years now, simply because it was different, and Tahoma looked too cramped). Only problem now is finding the right Lucida variant for the job, as only certain ones came pre-installed with certain OSs or applications at certain times, and some look like utter crap. But I’ve done my research, and I think I’ve chosen the best option that screws all people equally (maybe the Windows people slightly more than others).

I’ve also started using tags, so at least I now appear to be “with it.”

… there’s been a rise in activity on the blog here recently.

No, you’re not imagining things. I’ve been meaning to get back into blogging for a while now. Maybe it was the Winter doldrums, but now that it’s Spring and the snow is pretty much all gone now (ironically, we just had more snow tonight), I’ve grown tired of things like WoW again (see ya in the Fall, Fitsy) and have wanted to get back into more fulfilling activities, like writing and stuff.

Anyway, I haven’t been totally out of the blogging mindset. For a while, I’ve had the del.icio.us (and now ma.gnolia) linklogs going to show I wasn’t completely dead, and have tried to keep my Flickr, Last.fm, and Flixster profiles up to date to show what I’ve been doing, but it’s been hard to find the energy to do it at the end of the day when you’ve worked in front of a computer for nearly 9 hours straight writing code. More typing is exactly what I didn’t want to do when I got home.

Maybe it’s the Spring air, or the fresh smell after a good rain, but I feel like I’ve switched gears at work recently. We’re now technically in the year-long testing phase of the huge project I’m working on, and part of the team has been shifted to work on another project that’s behind schedule. Realistically, I’ll probably be taking on more tasks and responsibilities, and should be feeling even more tired at the end of the day, but so far I haven’t, and I’m not sure I will. Testing and bug-fixing is a different kind of work, and I think I prefer it to creating stuff from scratch.

Yes, I’ve already dubbed April “The Month from Hell,” but that’s really more so because we’re still trying to nail down an issue that was never really nailed down in the design docs. With bug-fixing, you already know (or should know, or at least can find out) how some feature is supposed to behave and it’s just a matter of getting it to work that way without screwing anything else up. You work with much smaller, hourly or daily attainable goals, which is a lot more rewarding.

Wow, I delved into work a lot more than I had ever planned on doing in this post. The whole reason I started this was just ’cause I wanted to mention my plans for the next while here. I haven’t been neglecting the blog as much as you think. I actually have about 14 posts that have been sitting in draft form for the last year or so, and I thought I’d try to get those into some state that would be ready for publishing. They’re a little behind the times and not really topical anymore, but I didn’t want to just trash them, so you might be seeing them in the coming weeks.

Anyone remember my attempt at reviewing my Top 129 Favourite Games of All-Time? That’s just one example of the kind of stuff I’m talking about.

See you soon…

No, I haven’t been put down nor have I gone on the lam in some kind of bizarre Logan’s Run-esque death ceremony upon reaching the age of 31. I’ve just been lazy.

A lot’s happened in the last three months (a lot of these will be Rider-related):
- The Riders win their first regular season game in Edmonton since 2000, albeit on a pretty cheesy holding call by the head ref (Proulx) on what would’ve been the game-winning field goal by Sean Fleming in an otherwise meaningless game for the Riders. It killed Edmonton’s slim playoff hopes for the second year of their new streak of play-off misses, but so did Montreal beating Henry Burris and the Stamps that weekend.
- The Riders host their first play-off game since 1988, and win (which they haven’t done since 1976)
- The Riders win the West Division Final, handily beating the favoured B.C. Lions, for the first time in the two teams’ third meeting in four years in the West Final (it was the Riders’ fourth West Final appearance in five years), giving the Riders their first Grey Cup appearance since 1997.
- The Riders win the Grey Cup! Their first time since 1989, ending a 17 year drought of seasons without a Grey Cup. The team now with the longest current drought is Winnipeg (who lost this year’s championship game to the Riders), who haven’t won it since 1990 (the year after the Riders won it in 1989) and are thus currently also sitting in a 17 year drought. Will Stegall beat the odds (which he himself put on his own self) and return in 2008? Will Glenn not fumble the ball and get his arm broken in the process in 2008? Will the Bombers win the Cup in 2008? Will Westwood finally be able to get a haircut in good conscience? Only time will tell.
- All of this with a brand new head coach this year, Kent Austin, who’s also a head coach for the first time, and was the quarterback of the Riders the last time they won the cup in 1989. Also the Riders first full year with general manager, Eric Tillman. What sucks now that they’ve done all this in one year, is what do they do now? The only thing left really is to just keep repeating, something that any team, any where, and at any level, would have difficulty doing (unless they’re the Canadian World Junior Hockey Team, it would seem).
- I survived the birthday season and the holidays here at home without any illnesses (I wish I could say the same for my wallet). I did get a weird head cold kind of thing in mid-December, but I never felt sick or tired, just had a runny nose, like some kind of extreme allergic reaction, and it only lasted a couple days. Sounds like my recent trip to Edmonton allowed me to miss the craziest flu season Regina’s seen for some time. When I got back to work on Tuesday, tons of people were home sick, and today everyone around me is coughing and sniffling. I wonder if asking them to wear masks would be rude?

Sorry ’bout that folks. Bobtober has already begun, and here I am letting it pass by with barely a mention. The Riders went into a bit of a losing slump, and I didn’t feel like connecting to any of my friends out there in the ether. Then I got sick. Then I left the city for 5 days without an Internet connection. The good news is everything is back on the up and up. The Riders are back on a winning streak, and dangerously close to hosting a home playoff game for the first time since before Captain N: The Game Master hit the airwaves (now available on DVD). I’m still busy at work, and have a few other work-related things that I’ve been procrastinating over, so the updates still might be few and far between.

In other news, the new TV season has started, and the venerable favourites such as The Office, Corner Gas, Heroes, House, and Stargate Atlantis, have all started up again. And it wouldn’t be a new TV season if CBS didn’t have a new batch of “reality” TV to share with the masses, and so they have. There’s Survivor: China, but the big news is the new show, Kid Nation, which is basically Survivor meets Lord of the Flies, and I have to say, it’s right up there with Amazing Race as probably the most zany and quotable reality show out there. I never knew I wanted to see a bunch of kids cut the heads off of chickens, but now I’m glad I have. Eat your heart out, Mr. Linkletter.

YouTube - Kids vs. Chickens

And in conclusion, I leave you with this:

YouTube - Futurama Feature Length DVD