The Life of Riley is a weekly post that details my activities since I ended a thirteen year career as a corporate drone. These posts are usually long, personal, and geared more for my own memory than the reader’s entertainment.

Sunday (Day 126): Country Music and Handstands

I made #1GF! breakfast and then played flash games until it was time to go look at houses. We must’ve written them down wrong because most of the ones we showed up at just weren’t open. Afterwards, we went home and I played song after song from the Old 97’s on my guitar while #1GF! dozed on the floor. Then, I just did random handstands against the wall so that when she would turn around and be caught off guard because I was upside down.

Monday (Day 127): Mmm Chicken Pot Pie

I finished off the bulk of my posts for the week and published four of them. I got a call from the dealership who will need my car all week. We went to retrieve #1GF!’s mom’s car from the mechanic’s shop and went out to dinner at the Abington Ale House which serves home-style dinners like Chicken pot pie. Behind the place was Barrett’s Haunted Mansion, where some kid with his guts hanging out jumped at #1GF! giving her a bit of a startle.

Tuesday (Day 128): Geeks and Redheads

Made a minor, 11th hour update to the Better Blogroll thanks to AJ, who noticed a couple of formatting issues. I also spent a lot of time revamping the Name that Tune: Drums Edition which somehow broke at some point thanks to Apache’s ModSecurity module. It’s back online for those who want to test their drumming knowledge.

Started building an Amazon store full of some games that I like. It’s not online yet, but Amazon only really pays 4% on purchases, so I don’t see it as being a goldmine anyway.

Went out with Macoosh to visit her brother’s grave, which I had never seen because I couldn’t bring myself to go to his funeral. It was really strange, but I’m glad she took me there. After that, we we sat and ate lunch for four hours, which I’m starting to think is a common thing with unemployed folks. During the lunch, I divulged my awesome idea of putting the Super Mario theme as my ringtone to the girl who already had the ringtone on her phone. I’m convinced that there are no original ideas left in the world. After that, we went back to meet #1GF! and relax for a bit. It was a really nice day. (Here’s more info on how to make a ringtone.)

Wednesday (Day 129): Reading

Upgraded Feedburner Feedsmith because of a security hole, finished off my final post for the week and caught up on my reading. I’m starting to realize that there is a lot of crap and duplicate content out there.

Thursday (Day 130): Site Changes

Dove into the documentation of open ads, which is something that I’ve been putting off. I keep realizing that having an ad manager is a precursor to several things that I want to get done, so I just had to dive in.

Once my brain was fried, I wasted some time creating a Dyer family crest for the Dyers group on Facebook. This group is open only to people with the last name Dyer. I find myself looking at the people and and saying things like “They don’t even look like me at all” as if they should. It’s uselessly cool.

I’m pretty intrigued with Skelliewag’s 50 Tips to Unclutter your blog, so I tried to formulate a plan to implement some of his points. The more I thought, the harder the project became until I just stopped thinking and dove in.

I don’t think that I cut down much, but simplicity is a work in progress that has to start with baby steps. I spent a few hours waist deep in CSS creating a header menu that now sits at the top of the page. It only eliminated a small number of links, but it gets some of the basic information out of the mire of my sidebar and into the open. I also made some section tweaks and widened the search bar at the top of the page. Even though there was a lot more to do, I went to bed pretty happy because of the baby steps that were behind me.

Friday (Day 131): More Site Fixes

Right after I got up, #1GF! pointed out that my new menu system completely broke the site in IE. She also was not very happy with me for removing the link to my comments feed. I spent the entire morning trying to figure out why IE wouldn’t play nice.

I loaded the IE Tab Firefox plugin to allow me to view my page in IE, which I should’ve done in the first place. For me to not to check my changes in multiple browsers after all these years is a bit stupid.

It took a few hours of tweaking, but I finally got the menu fixed and went to work on getting the comment feed available for #1GF!. Now, Clicking on the RSS link takes you to a page that includes both the post and comments feeds. Also (and I think this is pretty cool), if you click the little feed icon in your browser’s address bar while on this site, it will show a menu offering both the RSS post feed and RSS comment feed.

I also burned my comment feed through feedburner, which I never did because I didn’t think anyone was interested. Now people can get the comments feed via RSS, or have comments delivered by email just like the main RSS feed.

Saturday (Day 132): Foul Language

Went to see a couple of houses and then to a party where the people are typically so loud that you have to read lips of people you’re talking to. Those lips usually have terms like “ass face” or “nipple nuts” rolling out of them. As someone who likes to crack jokes and make people laugh, it is really nice to be in an environment where if a joke calls for foul language, you’re expected to use it.

What I learned

• Some people want comment feeds.
• Certain redheads will not take offense if you tell them that, in general, red heads are just too pink.
• Testing site changes in at least IE and Firefox is a must.
• Changes take baby steps, and those baby steps need to be taken now.
• An unexpectedly high number of people reading right now are doing so while Buuuuck Naked!
• Getting colors right is a lot easier when you use a Firefox extension called ColorZilla.
• There are no original ideas left.
• The web not only tolerates unoriginal thought, it actually encourages it.
• Sifting through variations of the same idea can be really, really boring.
• Even a group full of people that are only joined by the same last name can provide a strange sense of belonging.
• Sometimes there is no comedic replacement for the word motherfucker.

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Posted in Leisure