Scattered Thoughts

I am one step closer to having seen everything. My friend sent me this link in the mail and all I can say is WTF?!? And this site has been up for a few years now!

Came across this great post on getting more out of your Gmail address.

Append a plus (”+”) sign and any combination of words or numbers after your email address. For example, if your name was hikingfan@gmail.com, you could send mail to hikingfan+friends@gmail.com or hikingfan+mailinglists@gmail.com.

How cool is this? I normally use Gmail’s filters to sort the email I get, but with this new trick, filtering becomes so much easier.
myEmail+subscription@gmail.com for when I subscribe to a newsletter, myEmail+social@gmail.com for the social networking sites, myEmail+bank@gmail.com for banking purposes and on and on the list goes.

I realised today that I actually had quite a few firefox extension installed, so while going through the list, I thought I’d put down my 10 favourite

1. Firebug: One of the best web development tools I have found. It allows you to debug and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any page. Tremendous help when programming in AJAX, to see the POST variables etc.
   Download it here
2. The Web Developer Toolbar: It adds a menu and toolbar to firefox which enables you to do a lot of cool web dev stuff, like viewing a site with css, cookies, javascript disabled as well as resizing your browser to help you view what sites look like at different screen resolutions.
   Download it here
3. Timestamp Converter: Any dev who has worked with timestamps will appreciate this. It’s already made my life a lot easier.
   Download it here
4. IE Tab: As much as web developers (at least this one) dislike using IE, we have to accept the fact that the majority of web users out there still use IE as their browser of choice. While developing, I try and make sute that the site looks similar in both IE and firefix (more strict about this at work than at home :)).
   Download it here
5. PDF Download: I have clicked on pdf file many times before without realising and have then had to wait for the file to download and load while my computer has a heart attack. This little addon was a god send to stop that. It warns the user when the user clicks on a pdf link and prompts to continue opening or saving.
   Download it here
6. Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer: If you use firefox on multiple machines and want to synchronise your bookmarks, this is the addon for you.
   Download it here
7. Video DownloadHelper: The easy way to download videos from you tube like sites.
   Download it here
8. Adblock Plus: Block pesky ads
   Download it here
9. Measure it: Allows you to draw a ruler across any webpage to check width and height of page elements in pixels.
   Download it here
10. Abduction: Allows you to download an entire page or part of a page as an image. Download it here

Wow, have been unbelievably busy over the last few weeks…between work, sport and looking for an apartment I have barely had time to sit back and relax.
Hope to have a little more time to do this now that phase 1 of a major project at work is completed (at least until work on phase 2 starts :))

In the mean time have a play with this little time waster known as the ‘scribbler‘.
Here is what I came up with after about 10 minutes of playing around with it.

As that time of the year approaches again, I dug up one of my favourite festive videos - 12 days of Christmas - Indian Style.

These are the 12 gifts

On the 12th day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
12 cricket ball tamperers,
11 syllable names,
10 minute yoga,
9 telemarketers,
8 Bollywood films,
7 eleven workers,
6 IT graduates,
5 Indian games,
4 Hare Krishnas,
3 butter chickens,
2 nosy in-laws,
and a totally insufficient dowry

I came across this issue the other day and after a lot of looking and wasting time finally found how to do this.
This post is to save time for other people in the future.

1. Go to the Regional and Language Options in the control panel
2. Under the Regional Options tab, click on ‘Customize’
3. In the new window, there is a List separator option that has a comma, replace that by a pipe ‘|’ (or any other character of your choice)
4. Click OK all the way out.
5. Create a new Excel spreadsheet, or open an existing one.
6. Click on save as, in the ‘Save as Type’ drop down menu, find the csv option and click ok.
7. Open the file in wordpad/notepad and you’ll see that the file is now pipe delimited!

I have been a bit of a fan of Dynamic Travel Guide website Schmap for a little while now, and have used it before to plan a couple of my short breaks, so it came as a very pleasant surprise when I was contacted by them recently.

I received an email from Schmap a couple of days ago letting me know that they had shortlisted one of my photographs to appear on their Brisbane map, and they wanted my permission before they used it! I always liked this picture, even though it is not one of the best (according to me at least).

I took this picture around the end of Dec 2006 while on a 10 day road trip to Brisbane and the Gold Coast, I was spending the day at Sea World and this was the show going on in the Dolphin enclosure. Needless to say that this email made my day. Now I just hope they like the picture enough to actually use it in their next update.

To see more pics I took, you can try the photos section of this site or quicker to checkout my flickr page

The other day I went to print out one of my posts, and was quite surprised at how it turned out (Check the screenshot below). This would simply not do. There may not be a lot of people wanting to print any of my posts but I still would like the page to print properly. Back in the olden days of the wild wild web, the solution would have been to create a separate page meant for printing; but with the dawning of the age of the CSS, it is now as easy as attaching a separate stylesheet to my site which gets called when I want to print it.

Here is what I did to create my print stylesheet
I started by creating a blank css file called ‘print.css’ and uploaded it to my site, I then added the following line in the header file of my wordpress template

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/print.css" type="text/css" media="print" />

I also changed the call to my default stylesheet from

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/style.css" type="text/css" />
to
<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.SITENAME.com/blog/PATH-TO-FILE/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />

(i.e. I added media=”screen”, this removes the default stylesheet from the page when printing)

Thats the easy part now taken care of
(A little tip, if you upload your print.css file to the same place your template’s default css file is, you will be able to edit it via your wordpress admin interface)

Once the file is in place, I looked at what had been printed and identified all the information that while useful online was not required on paper(marked in red in the image). For example, The entire menu, the social network links, the category posted to information, the sidebar and the page footer. I looked into the source code of the page and found the ids and classes that were wrapped around these site elements and entered them into the stylesheet with a ‘display:none;’
This is what the stylesheet starts out with, I want to define the sizes of my logo, tagline, content, and h1’s etc

/*Make sure that the background will remain white*/
body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
}
/*Remove the unwanted categories from displaying*/
#header-links, #sidebar, #nav-wrap, .sociable, #respond, #commentform, #footer-wrap, .post-footer {
   display: none;
}
/*Set the font size for the H1s on the page*/
h1 {
   font-size: 14pt;
}
/*Set the font size for the logo "Scattered Thoughts"*/
#logo-text {
   font-size: 20pt;
   text-decoration: none !important;
}
/*Set the font size for the tag line "where good ideas go to die"*/
h2#slogan {
   font-size: 10pt;
}

Now all this is pretty good and gives me a fairly plain page when I go to print, but there are still a few things I want to change.
I want the post content to be shifted slightly to the right. My post content is located in a div with the class ‘entry’, so I add the following lines to my stylesheet

div.entry {
   margin-left: 5%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #999;
}

This pretty much looks exactly like what I want to see when I print the page, except for one last important (to me) thing.
When I add links in a post and I print the page out, those links get lost, because there is no way for me to see which page I was linking to on the piece of paper.
Once again CSS comes to the rescue, using css pseudo-elements I am able to add the physical link address onto the printed page, without actually making any changes to my template, or my posts!

a:link:after, a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

Now this will add the physical url in brackets right after the link on the page. This works great, but the links appear this way in the entire printout. Since I do not want all the links on my page appearing with their physical address, I change this CSS slightly to only work for the content within the ‘entry’ class

.entry a:link:after, .entry a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

This is what the css sheet looks like after everything

/*Make sure that the background will remain white*/
body {
   background: white;
   font-size: 12pt;
}
/*Remove the unwanted categories from displaying*/
#header-links, #sidebar, #nav-wrap, .sociable, #respond, #commentform, #footer-wrap, .post-footer {
   display: none;
}
/*Set the font size for the H1s on the page*/
h1 {
   font-size: 14pt;
}
/*Set the font size for the logo "Scattered Thoughts"*/
#logo-text {
   font-size: 20pt;
   text-decoration: none !important;
}
/*Set the font size for the slogan "where good ideas go to die"*/
h2#slogan {
   font-size: 10pt;
}
/*Shift the content a little to the right*/
div.entry {
   margin-left: 5%;
   padding-top: 1em;
   border-top: 1px solid #999;
}
/*To display code on the page*/
code{
  display: block;
  padding: 20px;
  text-align: left;
  overflow: auto;
  font-size: 10pt;
}
/*To add the physical link on the page*/
.entry a:link:after, .entry a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
}

There are still further useful additions one can make to this code, like expanding abbreviations, writing the physical link as a footnote instead of in brackets etc. I am still working on a couple more changes that I intend to post in the near future. Let me know how these changes go on your site.
Here is what the page looks like now after the addition of the stylesheet

Let me start by apologising to Sir Elton John for mutilating the title of his famous song (Sorry Seems to Be the Hardest Word), however I do disagree with him on this. I have always found it easier to apologise and say ‘Sorry’, but I have always struggled with the dreaded ‘G’ word - ‘Goodbye’.
I am not referring to the ‘See you tomorrow’ kind of goodbyes though, I am referring to the ‘So long, thanks for the memories’ (To steal lyrics from Fall out boy now) kind of goodbyes. Having a dad whose job had us moving around a lot, I have unfortunately said more than my fair share of goodbyes, and I always found it really hard saying that to friends. Before the internet really caught on, it meant making promises to write letters, but lets face it as kids how many of us have actually followed through with such promises? I was definitely not good at it. Once the internet became more commonplace, it became a lot easier to keep in touch, but that did not make goodbyes any easier.

Until now however I had always considered my move to Sydney as being one of the hardest, because for the first time in my life I was not only saying goodbye to my friends, I was also having to say goodbye to my family! I have now been here about 6 years (the longest I have ever been in one place), and I thought that I was finally done dealing with the Goodbye monster. How wrong could I have been?

Recently , I had to use the dreaded G word again, and it was still as hard as I last remembered.
A few days ago I told my employers of over two years that I would be resigning soon. This was my first full time employment after graduating from university, and I had met and become friends with some amazing people while working here. As such, I was expecting the announcement to be difficult; but no where near as hard as it ultimately turned out to be. I’m not sure if it is the fact that even though I am excited to be starting at a new place, I am dreading the reality, that very soon I am not going to be seeing my friends every morning.
I can only hope that the fabulous relationships that I have here are maintained (at least to some degree) after the move, but I guess this is something only time will tell.
Goodbyes are hard; but is leaving a job always this hard, or is this something that gets easier with time?