In true Canadian spirit, we must talk about snow and winter. This winter is unique in that while it has snowed a little more than an average year, there has been very little melt. This means that, not surprisingly, the snow accumulates. In downtown Toronto, snow may be carted off in trucks to a local park and dumped, but in most residential areas, it is simply too expensive.
My neighbour S has a snow service that clears his driveway with a truck. The truck has a plow and scrapes the snow backwards towards the street. Once on the street the snow is pushed up onto the side of the curb.
Today I moved my blog from dontai.Wordpress.com to my own hosting space on Site5, primarily because I wanted to experiment with the dizzying variety of themes and plugins. WordPress.com was gracious enough to host me, but I think I was about to outstay my welcome. I wanted to download themes and install plugins, which i could not do. The basic functionality was there, but flexibility was not.
I sure was not disappointed. I only got around to looking at the first 10 pages of themes, and the first 10 pages of plugins. There sure are a number of very busy WordPress themers out there.
No, not I but the little weed. No, I’ve done more than my fair share of school and one of the results of attending post secondary education is the love of books and a seeming insatiable thirst for knowledge. That’s who I am and I cannot change. Recently I tried and failed miserably.
Problem: After installing the AboutPeople theme and FCKeditor on Drupal 6.9, when the editor is invoked its editor window background is black and the text colour is black, not allowing you to see what you’re writing.
Solution: This is not a problem of the theme or the module, but an unfortunate consequence of their interaction.
Here the fix. Summary: Go into FCK Editor, change the default style sheet, which is “use theme CSS”, to the “FCKeditor default” style sheet, and the background will turn white, allowing you to see what you’re typing.
Today I was looking for a code editor and happened upon an article that recommended NotePad++. So I begin to install version 5.1.4, and not far along the install I was offered a number of optional plugins that had no explanation. It took me quite a while to find out what all these options did. Here is a summary:
I really like Web 2.0 and particularly Drupal and WordPress. There’s so much functionality gained so quickly, fantastic upgradeability, reliability, and a great support community. Recently I converted my friend David’s Drupal 5.1 theme Foliage to Drupal 6.9. It’s really a painless (after you’ve done it) 3 step process that I’d like to share. Here’s how I did it.
Files:
Unchanged files: block.tpl.php, box.tpl.php, node.tpl.php, and all the rest of the theme
Changed files: comment.tpl.php, page.tpl.php
Added files: foliage.info
It is with not a small amount of irony that “60 Minutes”, the show that airs at 19:00 every Sunday, presented a drug that is reported to prolong human life. It is remarkable that this fancy marvel of scientific achievement, Resveratrol, can nearly double the lifespan of all forms of life. This chemical, present in the skin of grapes, and therefore found in red wine, mimics the effects of a caloric restricted diet.
A what restricted diet? Yes, you got it right, “caloric restricted diet”. You eat much less, feel a little hungry and you live twice as long. Even more surprising is that scientists have known about this for a couple of decades.
As usual the little one was bored. The boring list includes: full internet and computer games, more Lego than you can shake a stick at, robots, Hotwheels, books, the list goes on and on.
I suggest tobogganing. What could be more Canadian than tobogganing? At -10C the weather is not too cold nor too windy. ‘Bogganing is healthy and relatively safe. We head off to the local large and medium hills, side by side. The sun is shining and we climb and make one on the medium and four on the large, all great runs.
$1.20/lb, 1.5 lbs of ground beef, browned with onions
If you are what you eat, then we are certainly not cow. At least not much, anyway. We’re not really big beef eaters, and never were. Hopefully this will bring us good luck in the Chinese year of the Cow, which starts on Monday.
It did not help when we learned of the Canadian mad cow scare, where the brains and spinal cords of cows were put back into cow feed. That’s bovine cannibalism, which is crazy when you think that cows are herbivores. Yes, mankind did lend a helping hand. The Canadian government did not even heed the learnings and warnings from Britain, where there was a huge and disastrous mad cow outbreak. Even Japan warned us. I guess our Japanese isn’t as good as it should be.
Here’s a tale of a Chinese company supposedly copying an American design. Hi-Bird of Chongqing, China, vs Harley Davidson of Milwakee, Wis, USA. Both have developed their versions of a flat tracker motorcycle.
Hi-Bird Motorcycle Company is from Chongqing, China, and have been manufacturing motorcycles since 1999. This sport cruiser is a 250cc V-twin, capable of 17 HP. The bike uses an old 1980s Yamaha engine design, one similar to the Yamaha V-star 250. I estimate this bike will sell in the neighbourhood of $4,000 in North America. In North America this bike would certainly be classified as a beginner low budget bike. The overall quality of your average Chinese motorcycle is, being polite, middling at best. Chinese bikes also lack a dealership network, necessary in order to obtain parts and authorized service. Hi-Bird does not make large displacement, performance oriented, and expensive bikes.
