The good news is that I have the stupid little weather gifs recreated with precipitation that doesn’t look like someone is standing in the clouds peeing. I’m not sure I like the hail, but at least I got it to bounce. I think it’s safe to assume that I’m not going to be in huge demand at Pixar Studios or ILM any time soon. It took all weekend to do the pictures.

It took all weekend to do the pictures because I kept getting interrupted.

I kept getting interrupted by my wonderful son, whom I love dearly, and who I would have liked to strangle Saturday night / Sunday morning. Not for the interruptions, because of course he is much more important than any stupid ani gifs, but because of the content of the ensuing conversations which went on and on endlessly and repetitively with no good resolution for THREE HOURS. I’ve forgotten how “dramatic” high school is.

Sometimes it’s really hard to be a parent. I can see why parents just give up on their kids. I just can’t do that. I love him too much and want him to grow up to become a responsible and self-supporting member of society. And if that entails being called horrible things sometimes, then so be it. Sticks and stones, and all that bullshit.

On the other hand, I saw the coolest bird this morning. I only caught a brief glimpse of it as it flew in front of the car and then between two houses. It was about robin-sized and olive drab in color, but it’s tail was two long streamers with a flash of metallic green that were longer than its body. I’ve got to hit the bird book when I get home and see if I can identify it. I’ve never seen anything like it before around here. I’m wondering now if it might be an escaped exotic. #1 Son didn’t see it.

One more day of school, and then summer. One more day. Don’t know whether to smile or cry.

I think I’ll spin Persistent Illusion off as its own domain. It doesn’t really fit under the Mommy Monster “brand” (so to speak). And that way it doesn’t have to fit in with the MM graphic scheme. Which will give me more room to play.

hmmmm…..

I’m feeling a little better towards WP today. I got a news feed up and working. And I figured out how to do some of the side-blog stuff by using link categories. So things are looking up a bit.

The newsfeed formatting isn’t perfect and CaRP isn’t creating valid XHTML, so I think I will need to tweak it a little bit, still.

But it works. And, as every good programmer knows, that’s more than 1/2 the battle!

[UPDATE 06/06/04] I plunked down my hard-earned $18.95 for CaRP Evolution, which gave me access to the ReplaceText plug-in. And that, boys and girls, has solved my invalid markup problem by allowing my to “fix” Yahoo’s invalid ampersands in urls. 🙂

For the third time in as many days I’ve accidentally blown away all of my tweaks to the WP index.php by stupidly uploaded the original index.php via Dreamweaver. 😡 At least I’m getting faster at re-tweaking. It only took me about 20 minutes to put it back together. A new record!

I know I need to back everything up. I’m waiting until I get the whole thing pretty much as I like it. Besides, I theoretically have two copies — one on the server and one on my computer. When I tweak stuff directly on the server, I usually am able to remember to dump it down to Dreamweaver. But for some reason when I update index.php in the WordPress panel I just don’t remember to download the result. This time I did the re-tweaking in Dreamweaver and then uploaded, so I know the server version is a clone of my local version.

I’ve CHMOD’d index.php to 644 so I can no longer update it via WordPress. If I’m away from my computer and need to tweak something I can always change it back to 666.

Yeah… 666… the number of the beast. 😈 Coincidence there? I think not!

I have The Son Spot up again. There’s nothing on it but a link to Autistic Youth. But I wanted the logo gif up again. That little spot going around the sun was my first venture into animating, and I feel rather sentimental towards it.

Continuing to work on Persistent Illusion. Word Press may be easy to install, but it’s not the easiest thing in the world to configure. Unless, that is, one is very proficient in PHP and CSS. I don’t really fit that bill. But I’m learning a lot of CSS by necessity. It would be nice if there were better documentation. But given that it’s an open-source project, no doubt there’s more of an emphasis on doing cool things than on the poor, confused end-user. 🙁

After a bit of experimentation, and thanks to a script from http://www.howtocreate.co.uk that snifs out Opera no matter how it has set itself to be recognized, I managed to come up with a little script that hides the iFrame when the menus are displayed if the browser is Opera, and makes it visible again when the menus are hidden. I even managed to make my own add-in to DHTML Menu Builder so that my script is part of the menu’s generated code.

And it works! And there was much rejoicing!

Now Opera users get to see and use the menus, and I’ve added a nice little “complain to Opera if you don’t like it message.”