Too Much Food
05:14 PM
The entire weekend revolved around food for the most part. Friday night, Dia and I were supposed to finally try Citrus with Tom and April, but instead had to settle for Osaka when it turned out there was a two-hour waiting list. Afterward, we chilled out in tiny Buckly Park on Germantown Ave. with our ice cream and gossiped for a while. The next day we headed over to their house for the barbeque, where we stuffed ourselves once again. Sunday I snacked on a veggie burger and large DQ Blizzard until dinner at Buca di Beppa with Dia, Pat, and Tim. I didn’t think I was too hungry, but once they sat us in the kitchen in front of all those orders coming up I discovered I was famished. To cap it all off, Jeff and I went out for sushi at Minado with Jay and Ali and right now I’m headed home for last night’s leftovers.
It’s a good thing we’ve settled into a twice-a-week biking schedule, Wednesdays and Saturdays. We meet at the same time at Valley Green every week, and every now and then someone comes out to make the rest of us look good. Last week Don made the trip out and borrowed Dia’s bike only to find out just how out of practice he really is; by the end of the ride he was walking up some of the hills. Saturday, Pat didn’t make it nearly as far, heading back after the first three big hills. To his credit, though, he biked the length of Forbidden Drive and back which is still a few miles of riding. It’ll be tough to stay motivated this week without Tim around, but maybe taking his bike will do the trick instead.
Memorial Day
12:46 PM
It’s the First Annual Post-19th-Annual Rudderow Memorial Day Picnic, and this year it’s being hosted at Tom’s house. Looking at the invitation there looks to be a sizable gathering.
It won’t compare to the extravaganza held every year in Maryland, but it’ll have to do. My parents claim to be too worn out to bother with hosting a picnic for what has become mostly a gathering of their kids’ friends. I requested use of the pool area for a simple Saturday pool party like the kind Tom is having instead, but that idea was shot down as well. They don’t want it to look like they changed the date and snubbed the neighbors.
In the end, it’s a lot easier to drive 15 minutes to a pool party than to coordinate a trip to Maryland, even if it does mean going without kickball or volleyball.
Just a Close Call
12:35 PM
So my knee pain turned out to be temporary. We rode on Wednesday, and despite an unusual amount of complaining from Michael and Egan it was a perfect ride. I had a surprising amount of energy for a weekday afternoon, which leads me to believe that my performance is only loosely connected to the time of day and has more to do with our route. I’ve always said that starting with one of the biggest hills in the park is a bad idea and now I have scientific proof anecdotal hunches!
Despite having to put up with all the bellyaching on our last ride, I’m going to keep pushing for starting on the north side of the Wissahickon. Once I’m warmed up I can ride all day long without any problem; but with that big hill sapping all my energy the rest of the ride is decidedly less fun.
More Knee Problems
10:49 PM
I don’t know whether it was the two hours of biking Saturday morning or the slightly cramped quarters on the ride to Barcade and back, but my left knee is causing me pain for the first time in almost a year.
Last summer the diagnosis was overuse and the only cure was to manage the pain and stretch it out daily, so I’m just going to make sure to follow the same regimen before bothering to see a doctor.
I’m loathe to think it could be the riding since I had so much fun on Saturday. I was energized, excited, and didn’t have to push myself as hard as I usually do; it was just a great day for riding and everything seemed to fall into place, even the weather.
Instead of stretching afterwards, though, I climbed into a cramped Chinatown bus to New York City, stood around a lot that evening where it certainly get a chance to relax, and rode the whole way back with my knee pressed up against the front of the car. At the time it didn’t hurt too much, but now that I think about it I should have definitely asked for the back seat where I could have stretched out a little. I’m still optimistic it’s just a one- or two-day problem that’ll pass, but there’s also a chance I could be paying for my mistake for quite a while.
Strictly Speaking
08:45 AM
Finally, I took the time to work out the kinks for Internet Explorer — not only version 6 but the IE7 beta, too. It took a few minutes to familiarize myself with the style sheet again but after that it was smooth sailing.
It really wasn’t even that hard. Since the layout wasn’t too complicated and the patches I had to put in place for the lesser browsers were technically valid, I decided to take it a step further and see what happened when I changed the doctype to “XHTML 1.0 Strict”.
It surprised me to see that there were only six small errors necessitating “Transitional” status. Once I deleted the two unnecessary <br clear=”left” /> tags and added a <div> around my search form elements, that was it.
So there you have it, a site coded in strictly valid XHTML along with its valid CSS counterparts yet still renders in every major browser. Except for the search results which I have yet to style, I can almost put the design of this part of my site behind me.
Productivity Levels
12:48 PM
Man, it’s been a while and I don’t feel the least bit guilty about not posting before now (though I did feel a slight pang after hearing from Dan earlier this week). I wake up in the morning with a single purpose: coding for Newgrounds; everything else has fallen by the wayside. Working out, biking, relaxing on the weekends — even when I find time to do these things it takes all of my concentration to not focus on my part of the redesign.
The hardest part is finding a stopping point. When some facet of the layout codes easily, I’m eager to use that momentum and move on to the next challenge. It gets worse when I hit a roadblock. I feel reluctant to go home, and when I finally do I can’t stop mulling the problem over in my head often wishing I was in front of a computer so I can try a few things.
This week I tried to handle things differently. I worked more methodically, taking my time while finishing the Forum thread pages to keep the page as lean as possible. I planned to have my day end at a point where I could quickly pick up the next morning without giving me soemthing to worry about overnight.
It went well until I ran out of pages to work on. We’re at another critical junction where the design elements being created affect multiple pages, in some cases every page on the entire site. The design is coming along nicely but this is just one of those rare times when there are no designs to code from scratch right now.
In the meantime, I’ve been filling out the completed pages with actual ads and up-to-date footers, neatening the code, and checking it all against the W3C validator. I even spoke with James and he helped me realize that I never styled the administrative links that are present only for the Forum moderators; so I took care of those, too. It was an interesting task, because my moderator status became a topic in itself and I spent the rest of the afternoon browsing Newgrounds forum posts, some of them referring to my NG profile or how a moderator should have more than two posts under his belt. Lots of congratulations were offered, presumably for my somewhat new position here. The most distracting thought was that people would follow my profile link to this site and notice how it doesn’t render properly in Internet Explorer.
So after Tim and I pick up the washer and dryer for the downstairs suite, hacking my blog for IE is exactly what I plan to do.
