Something Metaphorical

Well, I’m gonna have to go get my first Microsoft Certification for work within the next 3 days. I’m not particularly looking forward to it. Not because I think it’s going to be hard, but because I hate getting off my lazy butt and driving up north, especially in traffic. Oh yeah, that reminds me, I need to pick up my license plates from the dealership for my new truck. I think a received a phone call a couple of weeks ago, telling me they were there.

Some guy wrote in to my employer and bashed my work on a website. I used pixels to declare the font size and he felt I should have used a relative unit. It wouldn’t have been such a problem, except he couldn’t see very well and was using IE, pretty much the only browser that won’t let you increase the font size unless it’s relative. He claimed the 14px menu looked fine to him, but the 12px text was too small for him to read. Here’s a quick excerpt from the book he wrote:

I have encountered this problem on many sites made by unprofessional webmasters. But I couldn’t even expect to see it on yours one. Every software developer knows, that software should be tested to run properly in different environments! Probably, you should hire a new webmaster and check his work more carefully.

He outright called me unprofessional and even suggested that I be fired! Can you believe the audacity? A guy that doesn’t even work in the field calling me unprofessional. Some designs don’t work with a relative unit because they’d screw up the design, making it just as inaccessible. I’m sure he’s already written to CNN, ABC News, Fox News, and CBS News, telling them that their webmasters are unprofessional and should be fired. Now if we take into account the majority of the sites in the corporate world, he’s the one looking like an outright fool.

When I read a news article over at Google claiming that the MSN Search Toolbar would add tabbed browsing functionality to Internet Explorer 6, I just had to try it. It was a severely disapointing experience and the toolbar was promptly uninstalled. It felt like a half assed attempt to keep up with every other browser on the market that already offers this functionality. Perhaps me being used to tabbed browsing in Firefox made the experience unpleasant, but opening and closing tabs caused the window to flicker. When I pressed Ctrl+W to close a tab, it closed the whole window without warning me. You can’t even hide the toolbar without losing the tabbed functionality. As if it’s only job was to completely disappoint me, I was forced to restart after uninstalling the toolbar. Let’s hope Microsoft gets things right in IE7.

Occasionally, my cable modem from Time Warner decides it doesn’t wanna work. Actually, it happens a few times a day and I have to recycle the modem (unplug power, wait 30 seconds, plug back in) for it to find the connection again. It drives me insane because it likes to drop the connection exactly when I’m gonna do something mildly important. I’ve called TWC about getting another modem, but I gotta answer all these stupid questions from the support guys who pretend it’s my router or my fault somehow, and I’m just too lazy to drive across town to pick up another one. It wouldn’t be super bad, but once I’m back online, I can’t connect to any sites that I attempted to go to while the connection was down because Windows XP keeps bad responses from websites in the DNS Resolver Cache for 5 minutes. So here’s a fix for anyone else experiencing the same problems.

Open a command prompt by clicking the “Start” button, then click “Run…“. In the command prompt, type this:
ipconfig /flushdns
and press Enter. That’s all there is to it. If you don’t like the command prompt, you can go to Start->Settings->Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Services then click DNS Client and restart it.

I googled DNS Cache after writing this post and found this page that has more information, along with a Registry Tweak to keep WinXP from caching negative responses: DNS Resolver Cache By Vic Laurie

I suppose this is my obligatory re-introduction. I say “re” because I kept a blog a couple of years ago before it was the cool thing, but the amount I’ve learned about web development during that time has increased immensely. Now just seems like the time to jump back on the wagon. I wanted a place to log whatever nifty nuggets of information I might find, to voice my opinions on a whole range of issues, and I just felt left out with Brody (brother) and Junior (friend) starting their own blogs.

I’m by no means a designer, so I gotta throw a thanks to Ian Main for the Green Marinée theme that I modified for this design. I’ll probably end up getting my brother to make me a new design, and I’ll code it up and contribute a theme back to the wordpress community, so don’t get too attached to this one.

Of course I gotta put a plug in for my other site, Crazy Vercher Films. Check it out for some funny videos, and the forums are nice, too *hint hint*

Welp, I’m off to watch the second half of the Spurs game.
Go Spurs Go!