Mmm…vomit @ Roberts Hall
Mmm…urine @ Richardson Hall
The regurgitation stained toilet bowl has been left uncleaned for
almost a week now. π It looks like the person with poor aiming skills
behind this missed the bowl by a large margin, most of it ended up
towards the side. I think I’ll make this one Picture of the Day. The
second picture is of a clogged up urinal, I thought the color was
interesting and the amount is quite voluminous (as you can see) so I
took a photo of the toilet. I like the Webster’s definition:
In man, the urine is a clear, transparent fluid of an amber color
and peculiar odor, with an average density of 1.02. The average amount
excreted in 24 hours is from 40 to 60 ounces (about 1,200 cubic
centimeters). Chemically, the urine is mainly an aqueous solution of
urea, salt (sodium chloride), and uric acid, together with some
hippuric acid and peculiar pigments. It usually has an acid reaction,
owing to the presence of acid phosphates of soda or free uric acid.
Normally, it contains about 960 parts of water to 40 parts of solid
matter, and the daily average excretion is 35 grams (540 grains) of
urea, 0.75 gram (11 grains) of uric acid, and 16.5 grams (260 grains)
of salt. Abnormally, it may contain sugar as in diabetes, albumen as in
Bright’s disease, bile pigments as in jaundice, or abnormal quantities
of some one or more of the normal constituents.
Yes, I really have nothing better to do. π
This week is Week 10!!!
Week 10! I thought it was Week 11!!! Who told me that it’s Week 11?
Fess up now, I know someone did, or I wouldn’t have got this idea into
my mind. I need to…thank you, coz that really put my ass into gear. :p
Things that have gone wrong (in a good way) because I thought this week is Week 11:
I submitted my GSC2714 Alcohol and Drug Use essay on Monday and
wrote “Sorry about submitting this late, I didn’t realize it was due on
Week 10”. I wasn’t late after all because this week is Week 10!
I actually did my GSC2714 Alcohol and Drug Use presentation today.
Oops…I was scheduled for Week 11, but I thought this week WAS Week 11.
No harm done anyway, there wasn’t anyone else in contention for the
presentation spot and I think I did okay in the presentation even
though I fudged up my lines a bit.
I…uh, drank a lot of coffee because I wanted to stay up late
today to finish my CSE3151 Network Performance assignment that’s due on
Thursday Week 11, which I thought is tomorrow, but it’s really next
week. Duh!
Oh well, at least I got most of my work out of the way. It feels
good to “gain” a week. =D Anyway, I’ve been messing around with the
blog last night and earlier today coz of that gaining a week thing. I
read up about the Movable Type tags and made some changes to the
layout. The things that have changed are:
Recent Comments
I’ve added some tags to display the 8 most recent comments with a link
(Go!) straight to the comments section of the post in question. I did
that using #comments which is somewhat of a hack, sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn’t. Oh well. This is replacing the previous “Recent
Entries” sidebar, which displayed the 5 most recent posts. I doubt
anyone actually uses that since the main page has 14 days back anyway.
Or am I mistaken and there’s people that actually like that navigation
bit? The comments are set to be truncated at 50 characters, so it won’t
take up too much space. The nick of the person who commented can be
clicked to open up a new window to their URL (if they provided one) or
their email if they didn’t. This doesn’t really work well though, when
you click on an older post, it only shows the comments for that post
and if you click on an older month, it shows the 8 most “recent”
comments for that month. However, it works fine on the main page, so I
guess that’s okay.
Sticky Posts
I’ve wanted to do this for a while and finally got around to getting it
done. I was planning to add another field in SQL to mark a post as
“sticky”, but Movable Type’s category tags gives the same functionality
without having to modify the database so I used that instead. It makes
things easier by automatically showing all posts that is marked
“sticky” in the sidebar. Veritas has a link to show all of his posts, I
feel that this is appropriate as his posts are very specific (almost
always about substances) and it would be good to have an archive of his
posts without making too many posts “sticky” as that clutters up the
sidebar. I’m not doing that for myself because my posts are more
general, so there isn’t much point in implementing that. There is a
problem with the way the tags work though – clicking on an archived
month will only show the sticky posts that is chronologically behind
that month. Thus, if you click on the first month, you can’t see any of
the sticky posts. Oh well. π
Persistent sidebar
I’ve made the sidebar to be always visible, don’t know how you all feel
about that, but it does make navigation slightly easier and makes the
site more cohesive. I just took the sidebar stuff out and put it into a
template to be included automatically by every page. I read that
there’s an easy way to create an “About me” page based on the Movable
Type tags, but I didn’t bother to go through that, so I’ve changed all
the about pages to PHP so I can just include the sidebar template
easily without having to read up on the tags. Unfortunately, while
doing the sidebar, I lost all the blog links!
I haven’t done backups of the site since the time I changed hosts so I
had to rebuild everything from memory. My bad, I cut the sidebar stuff
out and cut some other thing again before pasting, thus overwriting the
sidebar stuff. π My memory isn’t really good, I’ve tried to put up all
the links that I could remember but I’m sure I missed quite a few,
because the list looks much shorter than before! I didn’t remember the
exact order too, but anyway, if I linked you before and it’s not here
now, it’s because of the cut and cut fiasco. I can’t remember every
single link I had, my memory is going down the gutter as the days go
by. Sorry about that, please email me if I accidentally left you out.
Aesthetic changes
I made the date bar grey with black text to differentiate the archives
easier. The posts on the main page have a white date bar with grey
text, and all individual and monthly archives shows the grey one so
that it’s easier to see that you’re browsing the archives. I also
changed the banner, so a different banner will load up if you’re
reading the older posts. It’s nothing much, just applied the “Wind”
filter twice and turned down the hue and saturation to make the banner
look “older” and more uh, weathered. That and the grey archives date
bar would give a better visual cue that you’re looking at the archives
instead of the new posts.
That’s basically it. Tell me what you think of the changes, I’ll
love to hear some input regarding the new features. I think the sticky
posts makes the sidebar a bit too cluttered and long, perhaps I should
be more discriminatory in marking a post “sticky”. I already tried to
squash the list by using a small font size and minimal spacing in the
CSS class definition but it’s still fairly long. Anyway, I’ll
appreciate any feedback regarding the changes. π Thanks!