News Archive - January, 2006

So, I'm back. Kinda. I wanted to have my the site completely redesigned a few months ago, but I've just been way too busy. I came up with a basic design about half a year ago, started making some graphics a few months ago and finally started writing the config file (yup, I'm writing all my scripts from scratch...again) last week. I've been working on it little by little (and I do mean little) on random days last week and this week. Tonight I decided to give up on waiting and just start posting.

The result is a post that will comprise my entire site for now. No navigation, no archives, no nothing. Just fuck all. The plan is that the more I post the more drive I'll have to create more functionality. The only problem is that I don't have much time to develop this site. In fact, I'm backlogged on other sites I need to develop.

I have a lot planned for version 3 of SWAMP, and even more planned for other projects. We'll see how far I get this time around. Worst case scenario, I should have some more time in six to twelve months and hopefully things will take off then.

Just to give you an idea of how little I've actually done: I'm writing this post in phpMyAdmin and I haven't moved the scripts from the v3 directory to the main directory yet...

Ok, it's time to stop fucking around and actually get some work done on this site. It's been over two weeks and I haven't done anything.

I am currently cleaning up my directory structure and deleting all my old subdomains that I have used for testing. This will allow me to set up all the subdomains that I have been planning on setting up for a long time. To start, I currently plan on setting up / cleaning up:

• photos
• scraps
• stand
• fission

Once again, we'll see how it goes...

The W3C is recommending that developers go beyond just creating valid pages, and encourages them to "think content, think style, think navigation." This may have been the first time I've seen a "Tip of the day" on their validation page that was more meaningful than "use <h1> tags." I was even more shocked when I saw that they had implemented an outline feature in the validator and even more surprised that they had developed a semantics extractor.

I decided to test out the outline feature (knowing full well that it wasn't going to be able to gather much, if anything, from my site since there is nothing there. It turns out (and this isn't very shocking) that the only thing the outline does is read in the header tags. So, I have gone back to doing something I stopped a long time ago... My news titles are headers, not divs.

After making the minor changes necessary to switch over to using headers, I decided to see what the semantics extractor actually does. Unfortunately, it seems to be broken right now. Maybe I'll remember to check it out again later.

I've been on hold for the past two hours, and the office closes in half an hour. This doesn't look good.

Kristin and I are going to Florida at the end of May. We're trying to keep our costs as low as possible since we don't have much money right now. We're going to fly for free on AirTran thanks to the 128 Wendy's cups we collected. I'm trying to find out if ThankYou Network will cover at least two days in a hotel in Key West using my ThankYou points, but they don't seem to want to answer their phones...

If everything works out, we'll be saving a bunch of money by not paying for the plane tickets, staying in a hotel for free for a few nights, and staying at a friend's house one night and my god parents' house another night. I also signed up for another credit card that uses ThankYou Network, so that I can get even more rewards. I'm supposed to get 10,000 points just for signing up (ends up being about $100), plus 5x the points at gas stations and grocery stores for the first 12 months. So far it seems like things should work out pretty nicely. I'll post again when I know more.

Chester has been sick for at least a month now. He has been randomly vomitting every once in a while and about a week ago, he vomitted every hour throughout the night. Kristin took him to the vet today and the vet thinks it might be the food we're feeding him, which is pretty frustrating. We started him on Kibbles n' Chunks, but it was going through him pretty fast; so we switched him to Beneful, which he didn't seem to enjoy too much; so we switched him to Nutro Max (each time we went to higher quality food). The vet recommended switching him to Nutro Natural Choice. That's four foods in less than half a year; not a good thing to do to a dog. Hopefully the problem is just the food and he gets better really soon with the new food.

The vet also gave us two pills to give Chester twice a day. Giving him pills is even worse than giving him liquid medicine, because when he starts licking like crazy the pills fall out of his mouth, and the liquid goes down his throat. I had to stick the second pill in his mouth four times before he actually swallowed it. I guess that's what it's going to be like when we have kids...

Today we found out that Greenies — the #1 selling dog treat in America; which helps fight bad breath — is actually bad for dogs. Not only is it bad, it can cause death. In a Newsday.com article, there was talk about a dog who had three feet of necrotic intestine removed and later died.

"The digestibility testing that we have with Greenies shows them to be more digestible than the average dry dog food when adequately chewed ... " reads the company's e-mailed statement. "If a dog swallows a large piece of Greenies, or a whole treat, the digestion process will be extended because of the decrease of treat surface area to digestive liquids and stomach action."

Veterinarian Brendan McKiernan of Wheat Ridge, Colo., a board-certified internist, disagrees. "They don't dissolve in the stomach," he says. "When we take them out, they're not digested. And they are causing both esophageal and intestinal problems in dogs to an extent that is concerning."

We're not sure if this is in any way related to Chester's illness, but we have decided to stop giving him greenies.

Kristin took Chester to the vet again this morning because I wanted her to bring in a stool sample so the vet could run some tests. It turns out that bringing in a stool sample was a great idea, because within 10 minutes they were able to tell us exactly what the problem was. Chester has hookworm. According to a PersonalMD article, Hookworm can lead to abdominal pain, diarrhea, weight loss, loss of appetite and excessive gases. This leads us to believe that all of the problems Chester has been experiencing are solely due to hookworm. Luckily, hookworm can be cured with two pills. Unfortunately, the parasites can live outside of a host for a while and can linger in things like dirt and carpet.

I left work an hour earlier than usual so I could pick up the carpet cleaner from Kristin's parent's house. I spent forever and a day cleaning the carpet, and Kristin washed all the blankets that Chester lays on. It's amazing how much dog hair is in the carpet that you can't normally see.

We have decided not to throw out the Nutro Max that we have left, since we don't think the problem had anything to do with his food. However, we are going to keep him on Nutro Natural Choice. I mixed about 30 pounds of Natural Choice with the Max that we had left, since we have almost fully moved him over already. We're also researching how good/bad Greenies actually are to decide if we are going to keep giving them to Chester. Until we make our final decision, we will not give him any more.