i knew for a long time that my LCD has the picture in picture feature, but i never thought about hooking it up and trying it out until last night. today i made my way to radio shack and picked up some cables to feed from the replay to the monitor.

and now i’ve got picture in picture on my monitor. pretty neat. the signal doesn’t translate well to full screen, it looks very pixelated. i can’t tell if that’s because of the LCD or the signal from the replay.

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so the page got a little bit of a facelift tonight. i guess i was sick of the default template so now my blog has fulfilled it’s blog destiny and it looks like EVERY OTHER BLOG in the world. ho hum. how boring.

i’ve always decided to rename the blog. i’ll have to spend another entry explaining the title of the blog, but i like it.

but i did one thing different. this design is heavily CSS dependent now. i never really like CSS pages, but i guess i can see how it’s sort of nice.

no idea how compatible it is, this is all new to me, and it looks fine on my browser…and that’s all that really matters, isn’t it?

i made a small change to the URL of this page to more accurately describe it. i moved back my old journal pages to live at [url=http://journal.ocliw.com/indexold.cgi?year=2003]http://journal.ocliw.com[/url] and moved these pages over to [url=http://blog.ocliw.com]http://blog.ocliw.com[/url] small change, i know, and i tried to make it so no one would really notice the difference…but still, i thought it was worth noting.

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[url=http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en_spaw/en_spaw_about]SPAW[/url]

this will only really interest geeky PHP or ASP.NET developers, but this appears to be a very nice WYSIWYG HTML editor control. this is primarily a note to myself to remember this when i need it.

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made a rather startling revelation today which was startling and disturbing at the same time. it turns out that if you use the internet explorer innerHTML property, if you assign something to innerHTML, IE will first parse the HTML tags in there and so stuff to it. so when you assign a value to innerHTML, it doesn’t put just what you have, but all this other crap to…it also likes to close <table> definitions so you can’t use multiple calls to innerHTML without it parsing it up the wazoo.

grrrr.

that’s right…there is a new devil in town…and they are called [url=http://www.ergotron.com/3_products/flat_panel/deskstands/default.asp]ergotron[/url]. they make amazing little arms that you can buy and add to your home. monitor arms, that is. that’s right, they make the monitor arms that let you have a 2 LCD set up…or for those more ambitious, a 4 LCD setup. 4×1 or 2×2 configurations…mmmmm. can you just imagine? 4 20.1″ LCD monitors staring at you? it’s like a wall of monitors just waiting to be loved.

one of these days…

oh yes. one of these days you will be mine. as soon as i get the 3 other identical LCDs i’ll need to complete the display. now that one LCD feels so…lonely. who would have thought that you could be insane enough to mount 4 of those bad boys next to each other? mmmm.
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i take back everything bad i said about pMachine. it’s my own stupidity that couldn’t figure out how to customize the look and feel more easily. sheesh. that’s what you get when you know too much…you over engineer the problem and you don’t find the simple, obvious solution.

well, i guess that’s just the way that it usually is. i end up not finding the easy way out and instead go through great pains to try and figure out how to do something the hard way.

oh well, at least i get it now. hopefully the page looks better. we’ll see though.

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posting pictures in pMachine is a pain in the butt. i long for the days when i did it all by hand. there’s got to be a better way to do it. oh well, i guess this’ll do for now. some of the borders are messed up in the pictures below, but i’m too lazy to fix it. i’ll have to make new photoshop actions for the s400’s images. *sigh*

i also fixed the HTML for the main index page now after adam mentioned that it rendered funny. i guess you can’t use the templates out of the box…

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weird. as configurable as pMachine is, you’d think that it’d have an option to let you make the comments box pop up instead of refreshing to a whole new page. i poked around the code and it doesn’t look like this was a consideration. so i think i’ve got it working now so it’ll pop open a pretty box and ask you to add your comments there instead of navigating you away from the page. i never really understood that.

pMachine has the more function as well, but i don’t get it. i don’t see the practicality of the more page…why split your entry onto other pages…i’ve always found it kind of irritating to have to click on something that i would have already wanted to read anyway.

pMachine does not appear to support pagination of the main index page. i’m not sure if this is a good or bad thing yet.

it’s been a few days since i wrote the integrated pMachine blogroll, yet i haven’t done anything with it yet because i’m too lazy to input all the URLs in my list of links. lazy, lazy me.

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all day today i’ve been working on something that i thought i would have done WAY, WAY earlier. i thought i was close to the end, i thought i could see the light. and every time i felt like i was getting closer….BOOM. another stumbling block.

but, ok, it’s no big deal. i see why i messed up. i can fix the bugs in my code. yes, all will be right.

and then another round of testing.

and then another round of hurt.

what i thought would be done by 11AM today, i think i have finally finished now. 4 hours later. grrrrr. i’m afraid to do this last round of testing, but it has to be done. i know it’s friday, but it sure doesn’t feel like a friday.

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