johnfulwider dot com

In May my cameras and I traveled to Italy and Germany. Here’s a slideshow with eight photos pulled directly from iPhoto thanks to the fantastic BetterHTMLExport plugin for Movable Type written by that great benefactor of humanity, Simeon Leifer. I simply can’t stand dinking around with creating Web-sized images and thumbnails; BetterHTMLExport does it for me right from iPhoto’s Export dialog. Bless him.

Must have been a Movable Type archive settings that gave me the dreaded White Screen of Death — johnfulwider dot com with nothing in the center content pane. I wouldn’t worry, but Rachael and George actually promised to look at my blog, thus bringing its audience to a staggering three people. (Hi Mom!)

Coming next: The photo slideshow I promised them.

All my Movable Type entries have disappeared. They’re still in the entries editor, and still available in the archive. They just won’t display on the front page.

Many thanks to glish.com and my good friends Anne, Eric and Nate for helping me achieve a three-column layout using only CSS — no tables.

I’ve only found problems so far with IE 5.2 for the Mac. If anyone can help diagnose what’s up, please post a comment.

I’m still struggling with CSS, as people viewing this page on browsers other than Safari and Mozilla will notice.

I really should make layout changes on a development server before taking them live.

There’s this horribly cheesy program on an over-the-air religious TV network here in Lincoln that should be called, “Pay for Prayer.” You’re supposed to send in money and a prayer request. Then they show the prayer “answers” with a headlines slideshow, like you see in movies when they show a plot development via a series of fictitious newspaper and magazine headlines.

Anyway, one lucky lady the other day squealed, “I sent in $77 and three days later, we got increased income of $750.”

Tomorrow we’re expecting one of our neighbors to show up on TV, overcome by emotion and yelling, “Praise the Lord! I sent in $77 and my neighbors got sod!”

Sorry, habitat-deprived flora and fauna from far and wide: Our yard, formerly a weed-infested candidate for EPA or Fish & Wildlife Service funding, now has sod.

(Kidding aside, prayer works. No deposit required.)

(Can somebody out there tell me the correct cinematography term for “headline slideshow?)

I’m converting to a three-column layout based on the CSS “look ma, no tables!” tutorial at glish.com. I’ve modified the “3 Columns, the Holy Grail” design, but the results so far are a bit buggy.

The downpour continues here in lovely Nebraska, washing away my hopes of having something other than dirt, mud and weeds surrounding my house. I think I may just turn it into a wildlife habitat and live off of EPA or Fish and Wildlife Service grants.

So we bought this new-construction house two or three months ago and figured we’d save money by seeding the lawn instead of sodding. Wrong. The day after the contractor seeded, Mother Nature decided to oh-so-temporarily lift her three-year Nebraska water restriction with three days of drenching storms. We found the straw we’d laid over the yard blocks away at the entrance to our subdivision.

Months of waist-high weeds and disapproving stares from our neighbors later, we called the sod guys. No one returned our calls. We called again and got a nice guy from Nebraska Sod to come out on a Sunday. He reassured us all would be green and groovy Real Soon Now. Indeed, we arrived home from work Monday to find the yard had already been scraped of weeds and graded. Things are looking up, we thought.

The next day, horticultural history repeated itself. The weeds now have a second chance at life, the graded dirt is washing away, and the sod fields are too waterlogged for harvesting. We don’t even bother thinking about how nice it would have been to have the sod in before the rain started, thus saving us the constant watering needed to establish a new lawn.

Ah, homeownership. When everything’s measured in multiples of $1,000, living under the thumb of a loony landlord looks awfully appealing.

New blogger Gregg Easterbrook decries the national media’s failure (tnr.com) to mention the Christian motive for Republican Alabama Gov. Bob Riley’s big tax-hike proposal.

National Public Radio (npr.org) is mentioning the Christian motive, in what I judge an evenhanded manner. Heard it this morning on Morning Edition (npr.org) during my rain-soaked drive to work.

I’m deciding more and more NPR is the place to go for evenhanded news coverage, if you set aside Daniel Schorr’s commentaries — which are so reflexively, dogmatically and close-mindedly anti-right they’re humorous. (That’s not to take anything away from his reporting experience, which is voluminous, his firsthand knowledge of history, which is staggering, or his speaking talent — which makes him a joy to hear. He’s just wrong on the issues.)

Back in April I wrote a literature review for my communications theory class in grad school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. It took a pleasant little poke at my ego (a classmate requested a copy today to help him with his own research) to overcome my laziness so I could post it. Thanks to Movable Type’s built-in Extended Entry field, I didn’t have to hard-code a static HTML page to contain the huge honkin’ 4,060-word monster (which, despite slash-and-burn editing, was still 60 words over spec).

I will have to find some way to put in the footnotes. Look for that in Version 2.0 of this post. By Version 1.2.1b I may have the section headings bolded or something. If you’ve got the same tolerance for punishment my professor had, you can follow the link below to read it.
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