Archive for Stories

12.05.07

Funny Work Stories December 5th, 2007

Posted in Stories, Work at 9:52 pm by Ben

Funny story from work: So a client had their website redesigned (after my redesign which got royally messed up by how many navigation buttons they wanted stick on) and they chose a different company to do it. The design looks good and does a great job of capturing the problematic navigation that killed my design. But as clients are wont, they decided to flip some colors around and add another button (obviously this client is predisposed to add buttons). The client didn’t want to use the original designer for whatever reason and decided to use us (again). The color switching and adding the new button went really well after we bought the missing font that the original designer had used. Anyway the images were fine and dandy. And this is now where the story gets funny. I’m looking at the HTML and CSS and find that there are a bjillion different stylesheets. Each page in the site has its own 2 stylesheets. Mind boggling crazy it becomes funny. But that’s not the worst of it. I drop in the images into the proper folder(s - don’t get me started on how they organized the file structure) and open up the appropriate style sheets to make some text color changes appropriate to the image color changes I’ve made. To make sure that I edit the correct style I also open up one of the html files - and I spot a <p class=”heading”>. I think, huh, that’s interesting, because generally one uses an <h> tag for headings…And as I look over the HTML code and the CSS I start to laugh as it becomes clear no <h> tags were used throughout the entire page! Although to be honest I didn’t search that hard. There’s nothing wrong with <p class=”heading”> but when it’s being used to replace an <h> tag, it’s not semantic or appropriate! That and the various non-breaking space code that littered the page made me laugh. Someone new to CSS perhaps?

08.30.07

Who knew?

Posted in Personal, Stories at 11:59 pm by Ben

This second year at MSU for my wife has been a royal pain. The College of Engineering requires my wife to be a TA this semester. Thats all fine and good. Her professor requested the College to assign her to one of that professors classes. This ensures that the professor can get quality time from my wife in the research lab as well as TA’ing her class. So the college assigns my wife to said classes. WITHOUT CHECKING MY WIFE’S CLASS SCHEDULE! So what do you know…a scheduling conflict. So my wife goes in and asks the College to help resolve this problem. College replies (sort of) that it’s her problem, she agreed to TA. And then they make the wife do a lot of grunt work to fix a problem that really wasn’t her fault. So a note to future students of MSU - be very wary of the College of Engineering - its not at all like what you think it should be. There’s a bunch of other little niggling things about MSU but this one so far has taken the cake.

07.29.07

I swam in a great lake…

Posted in Personal, Stories at 7:21 pm by Ben

It was time for a grand adventure. So the wife and I packed a picnic, swimming gear, sun gear and headed north-west to Muskegon Michigan this last Saturday. Huge sand dunes. Lots of sun. And lots of fun. Lake Michigan is cold. Very cold. Even in the middle of July. There were also annoying flies near the waters edge that made life unpleasant. But overall I highly recommend Muskegon. They also have a neat community museum that’s free to visit. Also a WW2 sub museum (USS Silversides) which we didn’t have a chance to visit. The sand is musical (its probably the best sand I’ve ever experienced) as it squeaks as you walk across it. Michigan really is quite beautiful. You should come visit.

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