Archive for February 2008
Updated: 01 Mar 2008 10:01 am by
Filed: Books & Reading • Food
Tagged: Barca • Food • Ivan Doig • reading
I haven’t really kept up on posting anything about what’s on my reading stack, but I actually have been reading quite a bit lately. Part of it is a release from the stress of work (and specifically, the stress of trying to make sure that when I disappear to go to China in the immediate future that I don’t leave a mess of unfinished major tasks for Jeff) and part of it is to keep from going crazy as we wait…
I’m currently in the middle of two books: Barça: A People’s Passion by Jimmy Burns (an unexpected Christmas gift from Chuck) and The Man Who Ate Everything by Jeffrey Steingarten (loaned to me by Mark). Steingarten is hilarious, and I knew I was in for a treat when he opens the book by touching on his food aversions and how he (mostly) got past them — those aversions include some of my favorites: Greek food, anchovies, Indian desserts, and clams. Right now, however, Steingarten is playing second fiddle to Burns. Barça is rich in the history of one of the great football clubs in the world, a club with a unique history interwoven with the politics of Spain and a club whose history is populated with some of the greatest players in the history of the game. The book is about much more than just the sporting side of the club, and has been a real eye-opener. Understanding the history of the club within the 20th century history of Spain and Catalonia puts a completely different stamp on the nature of the rivalry between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. I am within 25 pages of the end of the book and, although it has not necessarily been an easy read, it has been both worthwhile and very enjoyable in terms of both the history and the football.
Over Christmas, I also read The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig (probably my favorite contemporary writer) and Playing for Pizza by John Grisham. Pizza is fluff but enjoyable; sort of the the futbol Americano version of Joe McGinness’ The Miracle of Castel di Sangro but not as filling and without the twist at the end. The Whistling Season did not disappoint at all; it had been a couple of years since I last read anything by Doig, so this was a real treat. Vintage Doig, but with a touch more humor (or perhaps the humor is closer to the surface?); I don’t remember laughing out loud with Doig in the past, but I did in several passages here. The book follows a pair of threads separated in time by 40-ish years in the life of a young man in western Montana and more than just touches on the ways in which school and teachers can influence life. Definitely worth reading, and if you aren’t yet a fan of Doig, this one would serve as a great introduction to an extraordinary Western US writer.
Updated: 26 Feb 2008 07:00 am by
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • jQuery • WordPress
I had some time over the weekend and tweaked a couple of things in the sidebar to take advantage of some capabilities within WordPress that I hadn’t used before (showing recent comments, for instance), shuffled the order of the sidebar to make more sense (at least to me), and then added a bit of jQuery goodness to allow a couple of the sidebar panels to be collapsed and expanded.
We’ve been incorporating jQuery into more and more of the apps we’re building at work and I’ve been amazed at the kinds of things that can be done in a matter of just a few lines of JavaScript. Adding the ability to collapse and expand those sidebar panels is a total of about 15 lines of code and the only change to the page layout was to add a the request to load the jQuery file itself in the page header and to add a CSS class or two to the elements that provide the collapsing/expanding and to those that get collapsed/expanded.
Anyone interested in learning jQuery should consider two books, both by Jonathon Chaffer and Karl Swedburg: Learning jQuery: Better Interaction Design and Web Development with Simple JavaScript Techniques and jQuery Reference Guide: A Comprehensive Exploration of the Popular JavaScript Library. Both are published by Packt Publishing, Ltd. It’s rare that I find technical books these days that I consider worth purchasing in lieu of or in addition to on-line references or tutorials, but these are two: well-written, actually readable, and they combine to provide a great introduction to what this amazing library can do and how to take advantage of its capabilities.
Updated: 20 Feb 2008 07:05 am by
Filed: Adoption • Faith
Tagged: Adoption • Faith • li zhong
Now that we have been matched with Li Zhong, we have to let our adoption agency know — officially — what our daughter’s “English” name will be once the adoption has been finalized. This is something Deb and I have talked about since we started this process. I don’t remember where within these past three years we reached this decision, but early on we settled on “Grace” for her first name.
Her name will be Grace Li Zhong…
“Grace” as in God’s grace, as in a gift, something precious given solely out of love without expectation and unearned. We will keep her given Chinese name because it’s beautiful (literally) and because from the minute we saw our first small photograph of her, we knew it fit. “Li” means beautiful and “Zhong” means China or middle of China. We will probably call her Li (or something based on that) when we welcome her to our family.
Grace Li Zhong: a beautiful gift of God, given from the heart of China.
Updated: 15 Feb 2008 07:12 am by
Filed: Life in General
From the card Deb got me:
“There is only one true happiness in life: to love and be loved.”
George Sand
How blessed we are…
Updated: 14 Feb 2008 06:53 pm by
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • WordPress
It had been a long time since I had paid any attention to what was going on with the WordPress blogging engine I use, so I wasn’t surprised a week or so ago when I saw that they were up to version 2.3.x. Just based on all the bug fixes present in the latest release, I figured it was time…
Being a bit paranoid about stuff like this, I decided that since I was updating from a version that was at least 18 months old, I ought to do a dry run on the update. That meant getting everything I needed installed, configured, and running on my local box with a backup of both the database and the blog from the server. Over the past week or so, I’ve squeezed enough time here and there for that to happen, as well as giving the stylesheet some much needed attention and cleanup.
As has always been the case for me, the upgrade went flawlessly on both my local version and here on the server. As a result, I’m now running against the latest version of WordPress. Hats off to the WP crew for the usual high quality of what I consider the best balanced blend of simplicity and capability in the blogging world.
Of course, now that I had the new version running, I wanted to upgrade my theme to support tagging… and that took another couple hours since I know just enough PHP to be dangerous. Now I just need to go back and start tagging past posts…
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