Posts

Morning Stress

I want English Muffin insurance, for those times when you tear the thing all wrong and one side is basically not there and the thing toasts completely unevenly because of the difference in girth. And the pressure’s on then, because the damn things come in six-packs, which …

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Posts

Nothing's Coming Out!

You want to know why recycling isn’t keeping pace, why the universe is going to suffer heat death and run out of energy a few billion years from now? I just opened a new container of bay leaves— if you don’t know what those …

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Posts

Anatomy of a Late Night

New Year’s Eve has totally thrown us off schedule. For some time (the formula for which is: NOW - # of years we’ve had a dog) we’ve been consistently in bed by 11, 12 on weekend nights, with 1am being a notably late night …

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HP: W3C Print CSS Testing

Sponsored by HP, I worked with the W3C to create tests so browser/ user-agent programmers can make sure their code conforms to CSS2.1 and CSS3 Print standards.

A long and ultimately very rewarding project that started out by teaching me some humility. Coming …

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Posts

Life's Good”, Indeed

I am providing this post-mortem both as a public service and so I don’t punch in the screen of my brand-new LG monitor. I picked up a new 22” monitor at Best Buy yesterday after losing a monitor to the power surges from the ice …

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Posts

Presented Without Comment

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Posts

Xmas Flick Tradition Continues for Hicks in Stix

I bought myself a couple of early Xmas/ Birthday presents this week, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. I bought those two old weepers in order to maintain the family tradition (my moth…

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denimrack: Denimrack Website Overhaul

Updated an existing X-Cart-powered ecommerce site to improve usability, correct bugs on the front-end and add reporting to the administrative tools.

Denimrack came to me with a list of edits they wanted to make to their live web site. I added tracking of abandoned purchases …

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Posts

Making .NET 2.0 Spit JSON

I just finished translating a set of PHP web services into C# for a national car insurer and came across two things worth mentioning, if only for my future reference.

Each service needed an XML and a JSON version. I knew I didn’t …

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Progressive Insurance: Progressive API Conversion

Took an existing API concept written in PHP, converted it to C#, polished some of the rough edges and documented.

Progressive had a proof-of-concept API for insurance price quotes written in PHP. They wanted it converted to C# for better client compatibility; the Read the full piece