Being Amber Rhea

Check Your Driving Ability

There are a lot of bad drivers out there; what to do? Clearly the current driving test isn’t cutting the mustard. When I took my driving test (at the tender age of 16 – note that I haven’t had to retake it in the intervening ten years, but that’s another topic for another time), they didn’t even make me parallel park. I drove around in a circle, stopped at a stop sign, and backed into a parking space. I probably could’ve pulled that off drunk.

Clearly the test needs to be more challenging. That’s why I propose adding a new requirement: road head.

Obviously, the logistical concerns (as well as the ‘ick’ factor) involved in implementing such a policy are staggering, not to mention the issue of finding an easily executable road head equivalent for female motorists – and I’m sure we’ll belabor all these points in the comments section. But come on, it is a good measure of driving ability.

Can’t you just imagine some poor teenager who just failed the test for the fifth time… Overcome by the desire for a driver’s license and the desire for a blowjob, he pleads, “Just let me try one more time! I can concentrate, I swear! It’s the slurping noises that really bother me.”

Stats!!1!

The other day, I signed up for a pro account at MyBlogLog. I like their interface a lot. And their name makes me chuckle, because it makes me think of poo.

Apparently, today someone found my site by doing a Yahoo search for “husbands forced to masturbate.” How awesome is that?

This post sucks

I can’t remember the last time I felt really, truly well-rested. For weeks – nay, months – I’ve just felt perpetually sleep-deprived; it seems to be the story of my life. This weekend, I thought I had finally gotten caught up on sleep. (I know sleep isn’t something you can “catch up on,” but that doesn’t stop me from using the phrase.) Ah, that feeling of well-restedness… at long last, it was mine again, if only for a little while.

Well, it didn’t last, because now I’m back to my state of perpetual exhaustion – which should explain why this post sucks (and includes a made-up word ["well-restedness"]). I had big plans for tonight: write a post for Bloglanta, write a post that doesn’t suck for this blog, catch up on all the blog reading I didn’t have a chance to do during the day, answer some emails, and engage in some hardcore, unadulterated geekery involving my Tivo, my wireless network, and my iTunes Library. Instead, I’m going to bed at 9:35 p.m.

At least I don’t have to feel bad about missing Law & Order: SVU. Thanks, Tivo!

Meta Notes

1. If you are having issues with the captcha, please don’t just cuss at your browser and never visit my site again – tell me, because otherwise I don’t know. A few people have told me that they get an error message the first time they try to post a comment, but if they hit back and try again, it works. If I find out a large percentage of users are having this problem, I’ll disable the captcha until I can figure out what’s causing it, or try a new one. Email me at [my name] -AT- tangerinecs -DOT- com.
2. If you get my comments feed, I’m sure you’ve noticed that it doesn’t strip out the SQL slashes. That’s puzzling, since I do exactly the same stuff in the comments feed as in the main feed – including strip_slashes. I haven’t been able to figure out what the problem is. So anyway, yes I know about the slashes, and yes I know they are annoying.

That is all for now.

Update: The slashes in the comments feed are gone now. It was a matter of reversing the order in which I called two different functions. Why it worked fine the other way in the main feed, who knows – but the point is, it’s fixed now.

One-Liner

The brick-and-mortar equivalent of server uptime is the amount of time a 24/7 business (e.g., Waffle House) has been continuously open.

I’m stopping now. Really.

Just so you know…

I’m all keyed up. (But not “keyed up” in the same way as Christina from last night’s Grey’s Anatomy.) I feel like I’ve had about 10 cups of coffee.

This is just a warning, in case I end up writing about 2,874,985 more blog posts before the day is over.

How Timely

Guess it’s good that I recently changed my color scheme…

The time-wasting quiz gods have spoken!!1!

Learn Web Development the Right Way

Several people have approached me lately with some variaton on the statement, “I know a little CSS, but I want to learn more. Where should I start?”

So, for anyone having similar inclinations, let me put my recommendations out here for you!

Books

There are a lot of bad books out there purporting to teach “web development” or “web design.” What they really do is rehash the same old “This is a <b> tag, and this is an <i> tag, and ooh! Here’s how you make a table!” business that’s been around since 1996 – and if you’re lucky, they might tack on a chapter or two at the end about those new-fangled cascading stylesheets. Whenever I’ve seen strangers perusing such books at Borders or Barnes and Noble, I’ve politely walked on by, but what I really wanted to say was, “Hey, you put that back right now!” and slap the book out of their dirty little hands in a socially unacceptable manner.

Instead, here are some good books to start with:

• Bulletproof Web Design*, by Dan Cederholm
• Web Standards Solutions: The Markup and Style Handbook, by Dan Cederholm
• Eric Meyer on CSS: Mastering the Language of Web Design, by Eric Meyer
• More Eric Meyer on CSS
• The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web, by Dave Shea and Molly Holzschlag
• Designing with Web Standards, by Jeffrey Zeldman

Web Sites

The authors of the above books all have sites that are excellent CSS/XHTML/web standards resources, so I linked their names. Here are some other sites that reside in my bookmarks list under “Web Dev Stuff”:

• 456 Berea St. – Articles and news on web standards, accessibility, and usability.
• A List Apart – Definitive resource on design, usability, accessibility, search engine optimization, and more.
• CSS Panic Guide – A great jumping-off point to lots of other resources and reference sites.
• Position Is Everything – Modern browser bugs explained in detail! (Chock full of good CSS tips and tricks.)
• Wait Till I Come! – I promise this is not a porn site.
• W3Schools HTML and CSS reference sections. Excellent for looking up proper syntax, usage, etc. I use it all the time.

And, as always, Google is your friend – even if you don’t know exactly what to search for. Googling “weird CSS bug words repeated in IE” will actually get you to where you need to be.

This should be plenty to get anyone started on the right track – but hopefully not so much that you feel overwhelmed. (If so, pop a couple of Excedrin and come back in an hour.) All you aspiring web developers who are starting out with these resources are very lucky – you’re learning things the right way to begin with, so you don’t have to spend months or years unlearning bad habits.

* Ed Note: Yes, those are Amazon Associate links in this post. Deal with it bitches, I have credit cards and student loans to pay off.

Not about sex

Every Young Woman’s Battle has this to say about living together before marriage:

In a Christianity Today poll, 70 percent of teens overall and 50 percent of Christian teens said they thought living together prior to marriage (cohabitating) was perfectly acceptable. Many young women attempt to secure their relationship with a guy by becoming sexual with him, thinking that if she gives him her body, he’ll never leave. Don’t be fooled. Remember, what a guy usually wants most is sex, and if he’s already getting sex, why should he give up his freedom and get married? Like Mama used to say, “Why will he buy the cow if he already gets the milk for free?”

We’ll leave aside for now the fact that anyone who uses the wife-as-cow metaphor without any irony automatically loses all credibility in my book. We’ll also leave aside any nit-picking I may be wont to do at the male-dominant/female-submissive paradigm reinforcement implicit in the phrase, “give him her body.”

Even leaving all that aside – the argument here is total bullshit. It goes back to the point I made previously about the Religious Reich folks being obsessed with sex (in a bad way). They’re obsessed with it, yet they’re ridiculously out of touch with the reality of it, and the result is a pretty seriously warped perception. This is what happens when you turn sex into a holy grail.

What they’re basically saying here is that living together before marriage is about only one thing: sex. I say, it’s about everything but sex. Surely our esteemed and holy authors are not so naïve to think that you can’t fuck unless you have the same mailing address.

Living together before marriage (I refuse to say “cohabitation,” because it makes me think of animals in a zoo) is about all the aspects of a relationship that are decidedly unsexy, but crucial for the relationship to work. Managing finances, handling household chores, maintaining a healthy balance between “together time” and individual interests, learning about each other’s personality quirks, and so on – you won’t know any of that stuff if you don’t live together, and knowing these things ahead of time is invaluable. I would hate to move into a house with my new husband only to discover that he’s a slob who refuses to take on any household responsibilities. Does your significant other leave dirty dishes in the sink for three days at a time; consistently pay bills late; hover over you no matter what you’re doing; routinely max out the credit cards on shopping sprees…? Conflicts in these seemingly mundane areas can quickly lead to feelings of resentment and disrespect which can severely cripple, if not break, a relationship. Great sex alone cannot sustain a relationship over the long haul.

Therefore, to my mind it seems that anyone who proclaims, “No living together before marriage! Period!” must either be supremely naïve, or sadistic. And anyone who thinks cohabitation (there, I said it!) is only about sex is just plain stupid.

Note to Self

I have got to stop underestimating myself. I need to learn that I am awesome and I can accomplish all kinds of great things when I put my mind to it.