Life

Life is very busy. Good and bad. It has been hard to keep up with school assignments these past few weeks, but somehow I’ve gotten everything in on time. Sometimes it is easier to do things on the last day.

My last CSS test was really hard. It took me almost two days to finish it. I had no idea there could be so much math involved in CSS! I learned so many things while I was taking the test, but it hurt my brain pretty bad.

Some cool things I learned: (click here to skip the geekery)

• 1 em is not necessarily equal to the declared or default font-size for a non-replaced element (i.e. a paragraph, but not an image). The height of the em box is defined by the font designer.
• The height of the content area, which is the amount of space a user agent (i.e. a web browser) leaves for the characters, is determined by the user agent. It can either be the same height as the em box, or it can be determined by the height of the maximum ascender and descender of the font. This second way would keep the character glyphs inside of the content area, but would also lead to differently sized content areas for different fonts.

  If the height of the em box is measured as the distance of the baseline from one line to another and the browser includes the character glyphs in the content area, it is possible that a line-height of 1em may not be enough to prevent line overlap for certain fonts when using characters that have glyphs.

• Other highlights included calculating the height of line boxes based on font-size, line-height, and vertical-align properties, and the effects of negative values for vertical-align and half-leading.

If you are wondering what the heck half-leading is like I was before I took the exam, it is the difference between the line-height and font-size for an element divided in half. For example, if the line-height is 16px and the font-size is 12px, then the half leading would be 2px ((16 – 12) / 2). It determines the amount of space above and below the font outside of the content area. In the case of a negative value, it is possible that the content area will be taller than the line box.

I am also taking a database design class that is kind of hard on my brain too. It is something that is very good to know, but not something I really love to learn about like css. At least we are allowed to use MySQL and/or OpenOffice Base instead of MS Access. Access is required for some of the SQL classes. I won’t be taking those. Hopefully I can take the MySQL class without having to take one of those first.

Work is busy too. Mostly little jobs from current clients. They have been especially appreciative these days. Makes me happy. A little thank you goes a long way.

I am still moving sites to the new server. I have been delaying moving the ones where I need to contact the clients because they registered their own domain names and I need to get them to change the nameservers, or at least to give me their info so I can do it. It is not a big deal, but it involves a kind of human interaction that I don’t have much energy for these days.

So far, most sites have transferred smoothly and I am adapting to the VPS and all of the million more things I can control (and break) now which I have never been able to do on a shared server. Thankfully the folks at Liquid Web are very helpful and answer any questions I have. Sometimes they will even fix stuff for me.

I was most scared to move Autiblogger, but the transfer was pretty smooth once I got the wildcard subdomains working. I was worried for a little while there, but it turned out that I forgot to enter a period after the domain name in the httpd.conf file. Who knew? I’ve never even had access to that file before except on my local server, and even then I never had a need to alter it. Luckily the LiquidWeb guy knew. Now I do too.

Besides from work and school, things are still kind of strange. I am still undermedicated, but feeling much better than a few months ago. I can breathe all of the time now. It is still hard to focus on anything besides from coding for more than a few seconds, and still hard to unfocus from coding. At least that part comes in handy for work and school. It has also been easier to do things like watch tv and drive lately. Still can’t read anything besides tech books 🙁

Haven’t been able to go to class (karate) for months. That is good and bad too. I miss the people and especially getting to kick stuff, but I am also enjoying a relatively pain free existence, which is kind of new for me. I was kind of used to being in a constant state of semi-brokeness. I find that I enjoy not hurting. Still, I think I like kicking stuff more than I like not hurting so hopefully I will be able to go back soon.

Other things are just plain old fashioned good 🙂 Things with Karen are great. They always are. I am lucky to have someone that I can always count on to be good to me and to have fun with and about a million other things. I am loving little Nikkyo more every day and it is getting a little easier to not be so sad about Shiki all the time. Even the other cats are slowly adapting to the little one.

My mom and dad came to visit a couple of weeks ago while Karen was in Baltimore. I was supposed to go with her and we would have gone to Florida too, but I couldn’t do it. Too hard to travel. I asked my folks if they would come here and they did. That was really nice of them and I appreciated it very much. It helped a lot. I’m not sure how things would have gone if I had been here alone for all that time. Probably not so good. We had a really nice visit and it was sad to say good-bye. I think I may have finally convinced my dad to get a mac; probably a 17″ imac. Time to start working on my mom and brother now 😉 Hopefully I will be able to go with Karen in April for Passover.

I am also happy to be doing all of the autism related website stuff. It is a community of people that are often very misunderstood in ways that can lead to very bad experiences in the world, the newest of which may be never even getting to enter the world based only on the fact that they are discovered to be autistic before they are born. Crazy world.