playing electrician

Yesterday, my grandmother got her hair done. This has no point in the story other than since she was out of the house, my grandfather decided to do something that she didn’t want him to try to do – fix the overhead light in the dining room. Of course, yours truly quickly enlisted in the cause. You don’t think I’m going to let an 80-year-old man get on a ladder by himself, do you?

Anyway, my grandfather went and got a new light socket for the light. The old one had bakelite that had worn away and somehow caused the whole thing to not work. He insisted upon trying to install the new one himself. So I held the ladder for him and shined a flashlight into the crevice where the socket was going. He needed to connect the two wires to the new socket. But he got tired. So I told him to let me try.

We now have a working light fixture. It really wasn’t that difficult of a task; getting two wires connected to the screws on the sides of the socket and tightening the screws to ensure the connection is not that tough. But to hear my grandfather talk about it, you’d think I’d built the power plant for the city of Birmingham.

My grandfather doesn’t understand why I like school so much, and he doesn’t think much of the computer topics that I’m learning about. But he’s convinced now that school’s all right – after all, if I learned to do that in school (and I must have, seeing as I’ve never done anything else, right?), then school must not be that bad.

compliments for art’s sake

One thing that I have a healthy respect for is the world of art. I’m not talking about actually understanding the meaning behind some of the pieces that have been created, although given enough time I can give you something more meaningful than the faux-classic “x, yet y” line that you always hear regarding the subjects of art and wine: “Bold, yet understated.”

I’m talking about just having the talent to draw the subjects in the first place. Whether it be a masterpiece or a comic strip, still life or portraits, city skylines or rustic scenes, it’s all amazing to me. Of course, I couldn’t draw my way out of a paper bag; maybe that has something to do with it.

in the interest of stopping spam

I like getting e-mail about my college tradition sites, be it fight songs, rivalries, or whatever. That being said, I got way too much spam in the old lyrics@1122productions.com e-mail address, and I also had some spam sent to my main e-mail account as well. Since I have the power to control e-mail addresses on our server, I figured enough was enough. Besides, all the tradition sites needed a common e-mail address to send stuff to, anyway. So I eliminated the lyrics@1122productions.com address (hopefully sending a bunch of spambots some boomerang “account does not exist” e-mails for a while) and replaced it with a different one. Score one for the good guys.

no egg on my face

This morning, I made my first omelet. Well, pretty close to an omelet, anyway. I could pick up the entire contents of the pan at one time and flip one half over the other, which qualifies to me as an omelet.

My previous omelet experiences involved making a lot of attempts, then making a lot of scrambled eggs. But today I ate my one-piece “egg beaters” creation in triumph! Okay, so it still tasted like one big scrambled egg. I didn’t have anything to add to it. That’s not the point, anyway. The point is, I could have, and now there’s another dish in my somewhat limited repertoire.

version 9!

Welcome to version 9 of pressing on! The major changes are here on the front page, where you’ll see pictures (actual pictures on my site! Who’d have thought?), a changed menubar (both in location and in style) and a new layout.

On other pages, you’ll see that the overall style doesn’t change too much, but the infamous pressing on… logo has been changed just a little bit.

Another nice thing is that the style sheet that I designed for this site should work reasonably well in Netscape 4 as well. It won’t look exactly like IE5+/NN6/Mozilla, but it will look reasonably good.

Also, you’ll see that the theme swapper has been taken off for a little while. It was giving me problems, so I decided to take it out until I could retool it. I’m thinking of having five themes, one for each of the five “homes” represented in the pictures above. For more on the new design, check out the colophon.

In addition, I’ve added a golf section. Right now it doesn’t give anything more than cursory information, but I’m going to add to it eventually.

As always with a new design, I’m bound to have overlooked changes that needed to be done. If you find anything as you look around, please let me know. Thanks!

May day!

The following is a true story. I know, because it happened to me not more than 15 minutes ago.

It began like any other morning. I had gone to the kitchen to fix myself a bowl of cereal for breakfast. I had already gotten my bowl and the cereal itself, and went to the refrigerator for the milk. I opened the refrigerator, and there was the milk. But as I lifted it out of its door shelf, the top of the milk upset the door shelf above where it was resting.

The entire apparatus came down, jars and all.

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