Author: Andrew Huey

St. Patrick’s Day

Somerville St. Patrick’s Day parade names first-ever female grand marshal

I see that the Somerville St Pat’s parade is March 14 this year, the day after my birthday. For a few years, we had a tradition going where Mom and Dad, and maybe a couple of other folks, would come up to Somerville for the parade, and we’d hang out in my apartment, have a few beers, and celebrate my birthday. I remember one year when Pat and Heather came up too, before they were married, I think. That was fun.

Since Mom stopped driving a few years back, we haven’t been doing that. I have some fond memories of St Patrick’s parades in Somerville, though.

Happy Valentine’s Day

I used to send my Mom a card on Valentine’s Day, and sometimes flowers.  I mentioned that to someone a few years ago, and got a strange look.  They thought it was weird to send flowers to your Mom on Valentine’s Day.  I never really saw anything wrong with it.

adsense

Since I was doing a bunch of other stuff on the blog anyway, I decided to go ahead and sign up to put AdSense on my blog.  I don’t expect to make any money off it, but I was curious about it, so I thought I’d give it a try.  There was some weirdness going on at first, but I’ve figured out what was causing it — Adblock Plus.  Duh.  The AdSense page at Google is pretty much nonfunctional if you’ve got ABP installed and enabled in Firefox.  And, of course, it blocks the ads that are being put on my page, so  I can’t see them.  Oops.  I disabled it, and now I can access the AdSense site, and I can see the little ads Google is putting on my page.  By default, the ads were appearing at the top of the page, above the blog posts, so that was kind of ugly.  I moved the code to the bottom of the page, so the ads will appear down there now.

Fragile Things, again

I posted a couple of days ago that Neil Gaiman’s Fragile Things had just been released as a $7.99 mass market paperback, but still cost $9.59 for the Kindle.  I just looked again, and now it’s $7.99 for the Kindle, so I guess somebody (or some automated process) does keep an eye on these things and adjust Kindle prices downward when a cheaper hard-copy version of a book is released.
Oh, and I just noticed that Interworld is only $3.99 for the Kindle.  I already have the hardcover on that one, but if you like Gaiman and haven’t read it, it’s a good book.  (Not great, but fun, and a quick read.)

still messing around with my tag cloud

OK, I’m still messing around with my tag cloud code. As previously mentioned, I took a bit of code from this page, and have been messing around with it. I just added a couple of minor things that I wanted.
First, I now have a [Home] link at the end of the tag cloud, if we’re not actually on the home page. Second, I now change the link into just text if we’re on the page for a given label. None of this was a big deal, but it did serve to remind me of a few JavaScript basics, such as how to do RegEx matching in JavaScript, and how to get the URL of the current page. Here’s the code:


<!– originally taken from http://phydeaux3.blogspot.com/2007/05/automatic-list-of-labels-for-classic.html –>
<div id="labelList" class="BlogBody"></div> <script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
function listLabels(root){
var baseURL = '/search/label/';
var baseHeading = "My Tags";
var isFTP = false;
var llDiv = document.getElementById('labelList');
var entry = root.entry;
var h1 = document.createElement('h1');
h1.className = 'sidebar-title';
var h1t = document.createTextNode(baseHeading);
h1.appendChild(h1t);
llDiv.appendChild(h1);
var ul = document.createElement('not-ul');
ul.id = 'label-list';
var category = entry.category;
labelSort = new Array();
for(p in category){
labelSort[labelSort.length] = [category[p].term];
}
labelSort.sort(function(x,y){
var a = String(x).toUpperCase();
var b = String(y).toUpperCase();
if (a > b)
return 1
if (a < b)
return -1
return 0;
}); // http://www.java2s.com/Code/JavaScript/Language-Basics/CaseInsensitiveComparisonfortheArraySortMethod.htm
// where are we?
var pageaddr = document.location.href;
for (var r=0; r < labelSort.length; r++){
var li = document.createElement('not-li');
var full_link = baseURL + encodeURIComponent(labelSort[r]);
var re = new RegExp(full_link + '$');
if (pageaddr.match(re))
{
// just show the text
abnk = document.createTextNode(labelSort[r] + ' / ');
ul.appendChild(abnk);
}
else
{
// show the link
var a = document.createElement('a');
if(isFTP){
a.href = full_link +'.html';
}
else {
a.href = full_link;
}
a.innerHTML = labelSort[r] + ' ';
li.appendChild(a);
ul.appendChild(li);
abnk = document.createTextNode(' / ');
ul.appendChild(abnk);
}
}
// add a home link.
if (pageaddr != "<$BlogURL$>")
{
var li = document.createElement('not-li');
var a = document.createElement('a');
a.href = "<$BlogURL$>";
a.innerHTML = '[Home]';
li.appendChild(a);
ul.appendChild(li);
}
llDiv.appendChild(ul);
}
//]]>
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/13487006926024246136/blogs/3059692?alt=json-in-script&callback=listLabels" ></script>

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tag-cloud-ex.html

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Snow on main st


Snow on main st
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

It’s a good day to be working from home… Here’s the view outside my window right now. When I took a walk outside to see if I could get something for lunch, nearly all the stores on Main St were closed.
Here a link to a photoset with a couple more pictures I took from my window.
Oh, and not to get all maudlin again, but a couple of times today I’ve thought about picking up the phone and calling my Dad, to see how much snow they’re getting down in Whiting. Then, I remember that there’s just an empty house down there now. (*And* that I’ll probably need to shovel out the driveway and walk when I go down there this weekend to pick up Mom’s will and some other papers.)