Eat a live toad each morning and nothing worse will happen to you for the rest of the day.

Welcome

My father passed on this philosophy when I was in high school. I have retained the original image all these years. And now, I pass it on to you!

By the way, I have found that some things work better in all browsers except Microsoft IE. Go figure, but, if you want to see things the way they are intended, try FireFox, Chrome, or Safari.

Notes
Foundation
BlueGriffon
Ubuntu

  • These are notes about this page. The other tabs contain information relating to specific testing I am doing. Foundation discusses the CSS layout system I am working with and BlueGriffon contains notes about the WYSiWYG HTML editor I am working with for some of the development. Ubuntu is the operating system I'm working with on my netbook to support some of this testing and development.

    I'll put my general comments here and leave specific ones for the tabs. In general, I'm finding Foundation to be easy to use and quick to implement just as advertised. BlueGriffon has some quirks and I'm very satisfied with Ubuntu.

  • I'm looking at the Foundation CSS framework as a way to develop this page. So far, it looks OK. I'm going to experiment with this page and see if I can get to where I want to be for the future of the website. I'm blogging about it at the Bob Breedlove blog at BlogSpot.

    25-Nov-2011 8:35 AM: OK, the pure CSS menu didn't work so well and I reverted to the site wide JQuery and CSS menu. I'm still playing with the Foundation elements to look at the formatting.

    26-Nov-2011 7:45 PM: I have added tabs to the page. This section talks about the changes I am mwking with the CSS. It seems to work well and provides an easy to develop tabbed content. One interesting aside has to do with the BlueGriffon editor. I can's use the WYSiWYG editor to edit these tabs as I can't see them.

    4-Dec-2011 10:49 AM: I'm still working with Foundation. So far, it has been solid and I'm thinking about changing all pages to use this framework. I need to give it a trial on another page just to make sure, but so-far-so-good.

  • I'm looking at a free WYSIWYG editor for the website. I still love Dreamweaver, but am looking at something I can put on other laptops without costing an arm and a leg to license. So far, so good. But I have said that before about other editors. We'll see how it works out. Check it out here.

    25-Nov-2011 8:36 AM: I tried using the source editor and it isn't very good. I have also added the FireFTP add-on which allows me to upload files to the site. It works pretty well. Right now, my evaluation of this editor is that it might be good for small changes, but still lacks for major work.

    26-Nov-2011 8:00 PM:: I am forced to use the source editor to edit these tabs and it's working like a champ in Ubuntu. Go figure.

    4-Dec-2011 10:30 AM: Every editor should have an easy way to input a timestamp. Just an observation when using BlueGriffon -- it doesn't have one, at least the I have found.

    29-Jan-2011 1:45 PM: I haven't used BlueGriffon all thet much, but I have downloaded a new version (1.4). It is working OK on Ubuntu, but gets an error on my main workstation under Windows 7. I don't seem to be able to get around it and have entered a bug on their tracker.

  • This tab is information about my use of Ubuntu on my netbook. It's working out OK. Right now, my main use involves Firefox and BlueGriffon to work on this page. We'll see how well other things work.

    The Acer Aspire One is not the fasted thing in the world, but Ubuntu is somewhat faster than the Windows XP that came with the machine. Now if it only had OneNote, I might be very happy. It does have Basket Notes which is a poor relative of OneNote.

Things I wonder about

knotsOMG Facts cited this study of why strings like your headphones get tied into knots in your pocket. It's one of those things that I have always wondered about. Why, when you put away the Christmas lights neatly at the end of the season do they come out of the box next season all tied into knots. Well, someone has obviously too much time on their hands and actually performed a scientific study to give us the answer. I didn't read the entire study -- I don't have that sort of free time, but, they performed 3,415 trials to answer this question. As it turns out

It is well known that a jostled string tends to become knotted; yet the factors governing the “spontaneous” formation of various knots are unclear. We performed experiments in which a string was tumbled inside a box and found that complex knots often form within seconds. We used mathematical knot theory to analyze the knots. Above a critical string length, the probability P of knotting at first increased sharply with length but then saturated below 100%. This behavior differs from that of mathematical self-avoiding random walks, where P has been proven to approach 100%. Finite agitation time and jamming of the string due to its stiffness result in lower probability, but P approaches 100% with long, flexible strings.

I'm not certain what a selfpavoiding random walks are, but your headphones are long, flexible strings. Now if they could just study Breedlove's law of plugs which states

A plug will always plug into the socket in the opposite direction that it naturally lays.

 

Blog

Where am I?

People are all over the web. Here's where I am:

In addition to the general blog on the website, I have a couple of others

My boys are into skateboarding, check out their You Tube Site.

So, if you are into skateboarding, check it out! Don't be put off by the fact that it looks like I -- an old guy -- am posting all the thoughts. It's really my cool kids!

So why this page?

This is a bit of a radical departure from the other pages on the site. There's a reason for that. This is a place for more to check things out; to experiment a bit; and to play with some social media and other things that I may use in my other work.

For this reason, things may be a littie strange here. Things may not format right on your browser, things might not appear right, things might have wierd colors, shapes, sizes, flow -- but, it's all for learning and communicating.