Herman gallery using Flickity from Metafizzy

/ bullcitydave / 1 Comment

Herman 2000-2014

This will be on the pet profile site soon, but I’ve been playing around with it outside of that. This is more of the clean, crisp pet memorial page I wanted when I started thinking about the pet profile project over the summer. More to come on that. February 14 was the one-year anniversary of Herman’s death, so I thought it was fitting to use him as my test subject. This is working pretty well on mobile devices, though I need to do some mobile landscape view tweaking.

Using library Flickity from Metafizzy.

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Is PayPal tricking people into paying with Smart Connect?

/ bullcitydave / Leave a comment

I was going to title this “Using my mad web dev skills to fix Paypal change payment method problem” but thought the current title is good click bait.

I’m sure I’ve had this happen to me several times before over the years. The PayPal payment method defaults to Smart Connect, which is usually not my ideal payment method since I’m prone to run a balance and pay 26.99% interest on that balance. After much frustration, I usually give up and leave the payment method as it is.

Paypal change payment link not clickable

Paypal change payment link not clickable

This was my post-fix payment method. Originally, it was Smart Connect.

I went into Chrome Dev to try to see what’s going on. I found that by increasing the input element’s font-size, the link was clickable.

Checking out the link Change input element.

Checking out the link Change input element.

paypal_change_payment_method3

paypal_change_payment_method4

I could have also changed the padding on the element or probably a host of another things. Something is overlaying the link, and I don’t feel like spending an afternoon debugging their website.

But I’ve got to wonder if PayPal intentionally lets this bug stay to force people to use Smart Connect. I definitely do not have it as a preference anywhere.

Top 379 Catch-Up: #98-#89

/ bullcitydave / Leave a comment

I was recovering from my kidney transplant over the summer of 2011. I felt like I was freed up to figure out some new career skill to attempt to acquire. I thought about how I been WordPress blogging for years, and how I enjoyed customizing the blog. But I hadn’t ever looked into the best practices for really working with WordPress at a level that might lend itself to career doing something like this. Si I thought I’d start a new blog and use it as my development platform.

I was also feeling nostalgic for my mixtapes of 20 years earlier, which mostly consisted of sappy love songs and a general quality of music that most would judge as pretty darn awful. I was nostalgic for the lengthy countdown cassette series I had made. Top 100. Top 100 II. Top 100 III. Top 100 IV. And then, in college, the Top 200. Each countdown included voiceovers announcing the countdown, Casey Kasem-style. “Up six notches to #12, it’s Peter Cetera with ‘The Glory of Love'” (…more)

98

Dionne Warwick

I Know I’ll Never Love This Way Again

My Rating 9.22My 2015 Rating8.00Rate This!


97

Drifters

Save The Last Dance For Me

My Rating 9.22My 2015 Rating8.00Rate This!


96

R.E.M.

Losing My Religion

My Rating 9.22My 2015 Rating9.00Rate This!


95

U2

One

My Rating 9.23My 2015 Rating9.00Rate This!


94

Lionel Richie

Truly

My Rating 9.23My 2015 Rating7.00Rate This!


93

Cyndi Lauper

All Through The Night

My Rating 9.23My 2015 Rating10.00Rate This!


92

Mitch & Micky

A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow

My Rating 9.24My 2015 Rating7.00Rate This!


91

Chicago

Look Away

My Rating 9.24My 2015 Rating8.00Rate This!


90

Bee Gees

Too Much Heaven

My Rating 9.25My 2015 Rating8.00Rate This!


89

Duran Duran

Come Undone

My Rating 9.25My 2015 Rating9.00Rate This!

In the oughts, I operated the Shoutcast streaming station “Toastie Radio – Love Songs and More”. I’d be excited when there might be some 40 or so concurrent users around the world and people from far-flung places would sign the guestbook. The guestbook, yes. But I had had the goal of making a fully functional website with lots of PHP and mySQL programming. My vision never materialized. And I realized a lot of the listeners were bots that were ripping the music off the stream. And I was paying $100/month for a dedicated remote server.

Back to 2011. I was curious what a Top 100 15-20 years later might look like. But it had been so long. I could surely come up with 200 or 300. And then top379.com was an available domain. And so I decided my WordPress project would be to countdown my top 379 songs.

One song a day for a little over a year. I’d hit number one on Valentine’s Day 2013. That didn’t quite work out. The bulk of my time was not spent on making an awesome design or on designing some backend database structure that would make for an amazing dynamic data-driven site. It was spent looking up countdown data from obscure websites. And once I started figuring out every country I could find where a song charted, I felt obliged to continue that process. An hour a night was not sustainable.

Not to mention, I constantly lacked the confidence to post these sappy, schlocky ballads. Did I REALLY still like all of these Air Supply songs? I just wouldn’t be in the mood to deal with the question. I’ve listened to a lot of different music in the past 3-4 years, and my taste for sentimentality has dulled significantly. It’s hard to be motivated to post about songs I care nothing about and may be embarrassed to admit liking.

Well, I didn’t intend for this to be a recap of the history of the Top 379. It’s just a recap of the last 10 songs. Now that I’m under a hundred songs to go, I can see an end in sight…somewhere. I feel a need to finish this out, even if there is little interest from anyone including myself to persist. Frankly, I don’t even want to hear half the songs remaining in the countdown, though some of that may be a reflection of my current null-pointer relationship status. (Don’t ask what that means).

So…88 songs to go. Maybe if I can go through two a week, I’ll be done by the end of the year, or next Valentine’s Day.

If you can’t stand the heat

/ bullcitydave / Leave a comment

I’m the one person who does not get excited to find 72-degree temperatures in early February. I do not not like it one bit. In North Carolina, I’m lucky to get perhaps four straight weeks of temps below 60. Spring and summer can encroach at any time. I love the few nights a year when it dips into the teens. It’s invigorating. I’m a fan of the cool air, in general. 62 degrees. That’s perfect. But 72, in February? Ugh.

Why am I such a loner when it comes to my weather preferences?

Body image issues. For years, I was overweight, with my enlarged polycystic kidneys giving me the appearance of man expected twins Colder temps mean the ability to cover up the body in oversized shirts and sweaters and coats. Warmer temps mean exposing yourself. And if you see yourself in a grotesque light, this is awful.

Sweat. I’m a hairy guy. I sweat a lot. Warm temps, more sweat. Gross, especially for an perpetually out-of-shape guy. Even when it’s only 72 degrees, I’m sweating. Heck, if it’s 50 degrees, and I’m wearing a coat, and the sun is out, I’m sweating.

Immunosuppressants. While I’m hard-pressed to find any evidence now when I Google for it, I was told following my kidney transplant that my Prograf might make me experience the environment as warmer than the average person experience. A 70-degree living room feels like 80. A 74-degree office feels like 84. A cool summer day in the low 80s feels like the low 90s. Etc. Today, with the sun beaming down, is already uncomfortable.

Skin cancer! Related to the above, immunosuppressants put me at higher risk for skin cancer. I’m already so moley. I have no desire to wear bee-keeper attire to keep out the sun. If I wear long sleeves, I’m going to sweat. I get scoffed out when I say I don’t like the beach. Really, I love the idea of the beach, but it’s a horrible place for me to spend more than few minutes.

It’s depressing. What?  You’re thinking, I thought the short days of winter were responsible for depressed moods. For most, sure. For me, the warm temps are a stark reminder of the passage of time. Stuff growing out of the ground? Holy shit, please, no, not yet, too soon! I’ve got lot of life to get right and not enough time to do it. No springtime temperatures yet, please!

So when you exclaim what a gorgeous day it is, and I shrug, this is why.

The fear of giving voice

/ Toastie / Leave a comment

Today I had I’ve had two disturbing internet experiences, by which, I mean, I came upon two stories that paralyzed me. By which, I mean, I had powerful emotional reactions to them and desperately wanted to take action, but I couldn’t do anything. I could easily state what the gists of those stories are, but that would be besides the point I’m getting at.

General gists. In one case, a satirical website managed to offend my sensibilities for perhaps the first time. I found its post sickeningly disturbing. They cross the bounds of good taste all the time, and I usually an quite entertained. Not this time. I was going to post a comment but saw that those who found the post amusing were a despicable lot. I couldn’t bring myself to wade into the muck, but I stared at the muck for far too long.

In the other case, a friend posted a link to a commentary that was sickeningly disturbing, in both its content and because it was so spot-on. To me, this was eye-opening and the epitome of the type of content you might feel compelled to share because you’re sure a lot of people haven’t thought about it. But I did nothing other than sit ostracized for 15 minutes. I think I felt ashamed knowing that I’d simply be sharing a link and doing nothing else. I’m great at expressing outrage but doing nothing to make the world a better place.

The point is, I’m hypersensitive to everything going on around me, I think it would be useful to give voice to at least a small percentage of the feelings that stir and spin and careen out of control, but I don’t do it.

All things are possible with Dog

/ bullcitydave / Leave a comment

Was going to be excited to post something from RunKeeper, would’ve been the first thing I logged in a year…but the GPS went haywire and logged three times farther than Moksha and I actually went. First real run/walk with Moksha. Will need to force myself to do more of these. And perhaps and actually blog for real. This was going to be a Facebook post but then I realized I could just as easily post this to WordPress.

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