BrianJarrett.com

The older he gets, the more he looks like Traci. …read more »

Most websites use what’s called a cascading style sheet (CSS) to determine the placement of text, font types, and other html markups. In particular a web designer will use this to tell your browser what font to display when you visit his or her website.

For reasons unknown to me, Microsoft has decided that they want to dictate the font you see when you go to a website. They use something they call ClearType and they claim that it makes web pages easier to read. After a user installs IE 7 there’s a prompt …read more »

I received the best letter ever today, one that I apparently have needed for some time but didn’t even know it. Turns out there’s this group called St. Matthew’s Churches in Oklahoma that knows me without even knowing my name. They’ve detected, through some kind of magic, that I need some direction in my life. They decided to loan me a letter with a bunch of cool stuff in it so I could get right to turning my miserable, useless life around and start obeying orders.

I flipped the envelope over to find even more good news:

Prophecies? Sealed prophecies? That’s Indiana Jones type stuff! And it also appeared that my time was running out …read more »

I wrote an article some time back about getting online for little to no money. By getting online I meant an online presence, a website of some kind to provide the rest of the world with information about your life, your interests, your rants, or whatever else you’d like to share. In this article I mentioned Wordpress.com blogs. I also promised a follow up article on MySpace and its role in the grand landscape of personal online publishing.

The blog concept started out basically as a “weblog”; a simple online journal. That, in and of itself, is not too impressive. Not much more impressive than a pad and pencil; the way we’d been journaling for years. The primary advantage is that that pad of paper is now available literally for the entire world to read. In the past, exposure like that went for big bucks; now anyone with a computer and the ability to read and write can attain that same potential exposure. Sure, with the deluge of blogs and self-published content out there …read more »

As a rule I don’t use Internet Explorer; I use Firefox instead. The reasons for this are outside the scope of this article. I do, however, use IE for work-related stuff (it’s our company standard) when necessary and I use it when testing my website. One of the most annoying things about Internet Explorer is a nagging feature which reminds you that Microsoft feels your security setting are too lax. One of the main issues I have with this is that it appears to be all or nothing. If I let Microsoft choose my security settings then every damn time I try to open an image or zip file from a shared drive on my internal network I get a nag message forcing me to say “OK” before I open it. This is unacceptable since my internal network should be a trusted zone.

To get rid of the nag message every time I open a file from my network I …read more »

Well, it’s finally official. We went to the doctor today and got the ultrasound and the confirmation that our new baby is doing fine. That’s right, Traci’s pregnant again! And to think our initial odds were figured at only one pregnancy in twenty years! To have not only one child but two is more than we could have ever imagined possible. She’s 7 1/2 weeks along right now and the doctor said …read more »

Wow, seems I’ve been busy on the site here. I added a couple new posts, a new page about my skateboarding years, and a new photo album with …read more »

At one point in time we had four rabbits, two males and two females. Despite the fact that a rabbit can live as long as twelve years or more, three of ours didn’t make it past age four or five. Only one rabbit, Opus, our first and last rabbit, has survived until now. He’s now nine years old an I’m beginning to think he’s immortal.

At age nine he gets around pretty well. He doesn’t do much hopping anymore and he usually just stays in one or two spots. He eats, he sleeps, and does the kind of things rabbits normally do. I think he’s deaf now since it seems he can’t hear us coming until we pop into his field of vision. [Now I'm pretty sure he can still hear but just decides it's not worth the effort to react to the sound.] Such is the life of a rabbit, I suppose.

About a week and a half ago we found him in his litter box, looking half dead, apparently unable to get up. We figured this was the end …read more »

I work in BI, and I use OpenOffice, so this is a pretty exciting announcement. Seems that Sun has worked out a deal with Pentaho to include their BI reporting engine with the next version of OpenOffice. Looks like OOo 2.3 (due out in the second half of 2007) will include the new BI stuff. Here’s a link to an article about the deal and Pentaho’s announcement.

As an OpenOffice user I’m glad to see this functionality …read more »