Raine's journal

My younger brother, James, died yesterday. He was shot. It doesn't really matter how or why. It was sudden and he's gone and I'll never see him again. I know I haven't spoken to any of you in a long time. I just wanted my friends to know, and this seemed to be the best way to tell you. I can't keep explaining it to people over and over again. Every time I do, a little piece of me breaks.

I lit a candle yesterday morning. It's still burning. I don't know what I'll do when it goes out.

Tonight, I randomly had a very strong urge to get a hula hoop and just spin it around my belly. Very strong? No, really strong--incredibly strong--so strong, that I'm sitting here moving my hips like I've got one right now.

At first, this felt like a strange urge to have. Like, maybe one I should supress, ignore, and never speak aloud. Because hula hoops are for kids, right? But it wouldn't go away. So, knowing that I was not likely to have much success finding an adult-sized hula hoop in any of the stores in this area, I started looking them up online.

Apparently, (and I think I used to know this) there's this huge communnity of adults who make hula hooping a hobby. And actually make their own hoops. (The prices that the decorated, assembled hoops were selling for were a staggering $40 average. For a hula hoop. So I'm going to opt for the make-my-own-hoop option if I can find the 3/4" 160 psi poly tubing at Lowes (or wherever I end up searching). There's even a zine dedicated to 'hooping'. And people pretty much unanimously agree that Jason Strauss has written the best guide for making one's own hula hoop.

I'm still in the process of delving further into the hooping world and the interesting characters that live (and have 'net presence) there.

With any luck, I'll get that tubing and will be able to make a hoop of my own. Hell, with any luck that'll happen soon and...uh...I'll still be as good at hooping as I was as a child. It'd be pretty sad if I could only turn the thing once after all that effort.

I got paid! I have moneyz!! Having moneyz is always good!!

During the little bit of spare time that I could squeeze out last week, I finally set to work on finishing the porting of my journal's style to S2. I actually got pretty far. Farther than I'd hoped to get when I had last tried. All I have left is the coment styles, which seem to be a large pain in the neck. I've actually been at this for a while.

See, there are a few private journal entries in my journal about my frustrations working with S2, and the personal limitations that were keeping me from creating my own layout. I made them private, because they were largely uninteresting, and I cursed a lot in some of them. (Which, thinking on it, some of you may have found amusing. Anyway.)

Excerpts:

Shortly after I returned with the backdated entries:

I'm mostly finished with the new style. I still have to do the calendar. I ended up making it as an S1 style, since S2 seems to be a bit too intense for a n00b to figure out.

If I could have figured out where to start with the html design in S2 I may have gone for that. I seems like more work in some areas, but I was drooling of thoughts of ease in others. Unfortunately, I (with my limited PHP/Perl coding skills) simply could not figure out where to start, even after reading the entire S2 documentation. This doesn't seem right to me. I understood what I was reading, for the most part, but it seems to me that there should have been a section saying "the best way to start coding an S2 style is to [blah, blah, blah]."

Though, I wonder how well such help would actually have aided me. I mean, different people start coding html pages in different places, right? Some start with the CSS, others with the tables or divs or whatever they're going to use, but I still maintain that some sort of road map would have aided me in figuring the S2 process out. Seeing how others go about making their designs (or even better, an overly simplistic layout) a reality would very probably help me do the same.

When I settled for S1 instead, I wasn't sure what colors I wanted my design to be, so I coded the page with PHP tags in the CSS. This way, in order to change to basic color scheme, I only have to change three values.

So sweet.

I have other values defined as well, in case I wanted to change them, but these were the three that I mentioned as defined before the CSS:

## contents background
$contentsbg = "E7D3D3";

## sidebar and foreground color
$foreground = "C59494";

## standout and accent text color
$textacc = "895B5B";

There were obviously others. And in the CSS, the code looked something like this:

body {
background: #<? print("$foreground"); ?>;
}

.title {
padding-top: 10px;
padding-bottom: 10px;
text-align: center;
background: #<? print("$entrybg"); ?>;
color: #<? print("$text"); ?>;
font-variant: small-caps;
letter-spacing: 1px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #<? print("$sideborder"); ?>;
}

.links {
background: #<? print("$entrybg"); ?>;
color: #<? print("$text"); ?>;
border-top: 1px solid #<? print("$sideborder"); ?>;
border-bottom: 1px solid #<? print("$sideborder"); ?>;
}

Now if livejournal had a way to define a style with a structure similar to S1, but with the power to control (and, thus, be lazy) like S2, they'd be onto something. An idea for S3, perhaps? I hated that I had to generate each page's html and then copy that to the site instead of being able to use my code.

And, a few weeks later:

Okay, So by yesterday, I had gotten further with S2 than before. Which is to say, I actually have a working, visible style up for working with on the site.

However, that seems to be the end of the line for me. I need to be able to make it look like my original layout. Unfortunately, the gap between the two seems to much for me to do.

It looks like I'm actually going to have to devise and code out a way for the pages to display userpics, the links that I need for the individual entries, the time, and everything. I'm a novice programmer, familiar with mostly perl and php, and this seems ridiculous. I understand how great it can be for the hardcore programmers, but I was lucky to get as far as I did.

The documentation about S2 on the lj site is great for defining things, it really is. But this is proving as useful in actual application (for someone who has no real clue how to use it) as the OED would be for carrying on a conversation (for someone who has no real clue how to speak English). A bunch of useless information about S2 now sits in my head.

If there's a way not to have to reinvent the wheel with every layout in S2, I am totally missing it.

Then again, my mind may have been crippled by the mindless ease of using S1, and all of my problems stem from an inability to expand my thought processes, becuase I would like to be able to input things like: %%name%%, %%src%%, %%urlread%%, and %%messagecount%%.

I know it's never going to happen, but maybe lj needs to implement a style system that has the best of both worlds. When working on my journal's design, I don't want to have to tell livejournal how to handle a userpic, count comments, or tag a URL.

Especially because that seems to be beyond me, and I know I can't be the only one.

Ye Gods, I feel stupid. I hate feeling stupid. I'm not going to give up, because I can't. I hate feeling this way. The only thing that will fix it is making this work. I have to get this, even if it takes months--which it may.

I need a good anger/frustration icon. Why have I been paying for my livejournal for so long? I don't even use any of the benefits to a paid account, like more userpics.

And then I read the latest lj news item. Posted at the top is this:

Keep an eye on the Styles management pages for an overhaul that will be launching very soon. There are also big changes in the works on our style systems, which are currently called S1 and S2. We're working on making S2 your best choice by bringing in some of S1's functionality to it. The goal is to have one style system that's powerful, flexible and easy to use. We encourage you to switch to S2 now!

I swear, two weeks ago I would have been overjoyed to read this news, as it was the answer to my journalized prayers. Now it makes me mad. I was almost finished! Now there's no point in struggling to finish that last, maddening bit!

Rawr, lj. Rawr.

ETA: Wow. Lots of blockquote use on that entry. Bad me.
ETA: Also, they'd better make it easier (it's possible now, but they remove all of the handy "layer" and "style" links from the main customize page unless you use an S2 style. It took me a while to get annoyed enough to figure out a way around it) to edit an S2 style while keeping your S1 one up, or they're officially evil.

Wow. We leave for the hospital in, like, an hour. Maybe I should go get ready instead of complaining about things that don't really matter.

Yay! partridge is no longer struck through with the line of doom!

I realize that the amount of love that I have for his archives is probably disturbing. But, damn, this makes me happy!

I've been horribly silent for the past couple of weeks. For the most part this is because I've been busy and preoccupied with business, but part of the problem is that I haven't really had much to say.

I'm trying to resist the temptation to write only about work. Don't get me wrong--work is great! I love it! It's consumes me! I just don't think it worthwhile to have twenty consecutive posts about it. And, since, as an owner, I don't really have an off switch in that regard, it seems (to me at least) that that's all I've been talking about.

Nobody's complained, but I think that this sort of enthusiasm can get as tiring as someone always talking about their new boy/girlfriend. (You feel happy for them, but after a while you also wish that they would talk about something else. Anything else. Or go bug another friend with the joyful gushing, and let you get back to what you were doing.)

Anyway. I'm aware or what I'm doing; I just can't seem to stop.

Randomly, I've had a horribly strong urge to go skating for the past week. In a rink. The only things stopping me from going? I don't own a pair of blades anymore; I haven't skated in at least six years; I'm ridiculously out of shape; I don't know how to get to the nearest (tolerable) rink; and It'd be weird to go alone.

Wah.

And, for those who feared that I may have disappeared again: don't worry, I've no intention of disappearing anytime in the near future. I'm in a house with a wireless connection, I own two laptops with wireless card (and have immediate access to two more). Also, I am aware of at least three people who would excoriate me for dropping off of the 'net again under these circumstances, and I wouldn't want that.

partridge deleted his journal! He was actually one of the main reasons why I warmed up to (and eventually joined) livejournal.

Which is funny, because my journal at shike is long dead, and that was the main reason behind my original purchase of the domain.

Even though partridge hadn't posted long before now, his archives were good to go back and randomly read, and I still had hope for a return. Until now.

I mourn the loss.

ETA: That little strike through the name mocks me, I swear.

I couldn't sleep, because I'd just randomly woken up a couple of hours ago, so to pass some time I started reading through coloredink's friends page. Because I do that sometimes.

I came across a photopost made by crazy_usagi, and clicked it, because I know who she is.

At first, I was struck by the good photographic eye that comes through in some of the shots, and then, further down the page, I saw Mr. Edo. Being so...Edo. And a piece of the new band room (which can apparently never really change, no matter what they do to it on the outside).

I miss Edo! I haven't seen him since I graduated. I haven't, to date, regretted my decision not to go back to Gab more than I do right now.

Gods, nostalgia accompanied by tears. How perfectly horrifying.

I think I can go back to sleep now, though.

I found an old journal entry (written a little while after I'd gotten to California, saved in a text file for some reason.) Decided to post it here, not backdated.

I was googling the Wendy Lady that we got Mace from, to see if I could find her address online, because I want to budget in donations once my income is steady.

Wait. There's a better way to express that thought, I know it. **tries again**

Lately I've been thinking about what sort of charitable contributions I want to make once I'm making a steady income. I've decided that I want to donate some money to the lady that we got Mace from, for reasons that are probably obvious (I love Mace, she saved Mace, her house is filled with cats, I want her to keep filling her house with cats, etc.)

I left her address in a notebook in Virginia, though, and all I could remember was her name. So, hoping I'd find an article that mentioned her, I googled it. I found some articles about her, and eventually was led to her website at petfinder. I didn't even know she had one.

And Mace is on the front page!

Well, his name was Jimmy then, so Jimmy is on the front page! And he's doing what he does best: giving someone a hug.

I saved the picture to my computer, and the file is named "jimmyhug.jpg" I find this terribly cute. It makes me want to give her more money.

Oh! Just so I don't forget, here is the link to Wendy Erskine's petfinder page. Which can also be found at wendysfelinefriends.org.

Mace/Jimmy is in the third picture down, immediately under the "How You Can Help" header.

And here is a link to one of the articles about her.

I can't believe I saved that entry to a text file and forgot about it. It must've been written when I first started using Mercy, the mac, and hadn't mirrored my webserver on her. I am such a doofus sometimes.

Edit: Also, the tally of rabid animals at the end of that article is very intriguing to me. Though I'm not entirely certain as to why.

"Statewide in 2002, 317 raccoons with rabies were found, followed by skunks (147), foxes (56), cats (27), bats (17), cows (9), bobcats (5), dogs (4) and horses (3)"

Oh my gods! FernGully: The Last Rainforest is on tv right now.

FernGully! 1992!! I feel so old!

One of my favorite exchanges:

BATTY: Nobody cares about me.

ZAK: I care about you, Bat Man.

BATTY: Really?

ZAK: Positive.

BATTY: Only fools are positive.

ZAK: Are you sure?

BATTY: I'm positive. ...I fell for it! I should have known!

**dances around, singing "Land of 1000 Dances"**

"Naaa na-na-na-naa, na-na-na-naa, na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-naaaaa~!"

ETA: Sorry. I should probably be heading to bed right about now. I've obviously lost it.