More changes and updates

Lots of minor changes to the site over the weekend. I cleaned out even more extraneous css from my theme’s style sheet and I also pimped out my contact forms and my comment forms and their submit buttons. Sorry IE users your comment areas have ugly scroll bars waiting to scroll (it’s your fault for using a browser that’s dumb enough to do that)

In observance of Black History month I have made my El Creature lucha man an afro-american.

Internet Explorer Input Backgrounds

When creating snazzy search forms be sure to wrap the input field in a div and add the background image to the div while setting the input background to transparent with no border. Make the div the actual size of image and make the input field be the size of the image minus all padding added to center text in input field vertically.

If you don’t wrap the input field in a div and someone starts typing a search query longer than the background image, the background image will begin to scroll left as you type. If you type enough the background just scrolls right out of view. Code below should be enough to get you headed in the right direction, obviously make the background image url point to an image on your server.

#searchform .input-bg {
background:url(images/input.png) no-repeat left top;
height:28px;
width:92px;}

#searchform input {
background:none;
border:none;
height:22px;
padding:3px 3px 3px 6px;
width:83px;}

<form id="searchform" action="#">
<div class="input-bg">
<input type="text" value="search" /></div>
<input id="searchsubmit" type="submit" value="Search" />
</form>

Edit: I used a drupal tutorial I found on styling the submit button to create an all css submit button that doesn’t add a bunch of weird xy coordinates in the url after submitting like an input type=image and the button tags do(?). It basically just shifts the text out of the way and makes the text color same as background creating the illusion of a nice button. View tutorial here. That css code looked like this (below) and matches the form html above.

#searchform #searchsubmit {
border:none;
background: url(images/search.png) no-repeat left top;
cursor: pointer;
display:inline;
height:28px;
letter-spacing:100px;/*moves text out of way for ie*/
text-indent: -9999px;
width:32px;}

Crapping Turtle

I started making this in 2007 with all intentions of being on adult swim, but I only got as far as the silent cruddy looking little animation you see here.

Toy Taggers

Today I arrived home a bit early around 3:00 pm and realized as I approached my garage that it had been tagged on in red paint. The bastards must have done it some time between 9:00 am and 3:00 pm. As is usual for my alley the writing itself is terrible and it’s content is even worse. BLAZE, GSH (?), SD (or SP?) and of course 420! WTF!? Why on earth would some degenerate douche bag who goes by the alias BLAZE tag his scraggly, little toy letters on my garage and then bless it with a 420? He might as well had left a alien with the words believe written beneath it. There is no logic behind these actions. First this is in an alley nobody sees this. Second they painted it on my garage door when there’s a perfectly good fence next to my garage that actually faces people driving thru the alley, were someone to drive down the alley they will not see the tags without turning their heads. The only person that does get a nice direct look at it is me becuase I am the only one driving into my garage. Way to make my Friday and contribute to the urban landscape that is east dago (grmmble grmmble… fuxxors)

image_080
The magnificent, childlike, toy tags of BLAZE!

Food Update

My broken down ghetto eats are soon coming to an end. Sort of, the old lady doesn’t have a job and we need loot! So we may actually continue to have a freezer with just ice trays in it.

To celebrate my creativity with boneless, skinless chicken breasts I’ve decided to showcase two of my highlights in my fly by night survival cooking exploits. Please forgive my poopy cell phone pictures.

First up is the old chicken fajita torta. The idea of a torta is pretty lame but I was super hungry and needed something to eat my fajitas with. There stood some fresh bolillo rolls and the rest was history.

chicken fajita torta

Next is the chicken stew I made tonight. It was a bit on the salty side and I put too many potatos in it. But it was still delicious over rice. Good for the chilly weather.

chicken stew with rice

And of course my dessert, some Old Fitzgerald on rocks in my pimp glass.

yum

I Miss My Maple

Where in the F did my single flange maple wood plugs go. I stopped wearing them for some odd reason and now I can’t find them. My feeble brain can’t remember if I had them on in LA and left them at ConoLu’s (Find them dammit!) it’s driving me bat shit crazy. I realized they were missing the day we took off to Orlando.

I still have some olive wood double flange plugs but they’re nothing like my maples 🙁 I can’t even find maple plugs anywhere. I found maple wood plugs for barrels? It’s like maple isn’t cool anymore or something. I will find some to replace them but really hope that by the time I get new ones the old ones show up. They don’t even look like maple anymore, they are dark and oily from years of grimey lobe wear.

Please come home, I miss you.

Woody Guthrie

This video I found on youtube is stellar. What I find most amazing about it is A.) It’s Woody Guthrie, B.) it’s video of Woody and C.) they are cutting a record outdoors!!! If you watch there is a vintage dub plate machine being operated by some guy in the left corner and going into it is a microphone sitting on a mic stand in front of the van that Woody is playing out of. The fact is they were doing this in 1945, where as now I could never figure out a way to record a song in the wilderness. Surely they were in some country bumpkins front yard or back yard and the power came from the home. Either way it helps me understand that gritty sound that is Woody Guthrie, everything sounds like it’s covered in a lil’ bit of dirt (in a really good way) and this is prolly why.

Regarding my new hat

I was leaving the Burger King after spending my last two dollars and in the parking lot were two black guys staring me down. I continued to look at them while I drove past and of the guys said “THAT’S THE HAT!” I stopped and said “excuse me?” and he continued “THAT’S THAT HAT MY SAXOPHONE PLAYER USED TO WEAR!! THAT’S THAT HAT!! OH YEAH THAT’S THE HAT!!” I concurred that it was indeed a nice hat, threw him a peace sign (two fingers) and was on my way. Made me smile though, black people rule.

Ghetto Living

I arrived from Orlando with about $480.00 or so in my cheching account. My half of the rent is $525.00. So I borrowed $50.00 from my old lady to be sure I had a little extra once the rent hit. I also had $13.00 in my wallet, of which $10.00 I put into my checking account (KAH-CHING!) Leaving me with $3.00 in cash to my name as well as $3.18 in my checking account. Continue reading “Ghetto Living”

2.7 in the Heezy

Since my nerves are getting the best of me before my long flight east I decided to upgrade to WP2.7 aka Coltrane (in this muhfugga) I also upgraded the flickr plugin and everything is working fine! Not that I expected anything less but last time I updated the flickr plugin I hated the plugin for a few hours before it began doing what it is supposed to. So yeah… YAY! 2.7 is pretty bad ass.

Edit: I’ve officially give IE6 the finger forever (F-You IE6!). I am the poor bastard in charge of fixing everything for IE6 at my place of work so I sort of refuse to acknowledge it’s existence in my personal/freelance work. I will charge extra for it in a  attempt to deter clients living in the stone ages. I recently worked with a client who still had dial up and IE6! It was mind boggling once I realized I could not talk to him while he was online (no mobile phone either) It was also fun to see wordpress do it’s thing in an lowest denominator scenario, not fun really though.

New Head Pieces

Brixton makes some pretty rugged hats. I picked up a few at Emerald City in Coronado. I got two of the same hat but they are made of different fabrics. The first I swooped is the Stroll in grey wool with a Lady Guadalupe lining (Awesome… even more awesome if you like to mainline.)

Melton Wool Stroll
Melton Wool Stroll

The second hat I got is also a Stroll but it has a nice grey herringbone pattern twill (silly flyness!) The hats are very solid, even their straw fedoras are pretty hefty. I am impressed and look forward to owning many a hat by these guys.

Herringbone Stroll
Herringbone Stroll

Oh man… SNL goodness

This had me dying earlier tonight. Sometimes Andy Sandberg is just too funny. A while ago I remember seeing some death metal song about giraffes that my friend and I swore was all his doing. Today was one of those days that I woke up late and had a cup of tea with whiskey in it and ended up staying in my pajamas the entire day alternating between naps, food and drinks on the couch.