Categories
life local uncategorized

Frisch’s Big Boy sucks

Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.

Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.

Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.

Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.

When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!

Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.

This lasted for around twenty minutes.

Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.

Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.

So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.

Categories
uncategorized

Frisch’s Big Boy sucks

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. Please leave any comments there.

Tonight, after i’d picked up Holly from her car pool in Bellbrook, we went to the Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant there on Wilmington Pike to grab a bite to eat.

Wow, was it icy out! Unfortunately, the worst ice we’d have to deal with was in their parking lot.

Have you ever seen one of those science videos explaining black holes, or gravity, by showing you a marble spinning around a drain? That’s exactly what it was like.

Their parking lot is so uneven. Iced over, it is absolute hell on earth. Naturally, there was not one speck of rock salt to be witnessed anywhere. Wet glass, indeed.

When we first pulled in, we started sliding immediately. We slid to a stop after a good 30 feet, narrowly missing other parked cars and the concrete-lined edge of the lot, which could have done a real number on my wheels and undercarriage. Mind you, i had been doing less than10mph!

Spinning my wheels was the only way to get any traction at all. But no sooner than i would start moving, but the car would start descending down the hill, sideways. We very scarcely managed to avoid hitting curbs and suchlike, but i don’t know how.

This lasted for around twenty minutes.

Did the manager come out to offer to help? Nope. Did i feel like risking life and limb to walk uphill in that unholy, slick, uphill mess of solid, wet ice to ask for help, or tell them off for not salting their Mt. Fuji-like parking lot? Well, yes, but i knew that i’d absolutely certainly slip and hit my head and kill myself at the exact moment the next motorist suffered a similar fate and ran over my still-warm corpse.

Helpfully, the drivethrough window offered employees a hilarious view, which they took in turns, laughing and pointing.

So if you ever see me at a Big Boy restaurant, especially a Frisch’s Big Boy restaurant, please shoot me in the face for it, because i declare unequivocally, right here, that my money will never again come into contact with their filthy, greasy (and very likely cockroach-infested) registers.

Categories
life local uncategorized

Robbed!

Well, it finally happened. We have been robbed. Our nice Samsung flat-panel LCD television set is now sitting in the parlour of one who never deserved it. Along with the remote. I wanna murder a mothafucka. 

Somewhere out there is a scruffy hillbilly prick basking in the warm blue glow of my bad-ass Samsung. I can’t drive around to find them, because without the car here, they’ll just waltz right back in. I know it’s somewhere in this very neighborhood, but i daren’t take my eyes off of those items which they curiously left behind, for they will surely be back for them.

They took nothing else – which actually kind of sucks, because we just know their swift but short-sighted Possession Relocation Services are going to be rendered again. Everything was in plain sight! Guitars, keyboards and recording equipment, media devices, laptops, desktops, a camera, mp3 player, tons of DVDs and CDs and games – all right there. No more. I am putting them all away, since i apparently don’t deserve to have them any more.

Incidentally, this is the second time my life-space has been robbed. Several years ago I had all my CDs and my TV set taken from me. You work your life away – blood, sweat & tears and all that – and then some rotten, moronic asshat thinks they deserve it and you don’t so they just come in and take it. I partly blame this stupid gimme-gimme society we have so proudly built for ourselves.

We need: 

  • a fucking big man-eating dog with built-in violent aggression towards intruders, 
  • a shotgun (god damn i hate that i need a gun), 
  • someplace to stash our remaining valuables, 
  • moving-away cash – fast!, and 
  • a different, less crappy goddamned city. FUCK YOU, Dayton, Ohio.

I have a real bad feeling about my short-term future.

Categories
uncategorized

Robbed!

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

Well, it finally happened. We have been robbed. Our nice Samsung flat-panel LCD television set is now sitting in the parlour of one who never deserved it. Along with the remote. I wanna murder a mothafucka.

Somewhere out there is a scruffy hillbilly prick basking in the warm blue glow of my bad-ass Samsung. I can’t drive around to find them, because without the car here, they’ll just waltz right back in. I know it’s somewhere in this very neighborhood, but i daren’t take my eyes off of those items which they curiously left behind, for they will surely be back for them.

They took nothing else – which actually kind of sucks, because we just know their swift but short-sighted Possession Relocation Services are going to be rendered again. Everything was in plain sight! Guitars, keyboards and recording equipment, media devices, laptops, desktops, a camera, mp3 player, tons of DVDs and CDs and games – all right there. No more. I am putting them all away, since i apparently don’t deserve to have them any more.

Incidentally, this is the second time my life-space has been robbed. Several years ago I had all my CDs and my TV set taken from me. You work your life away – blood, sweat & tears and all that – and then some rotten, moronic asshat thinks they deserve it and you don’t so they just come in and take it. I partly blame this stupid gimme-gimme society we have so proudly built for ourselves.

We need:

  • a fucking big man-eating dog with built-in violent aggression towards intruders,
  • a shotgun (god damn i hate that i need a gun),
  • someplace to stash our remaining valuables,
  • moving-away cash – fast!, and
  • a different, less crappy goddamned city. FUCK YOU, Dayton, Ohio.

I have a real bad feeling about my short-term future.

Categories
family friends life work

What today was like

  1. Our mice have become entirely intolerable. Sometime during the night last night, one (or more) of them have somehow managed to Indiana Jones its way onto the kitchen counter, and ate a big chunk of our bread. Seriously, wtf? This, likely, because we are now even hiding our dog’s food lately, which i’m sure is not a popular decision with our dear little Speck. I have renewed my war with the rodents with vigor and prejudice. Our landlord must rectify this. Conditions are approaching unlivable. Failure: landlord.
  2. Oops, somehow missed a credit card bill. I’m not perfect, but i don’t know how i forgot that one. Failure: mine.
  3. Vectren, our fuel provider, informed us that our incredible $700+ bill was, in fact, incorrect. Due to – ahemunderestimations, it should actually have been more than twice that. Yes – read that again. We owe $1500+ for gas used over the past year, because of underestimations. I should have been suspicious that our water was, in fact, hotter than the surface temperature on Venus, and yet our bill was never unbelievably high. In fact, they had sent out notices a few times over the past several months, requesting an inside read off of the meter, but i, being an online bill-payer, assumed they were paper bills and simply ignored them. Thankfully, we have a year to pay it off in full. Failure: mine, with a little help from Vectren (hey, they had my voice number & e-mail).
  4. Holly’s friend from work called us “idiots.” Holly, apparently for putting up with me; and me for not going out and getting a gas station job months ago (believe me, i’ve been searching, but maybe i set my sites a little too high for this crummy town). Failure: my own. Though her friend’s callousness was a little over-the-top.
  5. Holly’s student loans have come due six months earlier than expected. Failure: apparently the lender, as she was quite clear that they would be due six months after graduation. It’s of course possible there was some nefarious fine print hidden away somewhere in obscure legalese.
  6. Holly is so very exhausted and just completely strung out from all these awful stresses, which of course now also include her newly-diagnosed diabetic neuropathy (her latest round of medical testing is costing around $1200). Failure: again, mine.

Final tally? Don’t even tell me, i already know.

So you can see how i might be feeling a little crappy about myself, and about life in general lately. Things have hit critical mass, so to speak.

Oh, i didn’t mention a few ongoing issues, like the killer mold that is growing in our bedroom, from water leaking in through the windowsill. Those things weren’t specific to today.

On the positive side, i did have [what i think was] a good phone interview for a corporation i’d actually love to work for. I’m really hoping for the best, but you never know in this town. Just in case, though, i’ve also applied for a couple of menial positions. We shall see how things unfold soon enough.

Categories
uncategorized

What today was like

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

  1. Our mice have become entirely intolerable. Sometime during the night last night, one (or more) of them have somehow managed to Indiana Jones its way onto the kitchen counter, and ate a big chunk of our bread. Seriously, wtf? This, likely, because we are now even hiding our dog’s food lately, which i’m sure is not a popular decision with our dear little Speck. I have renewed my war with the rodents with vigor and prejudice. Our landlord must rectify this. Conditions are approaching unlivable. Failure: landlord.
  2. Oops, somehow missed a credit card bill. I’m not perfect, but i don’t know how i forgot that one. Failure: mine.
  3. Vectren, our fuel provider, informed us that our incredible $700+ bill was, in fact, incorrect. Due to – ahemunderestimations, it should actually have been more than twice that. Yes – read that again. We owe $1500+ for gas used over the past year, because of underestimations. I should have been suspicious that our water was, in fact, hotter than the surface temperature on Venus, and yet our bill was never unbelievably high. In fact, they had sent out notices a few times over the past several months, requesting an inside read off of the meter, but i, being an online bill-payer, assumed they were paper bills and simply ignored them. Thankfully, we have a year to pay it off in full. Failure: mine, with a little help from Vectren (hey, they had my voice number & e-mail).
  4. Holly’s friend from work called us “idiots.” Holly, apparently for putting up with me; and me for not going out and getting a gas station job months ago (believe me, i’ve been searching, but maybe i set my sites a little too high for this crummy town). Failure: my own. Though her friend’s callousness was a little over-the-top.
  5. Holly’s student loans have come due six months earlier than expected. Failure: apparently the lender, as she was quite clear that they would be due six months after graduation. It’s of course possible there was some nefarious fine print hidden away somewhere in obscure legalese.
  6. Holly is so very exhausted and just completely strung out from all these awful stresses, which of course now also include her newly-diagnosed diabetic neuropathy (her latest round of medical testing is costing around $1200). Failure: again, mine.

Final tally? Don’t even tell me, i already know.

So you can see how i might be feeling a little crappy about myself, and about life in general lately. Things have hit critical mass, so to speak.

Oh, i didn’t mention a few ongoing issues, like the killer mold that is growing in our bedroom, from water leaking in through the windowsill. Those things weren’t specific to today.

On the positive side, i did have [what i think was] a good phone interview for a corporation i’d actually love to work for. I’m really hoping for the best, but you never know in this town. Just in case, though, i’ve also applied for a couple of menial positions. We shall see how things unfold soon enough.

Categories
life local uncategorized

well, there goes that.

I haven’t talked to him yet, but i’m all but certain that my landlord just sold the house that we’re living in. The one we just moved into. The one we had our hearts set on buying. What this really means is anybody’s guess.

See, he just showed the place last week. And just today, the listing i had bookmarked is gone; in its place, a dialogue box pops up advising that it’s been “taken off the market.”

We’ll see. I really, really, really don’t want to move all over again.

Categories
internets uncategorized web design

IE6 users

I am aware of a problem with viewing this site through the narrow and unrefined lens of IE6. I have a fix for it in mind and will implement it as soon as we are done moving and settled in.

For now, why not get the juicy taste of the Twenty First Century in your mouth with a shiny new web browser? They’re Box Modelicious!

Firefox | Opera | IE7 | Safari

Categories
life uncategorized

ouch

tonight Holly was cooking and the fire alarm went off. i jumped at it to try and twist it to get it down and shut it off and my hand hit the ceiling really hard and now my thumb feels broken but i think it’s ok – there’s not much swelling, although Holly had it iced almost immediately.

it hurts like a f—er.

Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

Big Urgent Garbage Hunt

The B.U.G. hunt is on! See if you can find all the problems with my new layoutI’ve already identified the ugly 3rd-tier dropdown menu thing on the navbar at the top, but I haven’t had much time yet to test everything out. fixed Later tonight I’ll tweak it and try to get it to behave itself a little better. Please post your comments here (be sure to include your OS/browser). And thanks!

(Things are bound to be a little on the messy side for a few days while I convert this thing over to the new theme.)

EDIT: Yikes! Single posts & pages are also totally unstyled! fixed

Categories
internets web design

Know Where You Laid Each Part

One thing about PHP is that it can get pretty complicated. CSS can get complicated enough on its own, with one class referencing any element on the page, pointing here and there. But when you combine the two… you’ve got something pointing to something which points to something that’s pointing at a thing which references anything you choose. See how crazy this stuff can get?

What I’ve been doing the past couple of days is turning my CSS files into dynamic style sheets, renaming them with .php extensions and serving them up, after preprocessing, as CSS. Doing this allows me to use a thing called a sniffer which looks at the User Agent string browsers send when doing HTTP requests to servers, which allows me to see to what I’m delivering content, $Browser on $Platform (e.g., Safari browser on Mac OS X), so that I can send either PNG images or GIFs. The only real reason for doing this is just because PNGs can be semi-transparent, except that all but the very latest Internet Explorer beta have serious problems reading semi-transparency (called “alpha” transparency).

This is something of a specialty of mine. For those who know me online, my old site was one of the first wave of sites to use semi-transparent backgrounds.

Like I said, this is complicated stuff. So now I’ve got a sniffer going “if $browser equals ‘IE’ on Win, set $imgExt to ‘.gif’, otherwise set $imgExt to ‘.png'”. And then I’m making a PNG and a GIF for every background that I want to see through. Meanwhile, all three subthemes have got several places where they reference $imgFileXX.$imgExt for different backgrounds.

So I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, referencing this variable to get to that variable to get to an image file to put in an element. Up until this very moment, I was doing all this without a particularly coherent strategy. That changes. Now. Because I only just now realized that I had been rearranging things trying to come up with reasonable alternative GIF images to send to Infernal Exploiter versions less than 7, and I’ve turned around at noticed that I have left one hell of a wreck in my wake. I now have way too many unused background images (failed experiments), and have tossed the variables standing in for the filenames like so much salad, resulting in a chaotic mess for all the good browsers out there who actually know how to deal with PNG images!

Guess you’d have to be there.

So tomorrow, I’m going to sit and think and make a god damned chart, so I can have a set pattern across all subthemes (e.g., Image5 is for alternate comments, Image10 is for the post background).

As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Oh, btw, I’ve named the first three subthemes “Leather” (brown and tan spaceship interior), “Saturn” (white, black, and dark teal; very clean and high-contrast), and “transmothra 3.0” (black, smoky indigo, and blue) (this last being a bit of an homage to the final version of my very nicely done old site, thankyouverymuch).

Now that I’ve said all that… it’s probably going to be another week before this thing is actually ready enough to be unveiled. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.

Sigh.