Its Trouble...

Sunday, January 18, 2015

Saturday, January 17, 2015

My wife and I are at the grocery store. She just walked up to the ginger inbetween two older gentlemen looking for various other vegetables and things. One gentlemen almost immediately asks here for advice on how to pick good ginger. I can only presume he felt comfortable/secure in asking her because she is Chinese American. He thanked her and moved on with his fine pick of ginger.

Then immediately, the other gentlemen engaged her in a conversation about her heritage, Chinese language, etc. I didn't interfere because it was more adorable than anything.

We finally broke away with our fine pick of ginger.

Friday, January 16, 2015

It finally happened

Its Trouble blog is 13 years old. It had one major facelift in 2002, just before Blogger.com's buyout by Google (2003). Its Trouble has had a subtle renaming; I had to remove the apostrophe in "It's" because it was bad for linking. As a result, the name looks fine, but has a drastic typo that should bug me more than it really does.

The 2002 facelift for Its Trouble was created by Jennifer Szabo, who has since renounced all things webdesign. The design of pretty cool for its time. It was certainly unique, with the curled parchment theme. I had my website loaded up with services, custom pages, and moderately useful functionality. Everything worked nicely. However, as time went on, stuff stopped working as old services went away and external websites died off. For example, there are a lot of really good comments on my early posts which are lost due to the original comment service going away. I was not able to maintain the overall website because Google shutdown FTP access for blogspot accounts, only allowing me to edit my home page. As a result, I have several dead pages which I will never be able to change or remove. Images, services, and weblinks stopped working on these pages many years ago. Its Trouble has been on a slow decline in terms of presentation, all the while having new content with 1000+ posts.

Well, I finally bit the bullet. I embraced the new Blogger.com stuff and updated my website with the biggest facelift in over a decade. The problem with Blogger.com is that everything is canned. You have only so many layout styles, and only so many templates, and only so many useful widgets. It is way more limited than Wordpress.

Even still, the new design is cleaner. There's noting broken. Its functionality is limited to the bare basics allowed by Blogger.com. I was able to keep a similar color scheme and background image as before. It's not half bad. I'm fairly happy with the result, if not a little disappointed that I cannot do much more.

Use in good health!

Sunday, January 11, 2015

How to make a complimentary angle...

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Thursday, January 08, 2015

Outside temperature right now #potatoquality #cold

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Monday, December 22, 2014

So, this place.

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You haven't seen everything until you've seen an octopus with tentacle high socks

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Friday, December 19, 2014

Awesome hall of shame devices - Interesting link

There's a cool article with ten hall of shame automotive devices that are/were supposed to do something or another to improve your vehicle's gas mileage, performance, and even ectoplasm removal (because I guess ghosts are slowing your car down؟). Popular Mechanic Gas Saving Gadgets (backup link) covers it all. My favorite is the magnets used to "straighten" fuel molecules to improve ignition efficiency. (If anything, the magnets would add more weight to your car, thus reducing fuel efficiency).