Aunt Kathy and Uncle Tinker drove down from Auburn this afternoon to visit. Mom and I met them at Grammy and Granddaddy’s house and we all went out to Pizza Hut for dinner. (Dad is working a late shift in the simulator this week so he couldn’t join us.) After dinner, I talked Aunt Kathy and Granddad into a game of three-hand Cribbage. Granddad knows the game well, but it was Aunt Kathy’s first time playing. She repeatedly insisted that we were making the rules up as we went. (I’ll be sure to provide a copy next time for her benefit.)
It’s been raining so much lately that I felt inclined to wash my car again. (I made sure to vacuum the interior this time too.) Mom also made tacos for dinner (my favorite).
I added a couple days worth of pictures from China. I decided it would be best to just go ahead and get the pictures up as quickly as possible and fill in descriptions later as I backfill the journal entries for those dates. (All the entries have already been journaled in a notebook, so it’s just a matter of transcribing and editing.) I started out with just under 500 pictures and I’ve cut that down to about 400. Each picture needs to be resized (perhaps with a batch job) as well as cropped and thumbnailed (by hand). There’s still a lot left to do.
The site image browsing capabilities are live. Now I can start the process of backfilling all my pictures from China. A dedicated pictures section with galleries is planned, but for now images will appear with blog entries only.
The axe fell at Farley today. The site re-organization process has finished and the unlucky individuals were escorted off-site. As of yet, I have no idea exactly who is gone or why. I can, however, imagine what it must be like to lose a job with a company you’ve given over half your life in service to (which I’m sure will be the case for some of those affected). I’m told that most of the individuals will receive some kind of package deal worth a year or two of salary, but it still seems like a raw deal.
Progress on the site’s basic image browser functionality went well. (I’m about 95% of the way there.) I got past most of the stumbling blocks today. Images must be scaled to fit inside the DIV elements (otherwise, images extend beyond the boundaries of the DIV). Scaling the images in itself produced inconsistencies between browsers. The Mozilla and Safari browsers exhibited no apparent problems, but Internet Explorer failed to scale the image properly until the browser window was resized.
A severe thunderstorm rolled in abruptly in the late afternoon. A couple brief power failures put web development on hold until the evening. Mom was out running errands during the entire thing.
