You might have noticed the news page was a little screwed up the past couple days or so. That's because I had messed with the blogger template to try to do a non-frames site, but I found out tonight when making more non-frame pages, that if you have to load a full page everytime you click a link, more ads just pop up. That's no good. So I'll just work with the frames instead. Though I'll add some page links to every page, so that if you go directly to one, you'll be able to at least navigate to the other pages without needing the bar on the left there.

Puppies are the devil in sheep's clothing. We got one, and he's just the sweetest thing when he's sleepy. He'll lay right down on your lap and go to sleep, and look as cute as can be. Though five minutes after he wakes up, he's either already going into his biting mood, or making a mess somewhere on the carpet. He'll rocket up and down the hallway, grab at your pants legs, chew on your socks, chew on your hand, chew on your shirt, chew on your pants, chew on the chair, chew on the carpet.. etc etc. We're trying to break him from the biting, cause that's even worse than wetting and messing everywhere. He doesn't seem to acknowledge any kind of reactions though when we try to make him see that biting hurts. I read you should yelp or say "ouch!" and stop playing, and look at him so he'll know he did wrong. But when I move my hands away, he just starts jumping up on me thinking I'm playing, and most times ignores the yelping completely. Sometimes I just leave the room (partly cause I read you should after a point, and also cause I get tired of being chomped). But depending on how soon I come back, if he's still in his playful mood, he'll keep right on biting.

Nevertheless, it's hard not to love him after he wears himself out. I'm just not sure yet if we'll keep him, cause my folks are getting tired of the mess and the enormous amount of energy he has (which involves biting to play). I hope he'll settle down eventually, or at least not bite so much, cause it would be nice to keep him. He's the first real pet we've had since we had our lab put to sleep a couple years ago. We have a bird, but he just squawks a lot and flutters around. It's nice to have a semi-intelligent animal trotting around.

I bet I can put a picture. let me see.

posted at 1:28 AM

Wee, no more cold. I probably won't catch another for say, oh, a year or so. Though having said that, I probably just jinxed myself.

If you wanna see the no-frames version of the main page I've whipped together, check out https://zeltar.tripod.com/newmain.htm

None of the buttons work, but it's just to get an idea. It looks kind of bare, so I may do something with it. But it uses a template, so that I can use the main border for all the other pages without doing all the extra work. The only thing I'll have to work out is how I'm going to add the web log into one of the pages, but I think I've got that figured out. At some point I'll probably switch the entire site over at once to the different format. The reason is because when someone goes directly to one of the pages, they don't get the navigation bar or anything. I could put links on each page, but that's not the same. So we'll see how this works out.

I'll try to whip up a page for the Multi-Boot Rebooter while I'm at it.

I've been in a Half-Life mood lately. Been playing that multiplayer, along with Team Fortress. They're fun, as long as the cheaters stay away. I mean come on, how does a shotgun blast kill you, when it's not a headshot, not a super-shot, and the person wasn't even close to you? It happened several times, too. Until I changed servers, that is. And in the last server I played on, I got kicked off as the levels switched, because apparently being in second place when I wasn't a member of their little group was a bad thing. hehe.

Well I'm gonna hit the sack. Let me know what you think of the newer design. Or throw any suggestions my way if you've got'em.
posted at 2:54 AM

Welp, it finally happened. After over a year without being sick, those evil little germs finally got me. It's not that bad of a cold, but all colds suck, and are annoying.

Anyone else use Yahoo Messenger? Anyone else hate how it pops up the message windows, with no option to turn it off? I know you can make them appear minimized, but I hate that too. I like ICQ, cause it just flashes an icon when you have a message. Well I've been trying to write a program to hook into Yahoo, hide the windows, and flash an icon in the tray. I made the hook, can hide the windows, but can't make them stay hidden. As soon as someone types soemthing, it comes back up. I can always rehide it automatically, but it pops up for a split second, which is annoying. I'm supposed to be able to prevent the window from reappearing at all, but it won't work. I'll keep tinkering though. If I can make it work like I want, it'll come in really handy.

Anyone hate the frames on this page? I've been playing around with a redesign, using a template so that all the pages will still have the buttons available like they are now. I might put up a different page design to see how I like it, so let me know what you think if you see one.

And I wanted to apologize for all the ads that seem to pop up at times. Not only do you get the Tripod ad, but usually an ad or two from the cjb place that redirects the page. You can always go directly to zeltar.tripod.com, but whenever I get a new web host, that link won't be very useful. Though at this rate that won't happen anytime soon, so do whatever suits your fancy.

I guess I might try to go to bed now and see if I can sleep tonight.
posted at 3:21 AM

Hope everyone had a fun and scary Halloween!

I've basically finished the Multi-Boot Rebooter, I think. I'll just call it MBR for short. And no, I didn't intentionally steal that acronym, for those of you who know what I'm talking about. ;) Anyway, I added some safeguards to the program to hopefully not screw up the boot.ini file if something goes wrong. And had to add the check for it to exit if it couldn't actually find the file. I tried to lower the amount of memory it takes (currently about 1.5 megs), but everything I tried ended up the same. It doesn't need all that memory for what little it does, but that's what happens when you compile with MSVC++. It's a handy little app though none the less, I use it, so maybe someone else will find it useful as well. I'll put a page up for it sometime.

You'd think Microsoft would have made an edit control to allow you to change the background text color for individual characters. I thought about making my own IRC client for fun, but I think most of the effort would be involved in making my own control just to display the output. I've messed with the IRC protocol for a while now, so doing that part of it would be fairly easy. I wonder how easy it'd be to use an HTML control instead to display the output...

posted at 12:42 AM