web-goddess

Month: May 2008

  • Detention

    Man. Stuff like this is why I get anxious every time we visit the States. The Snook already suffers the indignity of frequent “random” bag searches and being fingerprinted upon arrival (as all Australians do). I can just see some jerkass immigration official deciding he visits too often and throwing him in jail.

  • RENT 10th Anniversary

    RENT 10th Anniversary performance of “La Vie Boheme” by the original Broadway cast. Awesome. (Link courtesy of Kel.)

  • Mario is a menace.

    Mario is a menace. (Link courtesy of Tim.)

  • Exercise

    Exercise. We’re less than 72 hours from the half-marathon, and my lungs still aren’t up to 100%. Thanks to Dr. Emily, I’m trying out a ventilator that seems to be helping though. I’m certainly coughing a bit less. I went out for a short (4.5km) run Tuesday morning, and I’ve done a couple of Wii Fit workouts this week as well. (I unlocked Super Hula-Hoop, and OH MY GOODNESS that gets the heart pumping! I guarantee you that right now some chubby nerd is working out with this thing in his basement, and six months from now he’s going to be fifty pounds lighter and Nintendo will anoint him as the next Jared.) Anyway, I’ve got my number and timing chip for the race, and Project Hydration begins today. I’m going to do my best.

  • Joomla 1.5 Title Tags

    Joomla 1.5 Title Tags
    Since it took me the better part of an afternoon to figure this out, I’m going to immortalize it here for future Googlers. You see, there’s no nice way in Joomla 1.5 to customize the head title tags of each page. (According to this site it was meant to be included – they even have a screen shot! – but somehow the Joomla Powers That Be decided to kill it.) There are numerous third-party extensions that can allow you to set custom titles, but you have to specify the title on every single page. All I wanted was to have the name of the actual website appear before the page title without hacking the Joomla core. (Joomla generates the page title on the fly. Yes, you can modify the script that generates it, but on this particular project we’re trying to leave the core untouched so future upgrades don’t break it.) So finally, after several hours, I chanced upon this site which talks about modifying the header to remove unnecessary javascript files. “A-HA!” I thought. “This is the answer!” So here you go:

    <head>
<?php
$headerstuff = $this->getHeadData();
$headerstuff['title'] = "My Site Name - " .
                        $headerstuff['title'];
$this->setHeadData($headerstuff);
?>
<jdoc:include type="head" />

  • Younger than McCain

    Things Younger Than John McCain. My favorites are Alaska and the polio vaccine. (Link courtesy of PCJM.)

  • Flight of the Conchords

    Flight of the Conchords finally premiered in Australia, and we very much enjoyed it. Snookums made me pause it at one point just so he could verify that, yes, the New Zealand consulate is located in the same building as “All Asian Massage.”

  • Queen of Fashion

    Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution
    I just finished this fascinating book last night. It makes for an interesting companion-piece to the Antonia Fraser biography I read a few years ago (and that the recent movie was based on). The central thesis is pretty much that Marie Antoinette’s obsession with fashion was a calculated political maneuver to gain the power and influence she wasn’t able to get through the usual means (i.e. her relationship with the King and the production of royal heirs). There’s also quite a lot of discussion about the Queen’s more “shocking” costumes, such as her appropriation of mens’ riding wear and the loose peasant-style dresses she and her friends wore at the Petit Trianon. (Somehow both of those looks fed into the rumours of lesbian debauchery that continually plagued her.) It’s not the usual view of her as a pouf-obsessed idiot. I loved the details about the development of the French fashion industry, and it was fascinating to see how most of the country were falling over themselves to imitate her even as they were calling for her head. And I’d love to read a biography of this Rose Bertin woman! My only complaint about the book is a small one: the glossy colour plates in the middle seem to be misnumbered. Towards the end, a lot of the text references seemed to point to the wrong one. It’s a small quibble about an otherwise interesting read.

  • Optus has the iPhone

    Optus has the iPhone too. Multiple carriers in Australia!

  • Official Race Time

    “Official” Race Time… Not.
    My phone beeped at 6:30am this morning. It turned out to be my “official” race results from the Mother’s Day Classic. According to the SMS, my time was 56:00. WRONG. Check out the iPod data. I started timing it when I actually crossed the start line (and the electronic mats). I actually forgot to hit stop on it til after I’d removed my timing chip, so my actual race time was probably a minute less than that. There’s no way my chip time was greater than what the iPod recorded. (Even if its distance was miscalibrated, you can’t argue with time.) So I’m a little annoyed with their accuracy. I’m guessing that they SMSed the clock time when I passed the finish line without adjusting for the time it took us to get to the start.