H&M

shirts – good fit

pants – too tight

CK

shirts – good fit

pants – too tight

KUHL

pants – good fit

LEVIs

pants – good fit

Zara

shirts – sleeves too tight

pants – tight

American Rag (Macy’s house brand)

pants – loose to baggy

Merona (Target house brand)

shirts – maybe if I gain 30 pounds

pants – ok I think

Old Navy

pants – crotch too tight

As much as I’m a fan of metro shelving and gorilla racks. I was curious if I could throw together some cheap wood to make shelves. This is the first design I came up with.

And here’s the first version I made:

It’s basically my version 0, but I didn’t include the supports in the middle. It seemed strong enough as I was putting it together that I opted not to use them.

I updated the design and build another one today. Some changes:

• instead of two 1×4, I use a 1×3 and a 1×4 with the edge ripped off so the it could sit flush against the 1×3.
• I used scrap 1×3 at each corner to help support the shelves. I found that too much weight was being carried by the screws, so this should move a lot of the work of holding weight from the shelves to the legs.
• I added a stabilizer to the top.

Recommended:

Big Top – pretty much perfect.

EZ’s – good options. Offers malts too.

Mighty Fine – pretty good

P Terrys – portion seems small but is still a lot of calories. good price. gave me gas last time though… cheap prices mean cheap dairy I guess.

Fuddruckers – It’s been a very long time since I’ve been, but I remember liking it.

Avoid:

Hideout – Oreo shake was blended far beyond what it should have been and lost its consistency

Mighty Cone

Alamo Drafthouse – The most disappointing shake I’ve had because it’s also one of the most expensive. It’s like drinking warm whipped cream.

Some sites that aren’t Google I found helpful:

• linuxconfig.org
• ibm.com
• Awk – A Tutorial…

And some random grep links:

• old age and treachery…
• why GNU grep is so fast

Fixing Accidental Page Zooms (FireFox + Logitech G9x)

I’ve got the Logitech G9x, and I use it with the “microgear” off so my mouse wheel spins free. Unfortunately, I also use Ctrl+click a lot to open tabs, and my free spinning mousewheel triggers the page zoom when I hit Ctrl. If you accidentally zoom all the time like me, you’d like to disable that key combination. And you can. Just go to about:config and find mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action and change it from 3 to 0
mousewheel.withcontrolkey.action = 0

Keeping New Tab Jumpstart from stealing focus

One of the “features” of New Tab JumpStart 0.5a5.4 turns out to be a major annoyance. It steals the focus from your location bar to its own tiny non-awesome bar. You can fix it with:
mlalevic.jumpstart.focus_on_search = false

The Texas Tribune has a neat Flash based map of county-by-county election turnouts. My goal for this weekend… make a Polymaps version. My version can be found here: http://crccheck.com/map/.

The data source I found for counties didn’t let me limit it to just Texas, so a lot of counties outside Texas end up getting colored. The data source for the election data is from the Texas Tribune, and the only processing I had to do with it is to change the case to make it consistent with my other data source. I guess I could have just made it case-insensitive too.

Chrome renders the map much better than FireFox. It supports the SVG title element and takes less CPU.

While there is a mechanism to sort, it requires modifying your search query and a page refresh. My script not only does all that live, but it also turns the search box into a live-search, which makes finding a particular ticket fast. To accompany all this, I also de-paginate the results so all the tickets are in one page. This could potentially cause problems, because some projects might have thousands of tickets; but that’s a problem for another day.

While I have been on a jQuery spree recently, I made sure not to use it for this Greasemonkey script. Even though there is a lot of DOM manipulation, I rely on Xpath and JavaScript 1.6 Arrays. The script is simple enough where it’s easy enough to convert to jQuery if needed.

If you use FireFox, Greasemonkey, and CodebaseHQ, Give CodebaseHQ Tickets+ a shot.

LazyAlarm is a simple alarm/timer/countdown site. You just type when you want an alarm and it does it. You can add messages, make them repeat, and change the alarm level all through natural English. And bet best part is you don’t have to endlessly click to make it do what you want, as opposed to every-alarm/timer-site-I’ve-ever-found-and-tried-to-use. It was dealing with these frustrating sites that got me to re-make my old widget for the web.

I’ve got it set up as a desktop web application myself.

There are of course a few bugs/features I haven’t gotten around to implementing:

• ’0′ (zero) should trigger a countdown, not ’0s’
• changing alarm levels and adding repeat shouldn’t reset countdowns
• some time parsing could be improved

DirectoryIndex my_awesome_project.html


which tells apache to serve my project html when looking for an index file. This is basically a very specific redirect, but you don’t have to serve any possibly sketchy 301 or 302 redirects.

Now I don’t have to guess which of the four “index.html” files I’m working on go to what.

lazyCSS.com

Right now it’s just a bare-bones site but I hope to flesh it out within the next week… month… year? One neat little feature I threw in there for this “alpha” version is that CSS properties are sorted alphabetically. If you have a vendor prefix, it ignores it. I hope to have the app remember settings between uses, automatically detect if the input is single or multi-line, and handle comments, and automatically collimate multi-line css.