i drove out the day before xmas eve right after work, and went to my best friend's house. his parents are like my adopted 3rd set, and i always spend xmas eve with them. rather than making the drive all the way out to their new place (which takes about 6, 6 1/2 hours without traffic), i went to philly to go meet ryan, who was staying at his friend jane's house in center city. the drive there was fairly uneventful, except for the otherworldly radio reception i was getting. i don't know if it was atmospheric conditions or alien visitors, but i was getting crazy am reception on the drive out. i was about midway across pa, and picking up broadcasts from boston, nyc, chicago, cleveland, and d.c. i even got to listen to most of the exciting tie between the rangers and devils.
we went out for a bit in philly that night, hit a few bars, and then went back to jane's and passed out.
christmas eve we drove to ryan's folks' house, and started doing some christmas-y stuff. ran out to the liquor store and picked up some presents as well as supplies for that evening, and ryan even managed to do all of his shopping for xmas presents at 5 p.m. at the eckerd. you'd be amazed at the sorts of things you can find there when you're a bit desparate. ryan's brother showed up a short while later, and we started taking our xmas pictures, which every year involves some props, and usually the dog. this year we had some bum polaroid film, so we had to make do with triplets of izone pictures, instead of just one of the 600 variety. too bad, because we had some really good ones. we all wore cloth napkins on our heads (sorta like the flying nun) (the dog included) and posed with various gifts for baby jesus; an apple, a box of godiva truffles, what have you... we also had a really good one of us posing by the *ahem* posed wooden reindeer. ryan and i take great delight in posing them this way every time we're at his house over xmas. you know the ones, thin wooden cutouts, and one has their head down. you can sorta make the one with his head up straight mount the other one, and it's extremely funny. too bad we weren't the first to think of it, or at least the most famous to think of it.
xmas day my plans went all to hell. the nor'easter prevented me from making it to see either my mom or my dad, so i just hung out at ryan's house all day, watching "a christmas story" (and researching the actor from it who became a porn star) at least 7 times during the marathon, eating prime rib, and in general being lazy.
the drive back to pgh was similarly uneventful, although when i was flipping across the dial i did come across this nutjob on a "rush limbaugh" station... his comments were so amazingly sexist that i wasn't quite sure what to do; talking about his wife's "job" as cooking and cleaning, and how he doesn't want her to have any sort of free time or anything. my guess is they put him on to make rush seem that much more moderate in comparison.
anyway, got a couple of pretty cool presents. although i didn't see my mom, she had mailed me my present a few weeks ago, some new pedals for my soon-to-be cross bike (which reminds me, i really need to give paul some benjamins for that). along with that, the slf got me this awesome windbreaker, which will come in quite handy for the bike rides on the chillier spring mornings.
so, the stress of the holidays is (mostly) over, but i still have a bunch of work to do on the project i'm trying to finish before the deadline. i'm happy that i get to redo such a highly visible site using all the hot new xhtml/css web standards and everything, but it is quite an undertaking. there's tons of legacy content in the db, and time is just so short that i don't know if i'm going to get to it all. very few of the pages validate (if any), but we're still much closer to a compliant site. there are just so many issues to be addressed; here are some of my fun problems of the moment:
--problems with character encoding (pages that are "utf-8" encoded can't handle "glyphs", which are special characters which have a character for them, instead of using an html equavalent; i.e. instead of ™). i can change the encoding from "utf-8" to "charset=iso-8859-1", but that causes pages to barf in the validator since they're being encoded utf-8 in .nizzle by default. it also throws a monkey wrench in all the product and category detail pages, which are using xml/xslt transformations (with the xml data being utf-8). the "right" thing to do would be to re-code these pages in .nizzle, but i just don't have the time right now. actually, the Really Right Thing(™) would be to expose category and product data as a web service (which was my original intent when we redesigned last year, except i used a VB COM object to create an xml string using the msxml4 dom object, which works fine, but it's clunky and does not easily lend itself to having that data reused by other sites/applications). (a little note: i think i might have found the answer while looking for relevant links for this post... i can set a global attribute for output response encoding, as shown here. set the encoding to iso-8859-1 in the web.config, and that should solve much of my problems.
--font size. i'm trying to stay away from hardcoded font sizes, and using named base fonts and just percentages in my stylesheets. one problem so far with that is the store locator page... it uses some funky mapquest webservice-esque process to get its results back, which would be fine except that it puts some html comments in the top few lines of the page, which means that my <!DOCTYPE> tag is not the first line in the html, which causes weird font size problems in ie, but not netscape/mozilla or opera.
so, i worked for about 7 hours today (as did amy, bless her heart), and i figure i'll be back in the office tomorrow, too. thursday (new year's day) the office is off, and we launch wednesday, and if all goes well i have a feeling i'll be "sick" friday.
