- XKCD Comic, Grownups.

Earlier this week The Second Quarter returned from Thailand (where I’m sure he had a fabulous time with the lady-men and ping pong balls), and so delighted was The Square (and posse) with his return, we decorated his room for him.

After a while of doing this:

We got this:

In short, it was brilliant. His room is quite big, and we filled it with over 500 coloured balloons, pink sequined streamers, toilet paper, a pink “Welcome Home” sign (with added lady-men illustrations), one blown up condom, and a cpr training doll with a peacock feather mask. It was so full that the balloons came up past our knees. PAST. OUR. KNEES. There was many, many balloons.

It took a whole afternoon, and eight adults. There was much balloon madness to be had:

I couldn’t wait for The Second Quarter to come home, but alas, I was busy and couldn’t be around when he got back to see his reaction. Apparently he was in shock and it took a good few seconds for comprehension to dawn on him. He said that it reminded him of the XKCD Comic, Grownups (which is what it reminded me of, too. But Balloons instead of Playpen Balls. It was ridiculous amounts of fun, really, it was.

I especially love the XKCD quote (in the title) now, because as adults we ARE in a position where we able to do such silly things as fill a room with happy rubbery goodness. We are in a position where we are able to do something just because it’d be hilarious, and cause moments of joy (and there was much joy to be had walking with balloons floating about your knees). I’m glad I’m friends with such crazy, crazy people, who are totally willing to fill a room with 500+ balloons. So much Square <3! :)

I went down to the mall yesterday, and low and behold there are signs where previously, there were none.

After calming down some (I got myself worked up around a sexism/discrimination theory) I guessed street art. Most of you guessed (or were amused by) misplaced toilet signage. One of you even had a weird muslim seperatist theory. In the end we were all wrong. It’s actually:

Parking for seniors. Not that you’d know based on the signage. I don’t think that symbol in anyway says “Seniors”. Alas, it’s just another example of the local council being ridiculous. Perhaps they thought it would be politically incorrect to age the symbol people to actually signify age.

Just quietly, I still prefer the misplaced toilet meaning. Hah! :)

Autumn is most definitely here. There is a street Quinn and I walk up to get to the local park that has completely exploded in colour. All the trees have either turned super bright yellow, or are a fantastic mix of red and oranges:

It’s super cold at the moment (even when the sky is super blue) and going outside means multiple layers, but I love ironic the colour change – all the trees almost look like they are on fire. It’s brilliant, really.

I’ve been working on a custom wordpress theme as part of a much belated birthday present, and one of the requests was to have the fancy font that I’d used for all the headers to be used dynamically for the post titles. Usually all the fancy titles and stuff that you see on sites are actually static images, as you can’t rely on the users machine to have the fancy font installed. So, generally, you’re limited to maybe a handful of fonts. I wasn’t so keen on making an image everytime the author wanted to make a post so I did some hunting around.

I came across A List Apart‘s DTR Article by Stewart Rosenberger. You upload your fancy font to the server and it uses a small php script to make a temporary image which is used instead of the text. I also found an adapted version called P+C DTR, which used PHP and CSS to do the same thing.

Win:

Fail:

But, there were a few problems. The P+C DTR files had been removed, and I wanted a little more functionality than what the ALA’s DTR offered. So I did what any normal person and scoured the internet to find a decent copy of the files. What I found was example 1.6.1. for P+C DTR. You can find a zipped version here.

Unzip the file, and upload the whole thing to your web server, and test the example page. If you don’t get the pretty pictures check with your host, you’ll need a decent version of PHP (I’m sure this script is old school, so it should work okay with anything 3.0 and up. I haven’t tested it, so don’t quote me. It works fine with 5.0). You will also need the GD Library with PHP support installed on your server. If you don’t know what that means, talk to your Host and get them to figure out it for you.

Once the example pretty pictures are up and running, follow the README instructions and upload your font file to the dtr folder, alter the heading.css as you see fit, and add the php calls to the top and bottom and link the style sheet. It really is as easy as it sounds.

The problem I had was integrating it with WordPress. Three days of trying various combinations and banging my head against the wall. It point blank refused to work and by the end of it I was ready the gouge out my own eye, so painful was this DTR problem. What worked in the very pretty example did NOT work when I tried to do the same within the WordPress templates.

In the end I asked the advice of the brilliant Jennifer from InkSplash Designs who had successfully used DTR on Shamelessly Sassy and KDaly Photography and she said she’d had the same frustrating issues I had! But she did have some very clever tricks to get it working. Here’s what to do:

1. Install the /dtr folder in the root directory. So it should be in the same directory as the /wp-admin, /wp-content, /wp-includes folders, etc. (I’m fairly sure this is the source of all those frustrating issues! I’d installed it in the template folder)

2. In the theme files, put this:

In header.php, at the very very top, before the doctype: <**? php include 'dtr/dtr.php'; ?>

And for the stylesheet (I put this before the wp_head function): <**link href="/dtr/headings.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

Then at the bottom of footer.php, after the html tag: <**?php ob_end_flush(); ?>

(You’ll need to remove the **’s).

Anyway, now it works like it’s meant to! Hurrah – I’m so glad. I figured I’d post about it here, so that no one else has to scour the internet and come up empty handed!

The Third Quarter had this great idea, and as such a bunch of us were invited over to The Square flat to pizza make. There were nine of us who made, ate, and danced around with at least a pizza and a half each.

There was ALOT of pizza. It was pizza bedlam!

We had a billion different types of cheeses, sauces for the top, and sauces for the bottom a TRILLION different toppings (which worked out good for snacking too. There was alot of ‘some for the pizza, some for me’ going on).

In the end there was SO much pizza. We managed to stuff ourselves full, trying pieces of each others pizza. We were a pretty varied bunch too, so there was vegetarian ones, and no red meat ones, and ones that were different flavours on each half, and ones that were minimalistic, and ones that had every possible topping on it, and ones with weird topping combinations . . .

It was a brilliant pizza night. Just another reason why I <3 The Square so :)

- Bob Hayes, on work.

Just another reason why working here is Teh Awesome.