July 16, 2020 10:01 PM
Fixing my ascii art chick
Since coming back from my vacation, I've been trying to limit my exposure to other people. I realized that in my whole life I don't think I've gone two days without interacting with someone else in person. So this is weird. I'm forcing myself to stay at home except for going on runs outside (I need fresh air and exercise), and I don't even do that every day. So far this is working out okay. Each night, I write down a TODO list of things I want to accomplish the next day. I almost never accomplish all the things, but hey, I'm staying busy.
Today I told myself I was going to figure out how to include images in the blog entries occasionally. But then I looked at my site on mobile, and I turned my phone sideways. And you know what I noticed? The little ascii art chick on the front page was all janky looking. But it only happened when I turned my phone sideways. Looked perfectly normal with the phone in the vertical position. I tried to reproduce this in my Chromebook and no matter how I resized the window, it didn't happen. Also, trying to "debug" an issue on a phone is a pain in the butt.
But, somehow I was able to fix it. First I tried Googling, and found some promising looking StackOverflow questions about people having trouble with monospace fonts on mobile, but it turns out those people wanted to use box glyphs and my ascii art is well, ascii. So I zoomed in on the ascii art chick on my phone and highlighted the area. The spaces in front of certain lines were narrower than others. Why? Who the heck knows. I did the same thing on my computer and inspected the space element with the dev tools. I inspected other space elements. And I realized some spaces were inside <span>s and others weren't. So I made it so all the characters in the ascii art section were surrounded by <span>s, and it fixed it!
- <pre>
- <span class="yellow">.--.
+ <pre><span class="yellow">
+ .--.
; </span><span class="lightblue">@</span><span class="yellow">\
- ; :</span><span class="orange">></span>
- <span class="white">/\/\/\/\
+ ; :</span><span class="orange">></span><span class="white">
+ /\/\/\/\
\ /
'----'</span>
</pre>
Yeah, it was kind of dumb. I spent like an hour and a half looking at this. And I never got around to incorporating images in this post. Which would have been helpful. Oh well. Next time.
July 12, 2020 11:55 AM
End of Vacation
It's Sunday, which means we're nearing the end of my vacation. I visited family, but overall it was a pretty chill week, and more like a staycation than a vacation. I think it was a successful week, though! I managed to do a decent amount of things.
- Ate lobster AND crab legs
- Finished stitching my cross stitch
- Started playing Rakuen
- Made some updates to this site
- Had a family get-together
- Made Pad Thai with my mom and sister
- Played board games
- Read a bunch of articles on personal development
- Started reading Awaken the Giant Within
- Exercised
- Did a 6 mile hike and found some geocaches along the way
- Watched Hamilton
- Did a ropes course
- Celebrated a birthday
- Bought a new journal
- Reorganized my apartment a little
And plenty of other things that I just don't feel like mentioning.
July 8, 2020 12:04 PM
Hashtags
I added hashtags to my blog! I have a lot of things I want to add to this blog and being able to link each entry with a tag seemed like one of the easier things to knock out. Right now they just appear at the bottom of each entry, but eventually I'll link-ify them and display all the tags somewhere on the page.
July 6, 2020 7:36 PM
15 years in the making
When I was about 12 years old (okay, I don't really remember how old I was since it was so long ago) I received a cross stitch kit from my aunt (at least I think that's who gave it to me) for my birthday (once again, maybe it wasn't my birthday. maybe it was Christmas, who knows). But anyway, it was a long time ago, and I had never done cross stitch before. Turns out 12 year old self did not have the attention capacity to do a cross stitch. This was also a kind of complicated cross stitch. Definitely not a my-first-cross-stitch cross stitch. It said WELCOME with a bunch of flowers around it. I think I got the WELCOME part done at 12 years old.
X X X XXX X XX XX X X XXX X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X XXX X X X X X X X XXX X X X X X X X X X X X X X X XXX XXX XX XX X X X XXX A very very simplistic picture of what I was able to do at 12 years old. The actual cross stitch has more crosses than this.
At some point, I got bored, and the cross stitch kit sat in storage. Years later I would take it out and add more cross stitches to it. But I still didn't get very far. I did this again years later. And again. I probably had 4 or 5 attempts to actually finish the dumb thing. But I always got bored. So bored. My eyes would glaze over the crosses and I couldn't focus...
Until now! Because staying at home this much means I now have time to finish all the things that I've started years ago. And this cross stitch is the oldest of those things, so I was determined to get this done. And somehow, I've finally been able to get into the right mindset. And it's done. I FINALLY FINISHED MY CROSS STITCH.
15 years in the making.
Next up, cleaning it, ironing it, mounting it, framing it, and putting it on a nice spot on my wall.
July 5, 2020 9:39 AM
Vacation
I'm on vacation! I've been super super busy at work lately, so I'm taking a much needed break before work gets even busier than before. It's fourth of July weekend, which means seafood is on sale. I had lobster two days ago and crab legs yesterday, so I am all shellfished out.
--------------------- ----------------------------------. |` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------' |` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------' |` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------' |` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------' |` . ` . ` . ` . ` . `|----------------------------------' |` ` ` ` ` `|----------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' '--------------------------------------------------------' `--------------------------------------------------------' I made an ascii art flag! The dimensions might be off, but I have the right number of stars and stripes! Also, this was a pain in the butt to color.
During this vacation, I'm just trying to relax and work on some fun little projects. I'm very close to finishing a cross stitch I started over 15 years ago (!!) and I've even gone back to editing some code for my Teochew website. So hey, you might be seeing an update sometime soon.
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