When it rains it pours. Fresh for the new month is the November update to the Ormsby House Photo Gallery. It’s a great feeling to actually be caught up again!

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Taking care of baby makes for very little free time. Taking care of Mommy during the Christmas shopping season makes for even less. But I was able to set aside enough time to add some info and photos of Jack’s Bar and the old demolished Capitol Motel to my Ghosts of Carson City page. It’s not much, but it feels good to be able to add to the site every now and then.

I have this grand dream of putting up all kinds of photos and travel information on this site. Just give me ten or fifteen years. I’ll get there.

Something fresh and new for you on Thanksgiving: the October update to the Ormsby House Photo Gallery. It’s the continuing story of the longest casino remodel in history. In this edition? They build! They destroy! They take 30 days to do five days worth of work! It’s thrilling!

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Check it out if you darecare.

If you have a Movable Type blog (even one you don’t use), it needs to be patched. It seems that there’s a file in there, mt-send-entry.cgi, that can be used by spammers as an open relay. Whoopsie! Best thing is to just delete the file. It’s supposed to be used to let readers “E-mail this page to a friend”, and how many people use that functionality on their blog? Shred it.

More. More. More.

The trend of public CSS reworkings of popular sites continues. This time the target is Slashdot, online roost for thousands of geeks. Slashdot is currently mashed together with old-school HTML tricks, and could possibly be considered HTML 3.2, even though it doesn’t validate as such. So in this week’s issue of A List Apart, Daniel M. Frommelt took up the challenge and redesigned Slashdot’s homepage with XHTML and CSS. The results are identical, and Slashdot readers mostly agree that it would be good if /. itself made the switch.

Also in this week’s ALA there is an article about creating graphical headers with JavaScript. It’s based on a technique by Peter-Paul Koch, but the man is none too happy about what Christian Heilmann did with his code (“butcher” is a word that pops up a couple of times). Read PPK’s rebuttal of the article.

Since it’s the weekend anyway, might as well waste your time looking at the Worst Album Covers Ever. Stone has picked the worst of the worst (Parts one and two) and BizarreRecords.com is your clearinghouse for the whole collection.

I found a couple of rockin’ tutorials today:

How to install Apache on Windows

How to install PHP on Windows

How to install MySQL on Windows

Mmmm. Tasty. Now I can start translating this site into PHP while still using my XP as a development server.

I’m sitting at the computer, with the baby on a pillow on my lap. His head is in the crook of my right elbow. My right hand is using the mouse; my left hand is holding a bottle. So what happens when I need to type? Why, I whip out the Windows On-Screen Keyboard, of course! One of the suite of accessibilty utilities that comes included in Windows, it pops up a little keyboard in the corner of the screen. Then all you have to do is click on the letters with your mouse. It takes a hell of a lot longer than the usual hunt ’n peck, but it gets the job done. Especially if you only have one free hand.

Just one of the little details that have to be worked out when you’re Mr. Mom by day.

Today is National GIS Day, a day to gather together and celebrate the wonders of Geographic Information Systems.

Apparently enough people use GIS here at my office to make this a big deal.

Okay, here’s a tip I need to remember. How to use mod_rewrite to redirect any request for an .asp page to its .html equivalent.

RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.+)\.asp$ $1.html [R=301,L]

This will come in so handy when I finally move my site over to PHP and Apache.