(.n.b.: totally unrelated)

After a period of pretty dramatic inactivity (at least on this front) C and I have decided that we need to do more house-related projects. This will be inaugurated tomorrow by fixing the leaky pipe beneath the kitchen sink. I hope this whole rapture-is-tomorrow thing doesn’t get in the way of my domestic achievements.

This. . . didn’t last very long. We managed to settle on a smaller quantity than usual and went for it. While the expense was troubling, we were deeply relieved. Our relief lasted only until the friendly deliveryman had finished and I tried to turn to the furnace back on to a substantial quantity of disappointment. Something was catching on fire briefly, but then it was coughing disconcertingly and giving up the ghost.

In addition to our still being cold, we now had the fear that some sort of cascading failure was about to make our furnace, and by extension our basement, our home and indeed our very lives, explode and be cast swiftly into oblivion. Consequently, we called about Hazel’s extended family to deliver an, if not expert, at least more experienced opinion.

After a bit of monkeywrenching it became clear that there had been some water in the line, and that our fuel line filter would have to be replaced. The filter that was in there looked like an ostrich egg made of out mud. We weren’t even aware that there was a filter to change, although if we’d thought about it for a second it probably would have been obvious.

But even if we had thought of it, we would still have been out of luck, because if you want an effective metric by which to measure the decline of the oil furnace as a going concern I’ve got one for you: you can basically only by them online. Massive chain Ace Hardware no longer even has a supplier for them.

As for our part of the story, we were able to reach further along the extended family tree and find an expert, which is probably what should have happened in the first place but, you know, families!

Now I know that this probably (which is to say, almost certainly) means that most people who go to Wikisource are taking a Latin class, but deep down I’d like to think the world is full of people seeking the most venal and lurid pornography that antiquity has to offer.

When we first set this thing up I played around with writing the whole thing from scratch, as it’s my instinct to avoid frameworks. We got to the point where we had a roughly 75% functional framework I decided I didn’t really like working in PHP, and that we’d be better off with an install of ye olde Presse of the Wordes. After that I was inclined to leave well enough alone for a while.

But you know how things are. Inevitably we got fed up with how the thing looked, so I opened up the themes that came pre-installed in an editor and started extrapolating. Obviously I don’t know enough to say whether it’s good or bad in the grand scheme of things, but I was pretty happy with the level of obfuscation involved in dealing with WordPress code. Its classes are fairly sensible and having all the args be key = value pairs with defaults keeps the spaghetti  level pretty controllable.

Nothing, however, was available as a buffer against the worst part of any internet-oriented project: CSS. Im not sure how this became the right way to do things, but it’s really awful. Considering how miniscule its task (styling markup) is, CSS is unforgivably complex, and its inheritence model is totally broken.  It really promotes creating great masses of intractable code. I imagine I’ll go ameliorate that at some point, but the fact that I have to at all is pretty annoying.

Sour grapes aside, it was pretty fun overall, and the slightly more iconoclastic look is nice (although I can’t really take credit for any of the design decisions; I just put it together.)