I haven’t been able to blog about this, since I have some co-workers that read my blog, but I got a promotion today that I’ve been working on for a while. I’m now manager of a group of web designers/developers. Right now, I have two people under me, but I will soon have three. I’m still maintaining a lot of my old responsibilities on my old team, but I’ll be training someone else to be able to cover them as well, so my team shouldn’t suffer much because of it.

I’ll start having meetings real soon here to figure out exactly what this is going to look like and what exactly my new job will entail. I may have some stories in the coming week or two about that.

In other news, our department presentation for the company meeting was turned into a Renaissance play involving a knight, a dragon, and some minstrels. I’m in charge of costumes. At this time, I’m not exactly sure how that happened.

Given my recent luck with all things computer-related, you might expect that this is a post about me getting a computer virus, but it is actually about me getting a regular sickness-causing virus. I’ve been sick since the Friday before last with some mystery virus that has all but knocked me on my ass. I’m way, way tired, no matter how much sleep I get, and I get these nasty headaches sporadically throughout the day. I have a swollen throat from time to time as well. I saw a doctor about it, but he was pretty confident it was just a run-of-the-mill virus that I would just have to wait out. So if you’re wondering why I’ve been unresponsive or M.I.A. lately, that’s why: I’m spending my spare moments sitting or lying down.

Complicating matters is the number of important meetings I’ve been having at work. For instance, I would have come home this afternoon, but I had two meetings with senior management and one with my manager and senior team to discuss coaching redistribution. All together, I spent four hours in meetings today. And that’s not bad—I’m actually getting a lot of important stuff accomplished in these meetings—it just makes it harder to take time off when I need it.

So I will be constructing a bot to answer general questions and give unsolicited opinions while I am away from work. This bot will be programmed with over 2,000 quotes from Soren Kierkegaard, and will be able to pick a location to go to lunch as well as decipher XML server responses. The bot will have complex artificial intelligence to detect when others are talking about fantasy sports, and will be programmed to put on headphones in those situations and listen to Sigur Rós or Explosions in the Sky.

Man oh man, I have a headache.

I’ve opened up comments on my pages (including my poetry and faith pages).

So, if you didn’t see it, some Turkish hackers got to my site. What they did is write a bot that would attempt to hack every WordPress site it found, so it hit me, Janelle, who unfortunately lost her custom theme, and Lauren, along with thousands of others. I’ll have to work on redesigning Janelle’s, since I don’t have a copy of it on my current computer.

I am a genius. They said it couldn’t be done, but here it is.

At work, we occasionally have to deal with exceptionally long item names in drop-down menus. We came up with a trick to control the width of the initial box, but the drop-down expanded to normal, bloated size when clicked. We’ve been searching frantically for some way to wrap long item names in select boxes, but kept hitting a wall.

Well, with some outside-of-the-box thinking, I came up with a solution. It functions just like a select box, but it’s a scrolling div full of a long set of radio buttons. Here’s an example:

Here’s a link to the trick in action.

Looks like a select box, but it’s actually much more complicated. Try it out. Also, it’s set up to work with tableless forms, so you’re encouraged to use those.

Anyway, here’s the code for the above:

CSS

#programs_container {
  float: left;
}
#programs {
  position: absolute;
  width: 300px;
  padding: 2px;
  border: 1px solid #7F9DB9;
  background-color: #FFF;
}
#programs div {
  margin: 0px;
  font-weight: bold;
}
#programs div div {
  float: right;
}
#programslist {
  display:none;
  height: 200px;
  overflow: auto;
}
#programslist input {
  float: none;
  margin: 0px 10px;
}
#programslist label {
  display: block;
  float: none;
  margin: 0px;
  padding-left: 37px;
  text-indent: -37px;
  text-align: left;
  font-weight: normal;
}
#programslist label:hover {
  background: #C1E2F0;
}

JavaScript

function toggle(obj_id)
{
  var obj = document.getElementById(obj_id);
  obj.style.display = (obj.style.display == 'block') ? 'none' : 'block';
}
function selectProgram(program_id)
{
  var program = document.getElementById(program_id);
  program.checked = true;
  document.getElementById('selectedProgram').innerHTML = program.value;
  document.getElementById('programslist').style.display = 'none';
}

HTML

<div id="programs_container">
<div id="programs">
  <div onclick="toggle('programslist');"><div>&darr;</div> <span id="selectedProgram">Select a program</span></div>
  <div id="programslist">
    <p><strong>Group 1</strong></p>
    <label onclick="selectProgram('program1');"><input type="radio" name="program" id="program1" value="Program 1" /> Program 1</label>
    <label onclick="selectProgram('program2');"><input type="radio" name="program" id="program2" value="Program 2" /> Program 2</label>
  </div>
</div>
</div>

Edit: It’s ironic that a post about code would have its code garbled. This is a limitation in the WordPress plugin that I’m using to preserve the code format. I’m hoping for a fix soon. In the meantime, visit the example page and steal the code from that.

“The majority of people are not only afraid of holding a wrong opinion, as they are holding an opinion alone.”
- Soren Kierkegaard

In most cases, social proof is a bigger motivator than intellectual integrity. And I’m no exception—I’ve jumped on bandwagons before, picked up opinions without really thinking them through just because other like-minded individuals had picked them up. This just further evidences the tendency we have to be primarily social creatures.

And, from a psychological standpoint, it’s no surprise. On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, social acceptance is a much more basic human need than intellectual advancement (self-actualization).

So, let me be clear: one of my greatest desires is to help other people think themselves up to intellectual advancement and self-actualization. But that’s not a one-step process. And it’s not something everyone will get around to in their dealings with me. The much more basic needs are social and are, fortunately, easier to meet with a little caring. The important thing is to balance the two. I have a tendency to focus on one at the expense of the other, forgetting to either challenge or care for other individuals, depending on my relationship with them.

Anyway, this is one of my few posts that isn’t really meant for anyone. I just had to write this out to formulate it all in my head, and decided to keep it. Thanks for reading, though!

It’s that time of year again! Culture Club campaigning has just begun at PlattForm! For those who don’t know, each year, PF employees elect a group of individuals to help keep the atmosphere here fun and engaging. This group plans activities and social events, both in and outside of work.

I’m not running, but I’m managing a campaign for one of my co-workers, Dan Carr. Here are the posters I came up with:

• Poster 1
• Poster 2
• Poster 3

Tasteless? Probably.

In other news, I think I’m coming down with something. I went home early on Friday and laid down for the remainder of the day. I laid down most of Saturday and after church on Sunday. I had an abnormal amount of trouble getting up this morning. I just asked today, and that was the first symptom that my co-workers had when they recently got sick. Sigh.

In updating my WordPress files, I accidentally reset my theme to the default theme. That’s why it’s looked different since last night. Should be all better now.

And now, I bring you Ninja Turtles from around the world.

The trailer is out for the new Where the Wild Things Are movie:

If you don’t know, Where the Wild Things Are is a 1963 children’s book about Max, an imaginative troublemaker that constructs his own wild world in his bedroom and becomes King of all Wild Things. In the end, he becomes lonely and homesick and travels back to the real world to find supper waiting for him.

This movie looks like it greatly expands on the story, with Max traveling back and forth between his world and the real one. It also looks like it expands on his reasons for wanting to escape, giving him more of a reason than being sent to bed without dinner.

It could just be because I’m kind of a sucker for a good, imaginative kids’ movie, and the Arcade Fire song in the trailer sure helped, but I think this looks awesome. The movie looks visually amazing as well. It’s due out in October. I’ll try to round up a crew to go see it when the movie comes out, but let’s all try to drum up some interest before then.