Great job by the previous designer, and by Mistermix completing it.
I’m sure that people are going to have problems on various platforms for the next few days as the tweaking goes on. John and Mistermix will let you know how to let them know, if they haven’t already. I’m an IT Tech, not a web designer, server admin, or a DBA, so I’ll just tell you to restart your computer and update your OS.
We’re at that point in buying the house where the bank keeps sending back individual documents wanting minor changes, and so on. It’s making me crazy, but we’ll get there soon enough.
Open Thread.
debbie
New design is great.
shortstop
We’re going through the same thing with the lender for the place we’re buying. It’s really eye-opening to see firsthand how much the credit market has changed: as recently as several years ago, when we got a refi, the attitude was practically “Oh, sure, come on down on Tuesday and we’ll have that for you.” Now, we’ve had to provide so much documentation that I won’t be surprised to get a request for my latest mammography results and the dog’s training certificate. Our credit is clean and the ratings haven’t changed; we’re earning the same amount — it’s just a different lending world now.
Not complaining, as we’re conscious every minute of our good fortune…just making an observation.
pharniel
I remember that part of purchasing a house – and that was the free wheelin’ days of aught-7 and it was a crappy enough process.
My sympathies.
For those not purchasing a house the Exalted 3 kickstarter is live here and then there’s Demon: The Frutang/[REDACTED] is Magic and even Mage 20 had a thread which didn’t devolve into immediate flamewar.
Combine that with Chucubu’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine (The Nobils 3E High School setting…) and this thing and about twenty bajillionty other projects actually coming out it’s a golden age for table top gaming.
Unless you happen to be purchasing a house – then you don’t have any money or time to spend on anything other than
pleasuringsatisfying The Banks so you can get your money.mai naem
You guys are buying a house in a great market with seriously awesome rates. I remember when we bought out first house in the late eighties, we got a good deal on the house(Bush 1 recession) but the rates were just ok. I think our rate was 7.5 percent. I just remember walking into the house around inspection time and the realtor didn’t know I was there and she was telling a handyman something to the effect of doing a temporary fix on some little kitchen sink leak, just enough to get by for the sale. She was shocked when she turned around and wasn’t sure if I had heard what she had said. I didn’t care because I knew we were going to redo the kitchen when we moved in.
Schlemizel
So the powerball is around $230 million cash payout – maybe we should forma BJ team, get 100 people to toss in $100 each & buy 10,000 tickets? Still $2+million each ;)
Woodrow/asim Jarvis Hill
As someone who’s worked all those hats, and been “officially” labeled as such save DBA — brother, I tell ’em the same.
Nice site redesign, by the by. Don’t let the haters get you down.
dmsilev
Day three of very-annoying-week is underway. My colleagues and I have time on a fairly expensive instrument. Expensive enough that when you get time, you use it 24/7. Which means that yesterday I was awake at 4 AM to start a 5 AM->7 PM shift (we do an hour of overlap when changing shifts), and today got to “sleep in” until 5.
Just another 4.5 days to go.
Santiago
nice!
The Other Bob
I like it. I also hope you keep taking ads from right wingers. I can put up with them as long as we are sucking those bastards dry.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
What kind? And can’t you get an autosampler or something? That’s what we do to let our instruments run 24 hours a day without requiring full-time human attention.
The Red Pen
@Schlemizel: I wouldn’t even get out of bed for $2 million.
shortstop
@dmsilev: dmsilev, what do you do, if you don’t mind saying so here? I thought the diamond thing was a weekend project and now find myself significantly confused.
Quarks
This design is much easier/cleaner to read. Thanks.
Punchy
What’s with the giant empty box at the bottom of the post?
Zandar
REDESIGN IS OBOT PLOT TO ARGLE THE BARGLES
Also, I blame Blizzard. Nerf Monks.
Schlemizel
@The Red Pen:
Thats OK because we don’t want everyone in on this fabulous deal of a life time!
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I think the comment font needs to be slightly larger and swap the Newsmax and recent posts box, and It’ll be great. As for using zoom in, the current layout is exactly as wide as the display I am on. Not EVERY monitor has gone widescreen.
Citizen_X
Like the redesign, but boy, the manager’s a cranky asshole.
Can we get the old guy back, the one with the fat cat? He was funny. What was the cat’s name? Garfield, right?
shortstop
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
That might have had a chance of happening before everyone pissed Cole off.
Schlemizel
Is it fair to ask how much BJ earns from the schumks at newmax? I hate to click on them because I assume they get ad revenue fro each click but really I love the idea that this sit is partially funded by the insane clown posse we are trying to eliminate
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: Very very large magnet. It’s automated to some extent, but basically needs some manual intervention roughly every 10 to 20 minutes depending on what we’re doing.
@shortstop: I’m an experimental physicist. The diamond cell is one of the tools I use. Big-ass magnets are another one. We have some fair-sized systems at home, but occasionally need more field than what they can provide, so travel to a facility which has such. Which is why I’m stuck in Tallahassee right now.
beltane
The new design looks great, but I do agree with those who would like the font to be a little larger. Some of us are getting old, or at least the small font makes some of us feel old.
cmorenc
The new design is good EXCEPT for one HUGE flaw: reducing the font to a smaller size in the comments than in the lead thread essay/post makes them much less easily readable ! Which IMHO is an ergonomic loss that far outweighs any nominal aesthetic gain in superficial appearance, especially since the purpose of a blog with comment threads it to be read, not merely looked at like a painting.
PLEASE FIX THIS!
shortstop
@dmsilev: I’ll be damned. How cool! And that’s really about all I can say about it without further training.
@shortstop: NOT COMPLAINING but just want everyone to notice that my comment has a larger font than your comments (turns around, waves ass).
raven
The graders are here and there are plants and stone that we didn’t think were going to have to be moved that do! The princess is at PT and she’s not going to be happy when she gets home!
shortstop
@shortstop: Or the font is larger only during the editing period. Stupid, I am it.
raven
@dmsilev: Pretty close to some good fishin!
Schlemizel
@shortstop:
don’t worry after a bit your comment size goes down to tiny also.
BGK
Regarding my roundhouse-kicking injury about which I blathered yesterday:
I recently joined a new gym. One of the group activities it has is “fight club,” wherein one does various martial-arts-like routines. The 6:00 instructor is really enthusiastic and motivating, and even though we’re all wrung out at the end, a good time is had by all.
A week ago, she had us doing left then right roundhouse kicks in rapid sequence. Regardless of whether my aim or my execution was poor, I connected full-throttle on my first right kick with the hard plastic, water-filled base of the bag, rather than the bag itself. I did see stars and was kind of gimpy for a few days. This, however, didn’t excuse me from upper body work or left-side kicking.
Given that fairly recently, a flight of stairs was a challenge, the idea of injuring myself while doing anything martial-arts-related at all still strikes me as droll.
shortstop
@Schlemizel: I wasn’t worried; I was considering how to use my power for good instead of evil. But see above: I did twig what was happening.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@shortstop: Actually, once the ability to edit times out, the font for your comment goes to the same size as everyone else. And it’s only larger for the person doing the post. For everyone else, they are all the same size. They tricked you with relativity.
beltane
I remember the days when Balloon Juice was still hosted by Pajama’s Media, and Ann Coulter’s ugly mug regularly graced the FP.
shortstop
@BGK:
And what is rule #1? And why are you flagrantly breaking it? ;)
shortstop
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): They tricked me with relativity; dmsilev blinded me with science. (“SCIENCE!”) And it’s not even 8:30 yet here.
TaMara (BHF)
@dmsilev: That’s cool. Everything I know about experimental physicists I learned from Big Bang Theory….so nothing. :-)
dmsilev
@shortstop:
Cool is the other part of it. Right now, the samples are at a relatively toasty 25 degrees above absolute zero. In a couple of hours though, I’ll have finished that phase of the experiment and we’ll bring the system down to 0.3 K and start doing some hard-core quantum mechanics.
Poopyman
I also notice that the site loads super fast, too. Much appreciated.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Are you doing some kind of magnetic resonance stuff, or EPR, or trapping ions? Enquiring minds want to know.
bemused
Minnesota lit up the I-35 bridge in rainbow colors last night. I love my state.
It was such a short time ago when the regressives tried to bulldoze through an anti-ssm constitutional amendment. I can’t help but think this backfired on them thoroughly and just sped up and spurred on accomplishing equal marriage rights for all.
Just Some Fuckhead
I like the smaller font. That may help cut down on the old people a little.
Just Some Fuckhead
The font starts big and then gets small. Cool.
shortstop
@bemused: I think it did. You had the infrastructure in place from November and just kept moving. Really such a great story and so inspiring to watch. We are struggling hard in Illinois to get our bill through the house.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: It’s a metallic sample, so mostly electrical transport (resistivity), with some magnetization measurements. Probing a spin ordering transition in the relatively high temperature regime, and using Shubnikov-deHaas oscillations to examine the shape of the Fermi surface at low temperature.
jibeaux
Open thready…..mmmm…
Who has a website or cookbook that they go to for relatively easy, healthy, cheap if possible, weeknight dinners? I like Bittman’s Kitchen Express for ideas, but I’ve been using it for 2 years & need new ones. I’ve tried some from Pioneer Woman’s website, but there is an excess of pictures and explanation (I know how to pour oil into a pan, just gimme the recipe) and some of the recipes have been underwhelming. Epicurious is usually too much for a weeknight, but on the other side of the spectrum I don’t want any dumb recipes consisting of everything canned and prepackaged. It’s sort of a Goldilocks problem.
shortstop
@Just Some Fuckhead: And the ones that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all.
Rex Everything
2 spaces after a full stop! Nice!
Just Some Fuckhead
@shortstop: Maybe not, but that Johnson & Johnson baby aspirin was delicious, wasn’t it? We used to eat it like candy.
ETA: And the Flintstones vitamins! I still gobble ’em.
c u n d gulag
Trayz chik!
artem1s
if you try to enlarge font size, the center column then gets too narrow to read. And the default minimum size for the center column is too small, IMO, before it pops back out to a more readable size. I generally don’t have my browser page the full size of my screen so I can view multiple applications at the same time. I’m finding the narrowness of the center column at the size where I usually keep my browser screen, is not pleasant to look at, with two wide empty columns to each side. I feel like I should be able to adjust them but can’t. I tried zooming in but that just made the column narrower and even more unreadable.
using firefox 20.0.1 and windows 7. viewing the page at about half the width of a 21″ monitor.
Roger Moore
@jibeaux:
Just go to The Joy of Cooking. They’ll have a bunch of recipes that do what you want, and whatever other cookbook you get will be copying from them anyway.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@jibeaux: I posted this in the other thread when crockpots came up, but I’m pulling a lot of recipes from A Year of Slow Cooking these days. Lots of great recipes, lots of other great sites on the blogroll.
jheartney
Generally I give a thumbs up on the redesign. Could tweak a couple things – the comment font is still a bit small, and on the middle – column behavior, I’d have it switch over to single-column mode a little sooner; the center column becomes unreadable fairly quickly. Generally nicely done though.
shortstop
@Roger Moore: But if he/she wants to make them healthy, serious modification of Joy recipes will be required. Sounds like jibeaux’s down with more than the culinary basics, so shouldn’t be a problem.
Roger Moore
@shortstop:
There are plenty of healthy recipes in The Joy of Cooking; you just have to look until you find one. That would be the main benefit of going with another cookbook or web site; they would have selected the good ones for your rather than you having to go find them.
bemused
@shortstop:
The constitutional amendment really did alarm a lot of people and activated the LGBT community. People who didn’t pay much attention to the issue before and heard the heartbreaking stories of how marriage inequality hurts same sex couples and their children/families got educated quickly.There was a lot of thoughtful and civil discussion in the legislature which is how democracy is supposed to work.
Maude
@Just Some Fuckhead:
The Flintstones vitamins taste vitaminy.
The cherry kid aspirin is nowhere as tasty as the orange.
Edit, spell fail.
PeakVT
For anyone wanting a larger comment font, you can get it by installing this style.
shortstop
@bemused: Great stuff. A lot of credit goes to the folks who knew momentum would be highest right after defeating the amendment and thus didn’t wait to take the next step. The anti-equality people are walking around shellshocked right now, which I’m enjoying.
beltane
@PeakVT: Much better, my eyes thank you.
Roger Moore
@PeakVT:
Oh, that’s a big improvement.
jheartney
@PeakVT: Excellent, thanks. My old fogie eyes are grateful.
jibeaux
You know, I’ve honestly never had a copy of the Joy of Cooking, although obviously I’ve heard of it and I don’t doubt that it’s the bible on which many recipes are based. But it seems to me that in 2013 we’re a lot more conscious of eating local, using ingredients that probably weren’t too common in the early ’60s, eating seasonally, etc. I grow veggies myself and get them from a CSA, and my guess is there are probably better sources for what to do with my kale or Chinese cabbage these days. I know my way around a kitchen well enough, but I have been cooking for two adults for close to 20 years and cooking for a family for half that and I just feel out of ideas. I’ll look at all the suggestions, though, thanks guys.
Shortstop
@jibeaux: It’s been updated since the 1960s (by the daughter of the original author working with her mother, I think), but is still pretty dated in some areas. I find it useful when I need to learn a technique I’ve never used — it is really the bible for that. But I almost never use a recipe from it without modifying it, usually to reduce fat and salt and very often to combat blandness.
You might find the Cooking Light site helpful. Their recipes are generally quick, healthy and interesting: not what used to be thought of as “diet food.” They occasionally include processed foods, but tend to focus on fresh ingredients, and again, you can always modify.
dance around in your bones
@artem1s:
Have you tried the add-on NoSquint for Firefox? If you set the full zoom level to 100% and the text level to whatever’s comfortable for you (mine’s at 155% just now) you can make it more readable.
@PeakVT: Also, I installed PeakVT’s Stylish style :) last night and it really helps.
bemused
@shortstop:
Definitely shell shocked. Conservatives live in such a bubble. Republican Rep. Peggy Scott, who was in tears after the House vote, said we should be united, not divided. Wow. There’s some twisted projection there. In their minds, united means agree with everything they believe.
A friend said she thought it was Rep Scott she heard on MPR recently talking about the ssm bill. Scott was supposedly taken aback when the host said she wasn’t going to be interviewed alone but with some ssm supporters and was a little pissy about it. I haven’t been able to find an audio of that if there is one.
pete
Back to house buying: My favorite part when we bought last year was first signing about 753 pieces of paper, with my partner and in front of the mortgage notary person who kept feeding them to us and witnessing them, and then having to go back two days later (delaying the close by a day) in order to re-sign some that the funder thought had signatures that varied from each other. Writers cramp! And then, of course, they immediately sold on the freaking mortgage anyway. But it’s all good in the end.
ETA: Why does my comment look fat?
ETA2: And why does the comment editor, upon saving, just sit there instead of bouncing me back to the thread?
shortstop
@bemused: I believe Peggy “Cry Me a River” Scott’s exact quote included this gem of construction: “This divisive issue will divide this state.” Because, you know, if we just left in place the law that prevents so many Minnesotans from enjoying their civil rights, we could be one big happy family. Hetero family, one woman, one man.
I know I keep referencing NOM in these threads, but I can’t look away from their trainwreck. They’re currently whining about how MN amendment opponents promised they wouldn’t try to enact SSM, and now look what those sneaky homofascists have gone and done. You give these upstarts an inch and they take a mile. No self-restraint!
satby
Well done mistermix and everyone. Love the new design, it looks great on Chrome, and loads fast. But I’m easy.
Roger Moore
@shortstop:
This is actually dead on; it’s the follow-up assumptions that are flawed. If you do nothing, LGBT people who can’t marry will be upset. If you pass marriage equality, anti-LGBT bigots will be upset. It really is the issue itself- should we allow marriage equality or not- that’s divisive; the political wrangling is the effect, not the cause, of the divisiveness. The solution is to follow the constitutional process, which was designed to provide a mechanism for resolving divisive issues according to a regular procedure.
Cris (without an H)
First impression: this looks great!
shortstop
@Roger Moore:
But surely she could have stepped up her writing quality even more: “This divisive issue will divide this state divisively.”
The other stuff you said is dead on but obvious. What’s entertaining bemused and me is Scott’s notion that we can remove the divisiveness by failing to address the issue at all, i.e., making opponents of marriage equality happy.
belieber
lol…what a fucking brown noser. Yea site looks awesome…if you are clinically blind. But hey, the date looks so pretty now that it has color gradient….fucking awesome. Only took mistermux what? 3 months to change a theme from one crappy minimalistic one to another crappy minimalistic one that looks almost the same. He changed the fucking theme. That’s about it.
Tonal (visible) Crow
Properly spelling “sockialism” still causes WP to deep-six my message without warning. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Nutella
@bemused:
Jeez, what were they thinking?!?! Having people on the news who actually disagree about a substantive issue instead of letting the Rs stay in their cozy little bubble where everyone they encounter agrees with everything they say? It’s an outrage!
Edited to add: Not sure what you all did (font choice? color contrast?) to make the text so sharp and clear, but it looks good.
rdldot
@jibaux: Why don’t you try the Mayo clinic cookbook? Most of the recipes I’ve seen are pretty easy and quick, and definitely healthy. The Cooking Light website is pretty good, too. I hate Joy of Cooking – bought it years ago and the only thing I’ve cooked out of it is Oatmeal cookies.,
rdldot
@jibaux: Why don’t you try the Mayo clinic cookbook? Most of the recipes I’ve seen are pretty easy and quick, and definitely healthy. The Cooking Light website is pretty good, too. I hate Joy of Cooking – bought it years ago and the only thing I’ve cooked out of it is Oatmeal cookies.,
Steeplejack
Test message on a different laptop.
This is a tiny little Lenovo (X130e), but the site looks good.
Steeplejack
@artem1s:
I’m late back to this thread, so maybe someone has already suggested this, but go to View | Zoom and check “Zoom Text Only”; see if that allows you to increase the font size without changing the column width.
Jim Pharo
Site design = Good.
Steeplejack
@Tonal (visible) Crow:
That is a browser- or something-else-specific problem. Socialism works fine for me.