New Bathroom

We are in the process of updating the downstairs bathroom. New tile, new fixtures, and having a shower put in to up the value of the house. While looking for he stuff at lowes, we decided we would also update the upstairs bathroom as well. While we are waiting for the contractor to get started downstairs, I figured I would post a few pictures of the upstairs update. I'm pretty proud because I did all of it myself.

I removed the old sink, vanity, mirror cabinet, and lighting fixture. I put the new vanity together, rebuilt the drain which was made of steel before, and is now using much easier to deal with PVC. I hung two shelves over the toilet, a new towel rack, and a tp holder. I did all the electrical work on the lighting fixture and it worked on the first try without me electrocuting myself. Everything is level, nothing leaks, I even installed a new shower head. Big props to Jess for doing all the painting while I assembled all this stuff, but we were able to knock it out together in 2 Sundays. The first sunday was paint and sink, and then this sunday I put up the new medicine cabinet, and hung the new light.

All in all it cost about $400 for everything and the difference is huge. Here is a link to my mac gallery to see the pics. While there, also stop by and see all the pretty pictures form when I was snowboarding in Utah.

Rendering a site in IE on a Mac

Every since I switched to mac, there have been a few unavoidable problems. I had to install Windows XP when I first got it because of two main reasons. There was no Universal Binary for the Adobe and Macromedia suite of products so I needed to boot into windows whenever I did web work. The other reason had to do with synching my windows mobile phone. The only software available to synch my phone was the missing sync which was buggy and lacked pretty much any decent support, and it was like $40. Once the Adobe suite was released in Universal Binary and I found a freeware sync application that works wonders (syncmate), I was able to cut ties from Windows for good.

One thing I seemed to have forgotten about though, until recently is the ability to check the rendering of a website in IE. As anyone who codes websites knows, IE is the devil. They ignore all standards, and just do their own thing. I did some searching for people who maybe could write a plugin for firefox or something to make the page behave like it was rendered by IE so I can debug. Unfortunately most developers see this as a step backwards... why would we cater to IE.. IE needs the fixing, so make them fix their product, not cater to it.

I was able to find this nifty online application (netrenderer). Basically put a site in the box, and what version of IE you are trying to use. They offer IE7, IE6, IE5, and even the new IE8 beta. It returns only a screenshot of a maximized 1024x768 window, so if what you are trying to check is far down on your page, you won't be able to see it, but obviously there are workarounds for that.

Overall, it's free. I don't have to instal XP on my mac, and I don't have to leave a windows computer laying around just for this anymore. It has it's shortcomings, but it's helpful to look back at only one version ago in IE when they didn't render transparent png files...

It also gives me hope that at first glance, IE8 seems to have fixed their box model.

I wish I knew why everyone in the web community used:

Margin - Border - Padding - Object

but IE felt it necessary to use:

Border - Margin - Padding - Object

Amazing

I Wish This Was My Dad

T-Mobile's Parent Company is Retarded

So apparently T-Mobile's parent company Deutsche Telekom believes that they can send threatening letters to people who use magenta on their website because it is a copywritten color. They sent basically a cease and desist letter to engadget mobile because of their use of magenta in their logo.

A bunch of phone blogs out there have been changing their color schemes to now include this shade of magenta, but since I'm not going to spend the time doing all that, I figured I'd fight the good fight, and post this image which I took from Ryan Block's personal blog.