Mandaris

I really enjoyed this movie. It definitely deserved to have a sequel. That being said, I wouldn't take the time to watch it again by myself.

It’s phenomenal views and a cast of characters and actors that kept me entertained and following along with the plot. I really think they did a good job in showing what Paul and his family is going through and not relying on narration.

If I have all this praise, you maybe wondering why I didn’t rate it higher. Well, it comes down to the fact that the movie doesn’t completely standalone. I watched it knowing there was going to be a sequel. Unfortunately, I thought “Will modern audiences be ok with the movie ending where it did? Will I be ok with it?”.

I find myself bumping this up a star while writing this review because this movie did something. It brought me and my family closer together. We all saw it and then made plans to see the sequel.

So, I suggest you go see it too, but be aware that it will be the setup to something bigger.

I feel that this is one of the better seasons of the show. In this one, they move away from the constantly having our detective doing practically everything while the supporting cast chimes in occasionally. You get a feeling that they are more of a team and the other actors get a chance to show that they can… well.. act.

Except for Marlon, who I’ve never liked as a character.

But that could just be because he’s the Dwayne replacement that was never MY Dwayne.

Still, this is a murder of the week show and it doesn’t go to far from that. My wife and I like to watch it before bed; I think it might be comforting to know that the evildoers get caught and justice is served. Here is a link to Death in Paradise (2011) on the Movie Database.

Also, if you are interested here is a link to this season’s trailer on YouTube.

One last bit, there is an article on how and why they remastered the theme song.

We've started a new project which requires heavy, creative theming, so I made a prototype to test some ideas out.

I really like this article as it breaks down the reasoning of why they are doing what they are doing. It has some examples that you can follow along with and leaves me thinking about how I can take this knowledge into my own development.

Discovered via Andy Bell

James has been doing a lot of cool things on his blog. I feel that you should really check him out and everyone else in the IndieWeb WebRing.

I love diagrams and my heart almost jumped out of my chest as he wrote about combining two of my loves: Coffee and Diagrams.

I thought what better way to learn more about using Mermaid than to make a chart that shows how I decide what coffee to drink!

I haven’t really used Mermaid since I included the renderhooks it for the theme that I use for my blog. So, I was excited to have an opportunity to use it.

flowchart TD
    accTitle: How do I brew my coffee
    accDescr: This is a process on how I determine what kind of coffe to drink
    A{Am I brewing coffee at home, or am I on the go?}
    A --> B[Home]
    A --> C[On the Go]
    B --> D[Black]
    C --> E{Am I going to Starbucks}
    E -->|No| D[Black]
    E -->|Yes| G[Water]

How do you make your coffee?

This release is mostly centered around cleaning up different edge cases in the theme. This the first time in several point releases where I’ve made a change to the HTML structure. The release before (V1.3.07) was an addition to the theme that we won’t be seeing on Micro.blog until we update Hugo. I feel a bit of accomplishment in the fact that I didn’t see a need to.

Here are all the changes from the README.md that I haven’t blogged about.

v1.3.08

• Adjust fonts
• Make the a.no-decoration more accessible by changing contrast
• Add FloatLeft css class
• Add ::selection background color to match up with theme
• Add scrolling for debug output
• Change the title and aria-label for microposts to include the date and time. In the local copy of Hugo, an empty string title is automatically added.
• Add styling to the top of the list.html to make it stand out.
• Change the date format for the time used for published times.
• Rearrange reply order options to be Micro.blog, Mastodon, and then email
• Add articleSection to list of classes for category tags on a post
• Update README.md on previous releases

v1.3.07

• Add partials for upcoming mathematics support in Hugo. This can be seen when you toggle the math parameter. This has been defaulted to false until v0.122 is available. Demos can be seen on the MathJax demo page.
• Use Modern Font Stacks. Matt Langford discussed this on the Tiny Theme page on fonts. I really liked his implementation and you should check it out!

v1.3.06

• Change the li marker color to --text-alt in order to match header color
• Change padding of body to utilize more space on smaller screens
• add text-shadow to a.no-decoration
• Change logic for the debug flags
• Create stub for theme example folder
• Temporarily add the rsvp shortcode to theme to remove extra whitespace when post is cross posted to mastodon

This is the first interview in Technical Writing Chats, a series where I speak with technical writers about their day-to-day role and how they got started in their career. Today's interview is with Ally Sassman, a Senior Technical Writer at New Relic. I sincerely hope you enjoy!

Ricky Stanicky (2024) on The Movie Database - ★★★☆☆

I really enjoy the comedies with John Cena. They’re generally fun and light. I get to spend some time just sitting back and relaxing.

I’m not looking for depth; those movies are also available if I want them.

If you’ve seen this movie, then you’ve seen it a dozen times. There are a couple twist and turns but we all know what’s going to happen from the trailers and the first 10 minutes of the film.

I have no problems with that!

Here’s the trailer that pretty much sums it up.

This got me thinking: how are curly braces used in English today? Many English keyboards, such as the Macbook Air keyboard on which I am typing this blog post, have curly braces as a character you can type with the shift key pressed. If curly braces are on our keyboards, they would have to either have some use in language, or sufficient use as a punctuation in computational contexts?

I can't recall ever seeing these outside of the context of programming.

If you’ve come to my site, you’ve seen it. Or rather, seen that it isn’t there. Most site have them, whether it’s a big banner or image that lets you know that you are on a webpage. I’m referring to the header; usually the first h1 element in the html. Open any book on HTML and it’s one of the top five elements that you learn about.

But, if this element is so basic and used so often, then how why do I not use this in my theme?

No guarantee on structure

There are different tools that you can use to write posts for micro.blog. You can post from the website, MarsEdit, Ulysses, drafts, etc. These tools usually allow the end user to write in some form of Markdown syntax. If you look up the syntax for Markdown on Markdown Guide Basics Syntax or on the DaringFireball Markdown Basics page, you will see that the first thing they point out is the # used to make a heading. The tools will use the convention of taking the first # header and using it as the title for a post.

Most of the websites that I’ve come across will use title of a post as an h2 in order to denote that its semantically lower than the h1 they would have in the header of the page.

But, what about posts without a title? What about the person who isn’t familiar or not thinking about these details as they type away on their keyboards on that great post that will finally prove that whether pancakes or waffles are the superior breakfast item¹.

Other than testing whether the content has a title, the theme does not make any adjustments. It can’t automatically change all the headers and assume that the writer meant ### instead of ## for the sub-header.

Also, If we only navigate by headers and headers are only on titled posts, then what about the micro posts that micro.blog uses?

I’m not an accessibility expert, I just hope that whoever is using the theme, will be able to navigate using the different articles and aria-labels. I really hope that not having the headers isn’t a deterrent from reading the site. If you know of someone, please send me their information so that I can improve this site.

What would it take to change?

I was thinking about changing the structure of the theme to match the convention that I had seen with other themes. I’d make the articles have h2 and just go through all my posts to make sure everything had the proper heading.

In my local testing, I found that I ran into another problem where the built in table of contents feature of Hugo defaults to using h2 and h3 tags to create its content.

It’s documented on how to change the start and end levels but this would mean that users of the theme would see a change after an update. I can’t count on them reading the readme, being able to test it before hand, or going back to a previous version.

Ten Times the Technical Transform

About a month ago, I asked @help how many people were using this theme. Manton said 10.

I was shocked!

That’s 9 more than I was expecting.

I hope these people are happy with the theme - or so I imagine - and I don’t want to change that.

Withdrawn on the World Wide Web

The last reason is more personal.

I’m on the web, but I would rather you start reading what I wrote than read about me. Based off of my own web-surfing habits and the site traffic I get, I assume that when someone comes to the site they are coming from a direct link to an article. If that is the case, I want you to get to reading as quickly as possible.

The website has a title that is read by accessibility readers and shows up in the tab of your browser.

I don’t know how much of my traffic is people new to the site, but I do have an about me at the bottom of the page. It’s kind of a “find out more from this author” that you would see in the back of a book.

For me, this is more comfortable because I have trouble writing about myself. Ask anyone who has written a resumé, and they might say its easier to express how you think of feel about different things than it is to write about how you are really good at TPS reports.

Let’s head this off

This is not an attack on sites that use h1 for the title and have it at the top. I love those sites and the people that make them. This is just me explaining the theories of my own site. It’s not conventional and sometimes I look at it and want to start over.

It’s because of that burning feeling, I continue working on it.

Just running forward.

Without a head.