It never fails. Any time I am taking a long trip in the car, at some point I get stuck behind someone who forgets that the speed limit is actually 10 miles over the speed that they are going. “Why does this always happen to me??” is almost always the first thing out of my mouth.
It always feels like I just happen to pick the wrong lane, or let the wrong person over. I noticed something this morning though. After switching lanes during my drive to work this morning, I actually picked a good one. I actually picked a lane where I wasn’t behind the slowest person on the road.
After pondering my good luck, it made me think a little deeper. How many other times had I picked the right lane.
Yes, deciding what lane to drive on is trivial, and yes, it might not be the greatest metaphor in the world, but it still spoke to me. How many times has something good happened or how many times have I actually made a good decision and not noticed? When the good things go unnoticed, yes, bad things do always happen to you.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the WordPress Codex trying to grasp a better understanding on how their templates work.
While looking through all of the files provided in the default theme, there were two that bugged me. archives.php and links.php. For the life of me, I could not figure out how they were used and how someone would get to a file that used those templates. I was about to just ignore them because I just figured they would never be used.
Well, by default, they aren’t used, but if you do use them, they can be pretty cool.
archives.php is basically an index to the entire blog. Sometimes the archives on your sidebar can get fairly long, which isn’t cool, so you have the option of putting the archive on it’s own page.
links.php is a page containing all of your links. It’s an unordered list of categories, with a child list of all of the links in that category.
Like I mentioned, these aren’t used by default. You have to “activate” them. Here’s how:
- Go to the “Write” section of the WordPress backend.
- Select “Write Page”.
- Give it the title you want (Something like “Archives” or “Links”). Leave the content area blank. If you put something in here, it won’t show up.
- In the options on the side, select the “Page Template” bar to reveal a dropdown menu.
- Select the right template for the page you are creating.
That’s it. You’ll now have your special pages set up.
The cool thing is that you can create more of these special pages with different functionality like that. All you have to do is create a new php file in your themes folder and make sure something like this is at the top:
< ?php
/*
Template Name: My Special Template
*/
?>
You can put any HTML or PHP code you want, which is really cool!
This weekend my wife and I were off to a late start. It was early afternoon and we were trying to decide on where you have our first meal of the day. We were hungry!Deciding on where to eat generally isn’t an easy task. We have a few places that we both always agree on, but eating at the same five places gets old so we try to shake things up every once in a while. It was T.G.I.Friday’s this time. Neither one of us could really remember what they served other than burgers and such so we gave it a try. This was the beginning of the worst restaurant experience we had ever had…
We arrived and at first glance, they didn’t seem to be busy at all. The girl at the hosting stand reacted like a deer caught in the headlights at first however and ran to the back after we walked in. A server came back with her and they talked for nearly a minute, giving us several glances in the meantime. It was awkward and we almost felt like having to get us a table was a huge burden on them. The server turned to us afterwards to motion us on and explained that they were training a few people today and she was one of the trainers. Well good!, I thought. We’ll get someone with some experience. I will never make that assumption again.
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I haven’t had my phone for a week and updates were just announced at todays Macworld conference. The new features include being able to add more icons to the iPhone springboard, sending SMS messages to multiple people at once, advanced video playback, and adding lyrics to be added to your songs on the iPod.
I am very impatient so as soon as the conference ended, I hit the software update button and viola!, a new iTunes update.
After a 50-something MB download, I still had to download the actual software update for the iPhone which was another 150 MB. That took about 90 minutes to finish and I’m chomping at the bit! iTunes asks me if I want to install the new firmware and I continue. But uh oh! An error pops up on my screen.
Unfortunately iTunes wants you to be connected to the internet at all times so it would not update my phone. Fortunately I had been reading about hacking it before and remembered that pressing the Option button when clicking Update will let you select a file from the hard drive.
I located the update in ~/Library/iTunes/iPhone Software Updates/ and everything seemed to work fine. w00t!
I don’t know what it is about new beginnings. We love em! Something about the idea of starting with a clean slate is always appealing. Then at the end of the year, we feel crappy about not having kept our resolutions from the year before, and so the cycle continues.
Is there anything different about Jan 1st that makes it so much easier to drop a bad habit? Probably not. At least not in my opinion. But mentally, it feels like I can’t get away from the feeling of needing to accomplish more this year than the last. I do good for about three months if I’m lucky and then mess up or realize that I’m not as close to finishing a project as I thought. Depression sets in, and giving up usually follows because this year has been “wasted” already. There won’t be another new year for at least 9 months! I feel like I have to wait for some momentous occasion to start fresh again.
So if anything, my “new year’s resolution” this year is to forget the new year hype. We don’t need a new year to make changes in our lives. Every day starts fresh without mistakes so my goal is to make as much use of every single one that I can!
