bill tsukuda

This isn't as random as it may seem. The machine we used to strip the rinds from the nuts was actually called "The Wizard"; it's name embossed on the large gear that turned cylinder inside of it.

I've been working on a couple of sites the last week, and and both of them ended up using the "Popular Content" block from Drupal's Statistics module (not used on this site). One thing that I really don't like about that block is that is uses so much vertical space, so to make it all webified I decided to turn it into tabs. I know there's a couple of modules like Quicktabs that allow for easily configurable tabbed blocks, but this was going to be one of the few tabbed blocks (in one case the only one) on the site, and it seemed like overkill to install a new module to "tab" a single block. I decided to just use the jQuery Tools tabs plugin to fix the block.

Try not to read into things too much, now.

One little project that I wanted to get done on this site was to have the monthly archive links (over there on the left) load a list of post titles via AJAX and list them underneath the month when clicked. For some reason, I thought this was how Blogger was set up, but I can't seem to find any pages that work that way. This was a fairly straight forward project that took about 2 hours (or something like that--work, eating, and all that stuff makes me unable to time things correctly).

Redoing this site has forced me to re-assess my portfolio. It's not as strong as it should be, and I need to do something about that quick. Of the pieces I've had on this site for the last few years, I think I still like about three, and that's unacceptable. Of course, I've been in semi-retirement/hiding for about five years, so it's a little like walking into a house you lived in a half-decade ago, and realize how memory has distorted your perception and looking at things with fresh eyes, you realize how much it was falling apart when you left it.

It's done. At least it's done enough to work. The design's not quite what I had in mind from the get-go, but it works well enough for me. (This isn't to say that it works on Internet Explorer, but, fact of the matter is, it's almost a miracle that anything does.)