Monkey House

I have teamed up with a good friend to form a 2-man team for Movember. Our team name, chosen by David (who originally wanted “Movember Reign” which was taken) is “The Movemberists”. Movember is basically a moustache-growing contest. And since I am powerful with facial hair, I am a pretty safe horse to bet on for growing a 4-star+ ’stache.

As you can tell by following the above link, there is a fundraising component. I would appreciate anything you guys have to give, as it helps to raise money for fighting prostate cancer.

My personal donation page is found here: http://ca.movember.com/mospace/168763

..which is probably the easiest way to make a donation. As far as I know (I haven’t gone through the process myself), tax receipts are issued automatically if you make an online payment. For anybody wishing to do the traditional donation thing, I have all the required forms to make a request on your behalf.

If you would also like to join the team (I know, kinda last-minute, but it only takes a moment to sign up!), either to raise some funds or just for the heck of squaring off against me or David in a moustache race, just go to the main site, hit the “Register” button, and select the “Join as a Team Member” option. Our team is “The Movemberists”; there are a few with similar names, so pick the one captained by David Hicks.

If nothing else, please visit my page after the 15th to vote my stache. I’ll pop a reminder into the blog as well.

Short post, but might as well get it out while I’m feeling ranty.

Just visited a site that had the Registered Trademark symbol (®) after every single instance of the brand name that had the registered trademark. You will see this happen with “plain old” trademark symbol (™) as well.

Drives me nuts.

Unless a company has explicitly stated in their logo and brand name guidelines that this symbol must accompany every single instance, it’s not necessary. And even companies with that policy aren’t likely to notice you and bother litigating if you’ve handled their trademark in an acceptable way. But it’s one heck of an eyesore along with 99%+ of the time not being necessary, to see those danged symbols everywhere.

Here’s how it’s done in the vast majority of the business world, in one short sentence:

Use the ® or ™ symbol in the first or most prominent instance of the trademarked word or phrase.

If you’re using a graphical logo that includes the trademark symbol, you might want to play it safe and also add the symbol ONCE in the first or most prominent instance of the text trademark as well. Then you’ve been clear: “yes, that graphic is trademarked… but so is the name itself, even in plain text.”

That’s it.

If any of you ever decide to create a company or a product, for the love of God please do it this way. It doesn’t make your brand name look more cool or more legitimate to have that symbol everywhere.

/rant over

So, my sister and her husband are avid travellers. They’ve been to tonnes of great places around the world already, and show no signs of ever slowing down. It’s awesome for them, and they always have tonnes of great pictures to show for their trips.

As it turns out, internet is sporadic enough and webmail is dodgy enough that the easiest way to say “hello” to everyone from the road is with comments on this blog! Two of the comments have appeared in our most recent article, but I thought it made sense to give her a new topic to post comments to. So here it is!

The first two comments are duplicated here for anyone who missed them. So Na, feel free to comment here so everyone can see! And if anyone else has messages back for them, add those to the comment area as well. Have fun and safe travels!

October 19

Hi Greg & Alie,

I didn’t have access to my email, so thought I’d post a comment instead. We’ve had a good time on our trip so far. Ho Chi Minh is chaotic, to say the least. Today, we’re off on the train to Nha Trang (about 7 hours). We’ll be working our way North towards Hanoi. Hello to Mom & Dad & love to all. We’ll see you in a couple weeks.

Na

–

October 21

Just waiting for our pickup for our overnight train to Danang. Had a fab day in Nha Trang – beach is stunning – 7 miles long and turquoise waters & we had a good time on our little cruise. Internet is free here at the hotels!

Luv,
Na

I never thought I’d find myself rinsing off river stones.

The short version: although the layer of weedblocker fabric that was under the rocks was still doing its job (no weeds were growing from the ground itself), there was so much compost/sediment built up between the rocks that weeds were growing anyhow. A lot of them. Rather than just use herbicide of some sort, we took the rocks off the weedblocker (which we also replaced while we were at it) and put them through several stages of rinsing (not really by choice but out of necessity… the muck was stubborn!) before finally replacing them.

We only did the left side. The right side is a bit larger to begin with, and also extends down the side of the deck. It’s roughly twice the size of the left, all told.

Several, SEVERAL hours of rinsing and back-breaking shoveling. You can’t see the difference in the pictures, but it WAS an effective solution. Only problem is, too labor-intensive for the trade-off. When we do the right side next year, we’ll just use eco-green herbicide (I know, quite an oxymoron, eh?)

It was never intentional for me to advertise for Envato and their marketplace for so long (and for free!), but for some reason I never got around to removing the ads. Not that there’s anything wrong with Envato– on the contrary, it’s one of the best places on the web to get themes, graphics, audio files, etc… (there, one last final freebie for them. )

What I’m about to explain is hyper-obvious for anyone with web dev experience, but for those of you who are using the Androida Theme as users not as programmers, here’s how to get rid of the ads:

1. Log in as an administrator
2. Go to “Appearance” –> “Editor”
3. From the list of files to edit, select Sidebar (sidebar.php)
4. “Comment out” the line that loads the sponsors.

“Commenting out” means adding comment symbols (which are different from language to language to language) around a piece of code. These comment symbols tell the browser, “This is just a note… don’t do anything to render me.” The reason for using comments is so that you can easily reverse your changes later.

To add comments in HTML, you add “<!–” at the beginning of your comment and “–>” at the end. Now, I wasn’t sure if PHP would still get executed even from inside a comment (certain non-HTML code WILL get parsed, like the code in-between css style tags), but the first try of using the HTML comments showed that it in fact worked.

Here’s the change you need to make (note the comment symbols.. only one line is changed and the others are shown just for context):

That’s it! No more ads. And easy to undo if I decide to put some ads in there.