A blog about web design and
my life stories. For the most part. |
October 20, 2006
The NLCS this year was amazing. Also amazing, was the fact that the NL’s most potent offense was hog tied for several games (except a 12-5 rout in Game 4). I was at games 2, 6 and 7 and I am completely heartbroken. In 1999 and 2000 we were underdogs and it would have been nice to win the World Series, but this year it seemed like destiny.
October 08, 2006
I know the regular season has been over for quite sometime now, but if you’re a baseball fan and you haven’t read Jayson Stark’s 2006 Season in Review for ESPN, get your butt over there. My favorite recap is the foul ball of the year recap where Jay Gibbons of the Orioles actually lined a foul ball directly into his wife’s ribcage while she was enjoying the game. How is that even possible? Speaking of impossibe, Stark also recaps the Dodgers’ back-to-back-to-back-to-back comeback in September against the Padres. I’m just scratching the surface. A great read for any baseball fan to recap this 2006 baseball season.
October 06, 2006
I was brought into this ground floor company by a restaurant owner in my area. My brother had bartended there for a bit and suggested me when he mentioned he needed someone to do a website. His concept was for a website that could let users find and print restaurant menus. Sounded like a good idea. We checked the competitors (of which there are many) and decided on our plan of attack and our USP. The MenuExplorer.com domain name was purchased, we moved into an office a month later and it was up to me, essentially, to get the ball rolling.
Little did I know that mostly (if not all) of our core partners were not very adept at computers. And this whole business relied heavily upon computers; the website, databases of restaurants around the country, the whole works. First things first, we needed a place to collaborate and share ideas and get things done. I was stuck between a rock and hard place because I knew that we needed some computer-based solution for our project management, but these old dogs were a little rusty.
October 05, 2006
While working on the Menu Explorer website, I came across an error when using our Google Maps iteration called Cartographer.
Every time it would load in IE, I would get an error message saying: “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site, Operation aborted”. Damn IE. So, of course, the first thing I did was search Google for this error involving Google Maps. I came across an interesting blog post by Ryan Grant explaining a quick fix. I tried a few of his methods but none worked because we were calling the script from a rails view and the javascript for the Google Map is in the head of our layout so we couldn’t place the javascript after the BODY closing tag.
A comment on his blog post helped me find the right solution to keep the javascripts in the HEAD tag and call it with the “setTimeout(showMap());” in the onload method in the body tag. Worked great. Thanks Ryan and friends!
UPDATE: It seems that I was incorrect and I am still working to resolve this problem. I think that we need to use the cartographer helper in rails. I noticed that we weren’t using the helper and were just hardcoding the call to the jscript in the html view. I will be working on this all next week. I’ll let you know what happens.
Chris Matthias is web and graphic designer, actor, singer, poker player and New York Mets fan. He spends entirely too much time surfing the web. This is his (infrequently updated) blog. Check out his Tumblelog. Or, find out more about the man behind the magic.
