I love to Bar-B-Que on Labor Day weekend. I'm a child of the deep south. Born in New Orleans, and raised along the Gulf Coast most of my life. Pork is my meat of choice. There is just something about slow roasted pork. Instead of hickory, I use Mesquite wood for smoking. I smoked two racks of pork ribs and a picnic shoulder. I'm hooked on Stubb's Bar-B-Q Sauce. I'm a knowledgable sauce maker, but Stubb's is just plain good and easy to use. I don't even bother dressing it up anymore. It's good the way it comes out of the bottle.

I'm miserable full from sampling the cooking. I spent five hours slow roasting over Kingsford Mesquite Charcoal, with wet mesquite wood chips added for stronger flavor. After cooking for five hours, I could barely manage two ribs and a sliced pork sandwich with a Mt. Olive Kosher Dill Pickle on top. Fortunately I was mowing the backyard while I was cooking and it helped me work off all the samplin' I was doing during the smoking process. Well, it's time to go watch Clemson and 'Bama. Roll Tide! Ya'll have a good weekend, y'heah!

I was working on my web site locally last night, fine tuning some style sheet code. About midnight, I thought "the heck with this" and shutdown my machine. I've learned to completely shutdown Visual Studio before I shutdown my machine. Unfortunately, the machine did not shut down. I waited and waited. Then I brushed my teeth. Finally, I hit the power button for three seconds and went to bed. This morning, when I powered on, I found these error messages:

More...

When I was a little boy, I detested the political conventions. Why? Because the networks pre-empted my cartoon shows with stuff that a 7 year old could have cared less about. Today, I still detest the political conventions. Why? Because the networks pre-empt important subjects like Georgia, Iraq and the dismal sciences with stuff that a 50 something could care less about.

More...

Update: Check out my wiki page for the latest download of WinROTT. 

Summer is over. My son is off to college, my daughter has started her sophomore year in high school and the web site redesign is stable. It's time to crack open the WinROTT project and get started.

I am moving UserActor.c to a cpp file. There are some dependencies to resolve. This may take a couple of evenings while I get back into the swing of things. I am really feeling the need for some sort of .c and .cpp cross referencing tool. I still have somewhere around fifty .c files to convert. I'm looking forward to getting rid of all the extern "C" hacks I've had to use while the code is mixed between c++ and c. I was able to move a few functions outside of the extern "C" blocks. Whenever I am able to do this, it feels like progress is being made.

I cannot say enough good about Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics by Jennifer Niederst Robbins. This book is a life saver for programmers trying to learn a something about web design. Does it make me an expert? No! Does it help me learn what goes into web design? Yes! Can it help me make my web site better? Yes!

I spent most of the day working on a subtle problem. Firefox seemed to be repositioning the footer on my page whenever I moused over or clicked my navigation list. Using Robbins' book, I was able to isolate and debug the problem. It turned out I had two style sheet anchor elements interacting in an unwanted way. In addition, the focus rectangle that Firefox places on items that are clicked caused the navigation <div> to resize slightly, sending the footer into a tizzy.

Anyway, if you don't know web design, this is the book to start with. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.