As it were...

The other day the girls didn't know what they should do, so my wife said "You can watch TV in the den, play outside, or play upstairs." Ema put her finger to her chin, thought for a moment and said

"We'll take your suggestions into consideration."

They played upstairs.

My daughters just went outside to play. The first thing they did was walk to the edge of the deck, hold hands, jump off, and yell "Size DOWN!"

Then they were tiny fairies in wonderland.

To come home they have to "Size UP!"

A few months ago someone asked me if I could get Google search results to show up inside their own template, rather than having a form that left the site. After a little research, Google CSE looked like just the thing, so I got an API key and dove in.

I wasn't very happy with the way it worked. Basically the results came back in an iframe that holds a Google page. But it was indeed getting results, so I put it in place.

I got an email a few days later asking why the results were so "off". A quick search revealed that the term "Jesus" returned just one or two hits, even though it was used hundreds, perhaps thousands of times on the site.

More research revealed that CSE doesn't use Google's regular data pool, meaning that just because you can find something with Google's regular search engine doesn't mean that you'll find it in your CSE. The docs seemed to indicate that I should submit an XML site map, so I found a good site that will crawl my site and generate one. I submitted it, and 4 weeks later the results were a little different but not really any better.

At that point I remembered I had a Google Hacks book, and checked it out. It turns out it was for Google's SOAP API, which they've discontinued. Google has a new thing called the AJAX API. Their interface is a slick little AJAX tool, but I really didn't like the way it looked. Then I noticed they have a section for Flash and Other Tools. That's where it all started to come together.

Using PHP and cURL, it's easy to send off a query and get the results back in a JSON stream, which is then easy to parse and render. I mentioned that to Dave Brondsema and he said "Oh, I started on that a while back, and made great progress, but got pulled away. You want what I have?" Score.

So I took what Dave had and made it into a couple different php functions for easy calling. I still need to clean it up some, and comment it better, but it works marvelously.

Typography is the study and creation of typefaces, or fonts. All the fonts on your computer were created by a person, or group of people at some point, and they labored over sizes, pixels, scaling, and style. Different font types have different purposes.

There are great typographers just like there are other great artists; people who can make a new font that is elegant and stylish and fills a need. Then there are people who study those people, to find out what makes them good at it. Is it art? Math? Both?

I recently found a cool post that showcases the handwriting of some great fontographers, so we can see how they write to see if there are any clues. I think some of them are quiet funny, and some very interesting. One woman has distinct deliberate fonts that she uses when she writes with a pen. That's really interesting to me.

Tonight Ema said "Hey, want to hear a joke?" I'm going to try to type it exactly as she told it, it's cuter.

A desk clerk and a customer are in a store, and the desk clerk asks the customer "Sir, how come you're buying only left shoes?"

The customer says "Because my dance instructor says I have two left feet!"

I seem to recall hearing that joke before, so I asked her if she'd made it up, or heard it from someplace. She assured me she made it up, so I asked again, and she said for sure, she made it up. She'd been thinking about the phrase two left feet and it just came it her. I think that's cool.

Last week our washing machine made a couple loud clicks, as if there were something metal in the tub. We checked it, and it was working fine, so we left it. A little while later we heard a squeal, and I said "Is that in the basement?" We hustled down there and there was smoke coming out of it. We'd fixed it once before (different symptoms) so we tore it apart, and found that the belt that turns the drum wasn't going, though the electric motor trying to make it go was spinning. Hence, smoke.

The repair man came and looked at it (charging $75 to tell us it was broken), and said if we could find the receipt then the transmission would be under warranty. Since we didn't have the receipt, the repair bill would be $400.

In light of that, we went shopping for a new machine. We could have purchased a new machine for less than the repair bill, but we decided to look at something solid. My wife has wanted a front-load washer for a while now, but I didn't really understand why until we started looking at them.

We ended up getting a GE 3.5 Cu. Ft. King-Size Capacity Front Load Washer from Home Depot. It's the cheapest of the front-loaders, which made us a little wary, but this review is what made us decide to get it. The reviewer keeps her water bills, and in her first year using the new front loader (the same one we have) she used 11,000 gallons less water than the previous year.

That seems really incredible to me, but apparently all front-loaders use less water than top loaders. The clothes come out a lot drier too, which means we run the dryer about 10 minutes less per load. Over time that'll add up nicely.

In honor of this new machine, I leave you with a favorite song. I actually saw this rendition performed live in the early 1980's.