Some Blog Site

Our church is looking to have some changes done to the building, so we retained an architect to draw plans for the work. His initial proposal gave us a few options, and we are to select which option we want and then he will draw the real plans.

For the initial proposal, there was a rendered drawing of how the church would look with a certain change. One of the church members commented to the architect that the drawing looked pretty good, and then he asked him what software program he used to do the 3-D drawing. The architect’s response was “Google Sketchup“.

I hadn’t thought of asking that question, and I certainly didn’t expect the architect’s answer. I figured they must have some expensive architectural-type software that they use. But apparently Sketchup is good enough for them, and probably easier than whatever they have. And the price is good, of course, like all of Google’s products.

Some people worry about having all of their computer stuff run by Google – putting all their eggs in one basket. Iit is certainly possible to do just about everything online through a Google service. If anything happens to Google, or something changes such as now some things are pay services, then you would have to change your whole online experience if you used Google products for everything. But I don’t see that as a likely event.

I recently had to deal with the government, and part of that involved completing an application. The application could be via phone, paper form, or online form. I chose online form, as I thought it would be the easiest and fastest. I chose poorly.

Although most of my life is up-to-date, my home entertainment is still in the Neolithic period (I was going to type Stone Age instead of Neolithic period, but I can’t). I have dial-up internet access and broadcast TV – broadcast analog TV, on a cathode ray tube. The broadcast TV part means that the federal government is going to improve things, which means my life gets disrupted. I have to buy a digital-to-analog TV signal converter, otherwise my TV won’t work next year. But the government decided that, since they’re going to make a boatload of money on this deal, they would be nice and subsidize converter boxes for the masses.

So I went to the government site to order two coupons. The site looks nice, but it is a horrible site. I entered my information and clicked the Submit button. What happened? The form cleared my information. Was my information submitted? Do I need to re-enter it? The site had earlier mentioned to remember my confirmation number, but I got no confirmation number. Do I need to wait for a confirmation number? Is my submittal being processed? No feedback whatsoever, so I waited a few minutes (the site had said that the submittal could take a few minutes), tried again, and the same thing happened.

It turns out that the site does not play nicely with browsers other than IE. I was using Firefox, like any good internet user should. The reason I am writing negatively toward the government website dtv2009.gov is not because it just didn’t like Firefox, but that the website people should know that and either fix it (preferred) or warn users that the website is bad and won’t work with their browsers (not preferred, but still better than just not working and not caring why). So I used IE and got my confirmation number. The End.

I made changes to my Word Press theme last night. The dark/bright yellow/gold color is a bit much though. I’m thinking of changing it to more of a pale yellow so as not to distract from the text of the blog. I’ll probably be experimenting with the colors and layout designs some more in the future.  Further bulletins as events warrant.

I was having problems viewing certain websites in Firefox. They were pages I viewed often, so it was very annoying that the sites would not work. They would appear to ignore any CSS. I could still use the web pages because the HTML was there, but the pages were less effective than usual. Opera displayed the pages correctly, so I knew that the page source itself was fine.

After days of searching, I finally found the solution: force a full reload. Read the MozillaZine article about it, and look for the text about “Bypass the cache and reload the current page, by holding down the Shift key as you click the “Reload” button on the toolbar.”

I was almost amazed that it was that simple. I figured something had happened with the recent upgrade that Firefox had downloaded for itself. But it made sense, somewhat. Only the most-used pages looked bad because Firefox was using the cache for the style sheets. Most other pages did not have the CSS in my Firefox cache already, so it had to download a fresh copy.