icons, pants and promises

I've got to go to bed, so I'll try to make this brief. It's another one of those multi-subject entries.

Favicons = A Fun Widget for Your Blog or Website

After a glorious 11 hours of sleep, I got up this afternoon, watched a little tv with John, went though my watchlist and email, and then spent most of the evening out. When I got home again, I finished my AOL Alerts and started going through blogs on my FeedBlitz list, which I'm nearly three weeks behind on. But the first blog I went to was Shelly's The View From Here, and she mentioned something that ate up the next four hours of so of my night at the computer.

Can you guess what it is? Take a look at the URL box at the top of your browser window, or the tab this blog is in, if your browser uses tabs. The thing I want you to see may not be there in IE, but if you're in Firefox or Netscape (probably Safari, too), it should be there. It's a tiny rendering of this graphic:

I made the large version in my usual special effects photo editor, ArcSoft PhotoStudio 2000, but the favicon was generated at http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/. All you do is upload the picture and tell the website to create the tiny icon. The site gives you an animated version and a still version. Then you download it, unzip the folder it's in, and upload it to wherever you usually upload your graphics. The code that you put in your web page or blog template goes in the "head" section at the top, after the word head in brackets and before /head in brackets. The code for my favicon in this blog looks like this:

link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://mavarin.com/faviconma.ico"

only in the < > brackets.

The downloaded favicon is called favicon.ico by default. The animated version has a longer default name and is a gif. Since I made a bunch of them, I added letters to each name to keep them distinct from each other. Cool! The only problem is that these things are so tiny that most images don't show up very well. You need something fairly simple, such as a letter or a simple logo. And the animated versions aren't very exciting. In fact, I can't decide whether they're "neato" or annoying.

Besides this blog, I put favicons on the mavarin.com website, the Round Robin Photo Challenges blog, the Life at St. Michael And All Angels news blog (that one doesn't look good) and the Messages from Mâvarin fiction blog.

Cheap Pants

I went to the gym tonight for the first time in a week, but before I did that I wanted something to eat. All I'd had at that point was two or three grapes, literally. So I went to the mall and had beef kabobs and Greek salad - no onions, no peppercinis, no olives, no pita.


After that I needed time to digest before working out, so I went to Dillard's. I ended up with four new pairs of pants, for a grand total of $23 and change. They were 75% off, and 30% off of the reduced price at the register. It was silly to get two pairs of light blue pants, but for $5.80 plus tax I couldn't pass them up, either.

Promises, Promises

After that I went to L.A. Fitness. The treadmills were all in use (at least, I thought they were; John later pointed out more of the machines on the other side of the second floor), so I decided to give the stationary bike a try. The pedaling was easy, but when I increased my speed to the posted target for a 50-year-old (I'll be 50 in March), it nearly killed me. I lasted less than three minutes! I checked in with John, who was doing an hour-twenty on the cross-trainer downstairs, and then found a treadmill. The good news: like last weekend, I did 20 minutes plus the 2-minute cooldown, this time with an incline and at a slightly higher speed. The bad news: at one point toward the end, the thing claimed my heat rate was 185! I don't necessarily believe this number, but I was definitely over 150 for most of the session, and at the end my lungs hurt a little. I'll have to be a little patient and a little careful. But I need to keep my promise to myself that I'll continue to work out, and eat better, and start moving my weight downward instead of upward.


One thing I did in aid of this was buy myself new gym pants at a store in the Safeway shopping center. They have women's sizes, and I've been meaning to check them out for quite some time. I didn't really think they'd have gym pants, but they did, and in my size, and long enough to touch my shoes. My old ones are calf length, and John hates them. I was so pleased that I also bought a badly-needed nightgown for $15.

Now for the other promises I did and did not keep tonight. I promised to take care of an overdue hospital bill today, from that stress test I had months ago. I ran out of time, but I'll do it tomorrow. I also promised myself I'd pick up the many messages on my home phone number. I'm sure some of them are related to that hospital bill, and others are undoubtedly from various Democrats wanting my money, my votes, and my activism. Again, I'll do that on Sunday.

Father Smith gave me more sermons recorded in wma format, and I got John to upload them over his Cox connection. I need to post links to them,and ultimately I'll want to convert them to mp3 and upload those. I also promised to burn a CD of photos taken of prayer shawls and a quilt, so the ECW ladies at church can have photos printed. Now where are my blank CDs?

Karen

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