Slate Scrabbles

I just installed 9 slate tiles in our front entry area at lunch.  Tiles.  Like Scrabble.  Only with the worst typography ever!  You can’t even spell anything with the tiles I used.  And they’re imperfect.  The weird thing is that the imperfection is the stuff that you want to avoid in some parts of life, but they make the slate cool.

The slate has lots of colors and I had to cut it down by a quarter inch or so on both of the sides (it’s a square tile, so you only cut two sides).  It has different thicknesses, too.  We could have found similar thicknesses, but that would have taken potentially hours or choosing colors and patterns we didn’t like just for a thickness difference.

Part of me worries that this looks like a total “DIY” project.

Part of me worries that it will make our house look less cool to some guess.

Part of me worries that I’m even worrying.

It’s kind of like having a crap set of letters in Scrabble and you play near a triple word score and you’re worried that the other person has a Z or Q and they’re totally going to eat you alive.  Except it’s tile – so really it doesn’t matter that much.  Next month I could rip it out and put in something else that we like more.

Who’s winning?

Loading CKEditor with jQuery Promises

I needed to load up the CKEditor library dynamically as part of a module pattern using jQuery’s promises.  I kept getting issues about broken paths to files like the skin and the language files due to the context not being the root server path.  Because the software I’m working on is installed internationally and on all sorts of servers with different paths I couldn’t use the CKEditor config.baseHref setting.  The fastest way to accomplish this is through a custom load script (instead of $.getScript) like so:

function loadScript(srcURL) {
 var deferred = new $.Deferred();
 var e = document.createElement('script');
 e.onload = function () { deferred.resolve(); };
 e.src = srcURL;
 document.getElementsByTagName("head")[0].appendChild(e);
 return deferred.promise();
 }

Then you can just pass loadScript the URL to CKEditor (or another complex library that will do sub-sequent downloads and path references) and it will execute in the global space.

Teachable Moment

Jessica and I were having a very brief discussion about a new movie that is out and I said that the male lead was described as a stud by someone who saw the movie.  The 9yo walked by and said, “A stud is a piece of a lego.”

Yes, yes it is.

Time for a euphemism lesson?  I think not.