Pajama Saturday

Today was one of the more relaxing days in recent memory. I felt a bit overdue for a pajama Saturday, the only rule of which is no street clothes. (I cheated a bit in my early morning jaunt out for the daily bread, but the PJs were there... under a pair o' jeans.) The day was spent perusing Julie's iTunes collection, listening to the radio broadcast of Otello at the Met, eating well, tackling some techy challenges and just plain relaxing. It's been delightful. I can think of more productive Saturdays I've passed at home, but not many that were better spent.

In many ways, it's been the antithesis of the kind of day the poor soul who drafted this to-do list must be having:



Hardly on the same plane as kicking the junk, my results from today include changes to the look and feel of the Rooster's home on the web. I hope you enjoy the new rotating banners. (See a new one by clicking here!)

Pouring over photo albums to select them was tremendous fun, as was troubleshooting the Javascript to incorporate the rotating banner into my Blogger template. I started with a slightly modded version of Blogger's "Tic Tac Blue" layout, and found the script here. Tweaking the template to make the images fit neatly (which I'd say I've only 85% accomplished) required a lot of parsing of the template's HTML, a fun challenge. Less fun was figuring out why the script would not rotate through banners contained in a draft post hosted by Blogger. It appears that the kind folks at Google have anticipated this kind of use, and for reasons that aren't clear to me, prohibited it. (Images saved in draft posts will load fine when you browse them directly, but fail if you call them through an <img> tag generated by Javascript.) Beats me, but I settled for simply hosting them elsewhere.

Following a tip from the Idealog, I've also created a feed that integrates post, comments and my Google Reader shared items into one RSS 2.0 feed. (There's an atom version as well.) A great idea, but I share Jeff's skepticism: so far, FeedBlendr seems a little twitchy. We'll have to see how it plays out. Your feedback, should you choose to use it, would be most welcome.

Julie and I also had a chance to play around with Audacity, which I've used pretty extensively in the past, and Garage Band, an application I can tell will repay considerably more attention. Here's the product of our first few minutes of audio, um, engineering on her Mac.



I hope you've also had a pleasant Saturday, however you've spent it.