#365Gratitude Day 13:Thought of

So deep in my lizard brain, my big weakness is that I think I don't matter to people.  It's my kryptonite, the idea that when I'm no right with them, making them laugh or feel good, I'm invisible, and irrelevant.

I know, I know, it's nonsense.  

It's just the bad place my head goes sometimes because of stuff I went through growing up.

Anyhow, the 13th was, like it is every year, my birthday.  And this thing happened, which happens every year, which every time it does, makes me feel so damn good.  I got a flood of good wishes and thoughtful gestures.

On social media I got over 100 such nice wishes from people in various places.  My wife made me amazing home made soup for my birthday dinner.  My sister-in-law, MB gave me a huge canvas print of my favorite piece of art, he Great Wave Off Kanagawa,  

So beautiful

And my brother called me, and sang to me.

All of which are a giant punch-in-the-throat to that awful lizard voice.  Sometime in the next 12 months I'm gonna hear the lizard voice again.  But as I always do, I'll remember stuff like this, and tell it to shut itself right up.

I'm pretty lucky.

#365Gratitude Day 12:Like a version

So, remember that gratitude from yesterday?

Well, I figured it out.  All by myself.  Go me!  

Prepare for technobabble.  Feel free to put on Madonna's "Like a Virgin" to listen to while you read said technobabble, if you like.

So, I'm using a special bootstrap template, called SB-Admin-2.  That template is a series of javascript, css, and supporting files used to give a website a certain look and feel, a style for your front end.  Part of what the template employs is an absolutely wonderful jQuery plugin called DataTables.  DataTables takes your out-of-the-box plain old HTML table and makes it super fancy.    You can sort stuff, filter, paginate, all kinds of awesome goodness.  

DT is in fact SO fancy that it has all these extensions which can make it do YET MORE THINGS.

One of those extensions is called Responsive, and its whole purpose is to make DT act, well, responsively.  When your window shrinks because you're on a phone or tablet, DataTables will do awesome, space-aware things too, like hide columns, or shove data down into a "child row" for you.  Part of that is shoving only the columns you want, when you want.

Well, that's fine in theory, but when I went to use it in my day job it did no such thing.

I figured out why.

FIRST it's because SB-Admin-2 while beautiful, wonderful, and all-inclusive, like a package vacation is somewhat dated.  It does ship with versions of bootstrap, data tables, and even responsive included.  

And that's just fine.  Except that picking which columns have priority to stay visible is a feature that's newer than the version shipped with the template.

Here, I'll show you.

This is a little screen capture of the top of the responsive javascript library.  My handy little green arrow points to the version of the extension, that being 1.0.6

And here's the page that describes how to use responsivePriority.  It works as of version 2.0.0.

In a word...

BOOM.

I love when I figure shit out!

#365Gratitude Day 11:It's a package deal

So I work in Information Technology for my day job.  Another way to put that is that I'm a professional Figure Stuff-Out'er.

I've had this thorny thing I've been working through, that involves tables, buttons, responsive design, and all sorts of slick javascript related what-not.

I happened upon a potential solution to said thorny thing around 3am, while dreaming, and then immediately got on my phone to look it up, saw it might work for me, and bookmarked it to use.

Well, many hours later I tried it, and even though it should have worked, it didn't.

But I achieved a reasonable compromise anyhow, through trial-and-error and my own refusal to be denied.  I got it to the place of Good Enough.

I have some ideas about why the thing didn't work, and I'll look into it.

Why is this a gratitude?  Because having and solving mysteries is my job.  I like that job.

#365Gratitude Day 10:An incredibly awful pun

This may be the worst pun I've ever heard.  Enjoy!

#365Gratitude Day 9:Best and Most Beautiful

Yesterday Valentalae told me about this utterly amazing documentary.

It's called "Best and Most Beautiful Things."

It's about a legally blind, autistic girl named Michelle Smith.  As it happens, she's an age player.  As it also happens, she listens to the podcast.

If you're listening carefully, you can hear her talk about and quote something Valentalae often says, about non-consensual ageplay.  And then later on, she quotes something I often say, too.  

You go watch the whole thing, and see if you can catch where.  I won't spoil it for you.

This documentary is utterly brilliant.  It shows the very real life of a very real person.  She's not some sort of plucky-yet-disabled low budget superhero (thanks Vee, for giving me that verbiage).  She loses her stuff.  And sometimes, she loses her shit.

She's blessedly, wonderfully, perfectly imperfect.  Just like everyone.

That's kind of the point of the whole documentary.  I'm glad it exists, and that she does.  She's an awesome person.

If you want to watch it, it's on Netflix, PBS has it to show for a while, and I know it's coming to iTunes, if it hasn't already.