Hey, I Can See In This Room!

Yesterday afternoon, and this morning, electricians installed lights in the north room and living room of our house. They did other stuff, too: but it's the new lighting that impressed me most.

We live in an old farmhouse that was extensively remodeled somewhere around 1970 or 1980. I'm told that having no ceiling lights was 'in' for a while back then.

For whatever reason, the two largest rooms on the ground floor had no lights at all in the ceilings. Which would have been fine, for folks who had enough floor and table lamps to spread around. And a lifestyle that allowed that sort of thing.

We didn't - both ways.

The living room was adequately lit, but the north room where I work? I had a desk lamp that provided pretty good light for my mouse pad - but apart from that, the room got pretty dark after sundown. Or on cloudy days.

Actually, the only time the room had adequate illumination - by my standards - was during the winter, on a clear day, with fresh snow outside.

That was then, this is now.

We've got three sets of broad-spectrum fluorescent lights in each room: and nice, even, good-enough illumination. Even by my standards.

I like it.

Dense Fog

I drove up to Hillsboro, North Dakota, today: and back. My wife and I had to take care of some business up there, involving the Spiral Light Candle company. That's what my son-in-law and #2 daughter have been working at developing for about a year now.

I'd hoped that the patchy fog we'd driven through on the way up would be gone this evening. Instead, starting between Fargo and Fergus Falls, we met light fog, medium fog, and downright emphatic fog.

It is not a good sign, when driving on an Interstate at night, when the lights of the semi in front of you disappear. Along, apparently, with the edge of the road.

I was very glad to be home, under our own roof, where I learned that there's a Dense Fog Advisory on until 10:00 a.m. tomorrow. Thankfully, I probably won't have to go out in it.

Now, an unabashed bit of self-promotion:

• Spiral Light Candle Corporation
  • Website, spirallightcandle.com
  • Spiral Light Candle Corp. Storefront
    (Our presence on Amazon.com)
• From another one of my blogs:
  • " 'Confidence' and a T-Shirt"
    Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind (January 19, 2012)
  • "Spiral Light Candle Factory Construction: More Photos"
    Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind (January 18, 2012)
  • "Factory Construction on Schedule; National Sales Manager Hired"
    Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind (January 4, 2012)
  • "Candles: Analysis, News, and Very Odd Questions"
    Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind (December 3, 2011)

The Case of the Incredible Jumping Posts

I've been annoyed recently by the way my posts behave. I'd load one, to see if I'd already said something, or check on what I had said. Or fix a typo.

The page with the post would load fine, except that it would jump down to around where the comments were. More or less. The post was there: but I had to scroll up to see it.

Annoying. And frustrating. Also a time-waster. It doesn't take long to scroll back to where a post starts: but it does take a little time, and that adds up after a while.

I looked in the HTML tags I'd put in the posts, to make lists or links: and they seemed okay. Nothing unusual, nothing wrong with the tags.

My son suggested that it might have something to do with the way my browser used cookies. Sure enough: the posts displayed fine in Chrome. So I tried dumping my FireFox browser's cookies. That sounds disgusting, by the way. Anyway, the posts still jumped.

Frustrating.

Then I noticed that the incredible jumping posts all had comments. Aha! That gave me something more to look for. I finally found this in a Blogger help forum:

• "Blank White Screen on certain posts in IE"
  Help forum, Blogger Help (January 13, 2012)

I don't use IE (Internet Explorer), except every few years when I have to deal with some company whose online presence won't work with anything except Internet Explorer. It's interesting, though, that an IE glitch showed up about the same time that my FireFox browser got the jumps.

The two issues could be related:

"...5) Description of the problem: The homepage loads fine, but when clicking on any article that contains comments with IE, the page loads completely, then goes to a blank white screen or it freezes completely. Posts with no comments load fine, so this problem is definitely comment related, and just started as the new threaded comments came out....

"...There is also a problem with Firefox 9.0.1 related to comments. When clicking on any post that has comments, the page auto-scrolls down to the comments instead of loading at the top of the page, or at the read more jump. Pages without comments load fine...."
("Blank White Screen on certain posts in IE")

There's more, including a way to fix the FireFox comment issue by changing about 14 lines of code in each blog's template. I am definitely not going to try doing that.

This, I will try:

"...We've raised this with Google Engineering. Until it is fixed I would suggest settings your comments to either Full-Screen or Pop up rather than Embed...."
("Blank White Screen on certain posts in IE")

It's simple, easily reversible, and may not annoy too many folks. Including me.

Now, to see if changing the comment settings works.

If this is something I have to do individually for each blog, I'll concentrate on my more-active blogs:

• A Catholic Citizen in America
• Apathetic Lemming of the North
• Starting a Small Business Without Losing My Mind

And, yes: That's an example of unabashed self-promotion.