I had so many hopes and dreams for this weekend. I was going to get so much done. Then I made the mistake of trying to modify the family website. When my father was in the process of passing away, emails within my family were getting a little out of control. So I bought some web space and put up a messageboard ^[1] as a perennial Christmas gift for the family. It’s gotten some real use, about 13,000 posts in less than 3 years. It makes planning events and staying in contact so much easier, especially as we get spread throughout the country.

Invision does a good job with their program. I am really satisfied with the service and the product as a whole. I have, because it is a family board, added a TON of smilies to it. It was getting out of control, so I started looking for some sort of way to categorize and paginate them. I finally found a mod at Invisionize ^[2], and it seemed to be exactly what I needed. A little work perhaps, but it looked like it would do the trick nicely.

I have to add a caveat: while I did notice that the 2.1.x code hadn’t been released yet, the site that had the demo on it worked, and it was IPB 2.1.3 so I figured that I could just do it with IPB 2.1.4 without a problem.

Nevertheless, after 16 hours of mucking around with 500+ gif names, playing with small bits of code, and more than a little cursing, I finally said “fuckit” and re-did everything back to the way it was. What an annoying waste of time. And it took me another 6 hours to get everything back to normal. Then I went out and got drunk watching The Matrix Reloaded ^[3], and woke up really late with a painful headache that is finally going away 12 hours later.

So, I didn’t do my ironing or shopping until today. I didn’t play around with my site until now, and that’s just to post this. I didn’t get to relax and surf the net, or even watch any football. I didn’t even get to celebrate MLK Day.

It was a waste of a weekend.