Here it is at 7pm (EST) on Halloween night. The “Trick-or-Treaters” are just starting to pour in and I’m here in the office with the candy bowl finalizing the switch of Jasongraphix over to it’s new default theme “Contemporary Home”. I initially started this new theme in late August to commemorate the purchase of my wife and I’s first home, but the progress was so slow that I decided to sign up for the 2^nd biannual CSSReboot to give myself a solid deadline. That decision made for a tough couple weeks, but I am very happy with the results.

You can think of it as a halloween costume…that this site will be wearing for a long time. The initial “1900s Scrapbook” style theme was featured at CSSVault, Stylegala, Screenspire, i-marco’s Choice, and yes, even Jason Santa Maria’s Oddities and Diversions list. Since there are over 900 people participating in the Fall 2005 CSSReboot, I don’t suspect the new theme will receive quite as much attention, but I definitely think it’s an improvement over the old design and a much needed change of scenery.

The good news is that whether you like, or don’t like my new theme, you can change it to your own taste. If you prefer the previous the old turn-of-the-century look, just use the “select style” dropdown box on the homepage and select 1900s. If you’d rather see the site with minimal or no styling, you can do that too from the style selector. Well, the kids outiside are wearing out our doorbell and pounding on the door so I better get back to my duties as a homeowner on Halloween. Enjoy!

Update: I’m not sure how “legal” this is, and please don’t abuse it, but you can Click Here (★ ★ ★ ★ ★) to give my site a 5 star vote on CSSReboot. I got frustrated with telling people how to browse to my site to vote for it, and their system is pretty simple, so I set this up. I guess it’d only be fair if I also gave you the opportunity to give me a 1, 2, 3, or 4 as well.

After Dan Cederholm made his argument yesterday that CSS “Hacks” should really be called CSS Patches, I decided it was time for me to explain how to make a Drywall Hack…er, Patch! Unlike in pseudo repair jobs done to css to account for browser inconsistencies, this process actually involves making a physical patch for an honest-to-goodness hole in a brick-and-mortar (well, drywall actually) wall.

Exhibit A:

Yes, that’s a hole…in the wall of our upstairs bathroom. Although I’m tempted to say “I’ve always wanted to punch a hole in a wall”, and that “I did it for the sake of this tutorial”, I have to admit that the hole was there when my wife and I moved in. It was actually hidden below 3 layers of wallpaper that we removed, and patched with a business card for a car dealership. No joke…I guess that’s how you know you’ve moved to SC. Being the son of a master carpenter and the son-in-law of a tile mason, I’m not one to resort to shoddy home-improvement techniques so I thought I’d write up a tutorial on how to properly patch a medium-sized hole in a section of drywall. There are many methods to repairing drywall but the technique that I’m going to cover here is often referred to as a California Patch and can be used to repair a hole between studs that is too large to glaze over with drywall putty.

Before we begin, you will need a piece of drywall that is at least 4-5 inches wider and taller than your hole. Often times, if you go to a home-improvement store, they will have broken pieces of drywall that they will give you or sell at an exremely discounted price. I was able to buy a half-sheet (because I know there will be more patches to make before our home improvement is done here) for only $1.02! You will also need the items pictured above:

• Keyhole Saw
• Utility Knife
• Metal Ruler (or T Square)
• Pencil
• Spackling Paste
• Putty Knife

Step 1

With a keyhole saw, cut away any crumbled or damaged drywall around the hole. Try to make your new, larger hole as rectangular as possible.

Step 2

Measure the width and height of the new hole. Draw a rectangle of the same dimensions on the spare piece of drywall and cut it out, leaving about 1 inch around the rectangle. To make a clean cut, score it repeatedly with the utility knife using a metal ruler as a guide.

Step 3

Hold up the patch to your hole to visually check to see if the penciled rectangle is about the same size as the hole. It’s a good idea to measure it again just to be sure.

Step 4

The secret to the California patch is in the fact that drywall has thick paper on both sides. Laying a metal ruler along the line that represents a side of the hole, score across the entire patch, but do not cut all the way through. Once you’ve scored about halfway through the drywall, snap it off like a Kit-Kat bar and peel the gypsum away from the back layer of paper. Repeat the process all the way around the patch as shown above.

Step 5

Place the patch over the hole (with the excess-paper-side out) and gently press the drywall “key” into the hole. Do not jam the patch into the hole because we have to pull it back out again in a second. If it doesn’t fit into the whole, trim away at hole with the keyhole saw or utility knife until it does. Once it does fit nicely, pencil around the excess paper and then remove the patch from the wall again.

Step 6

Using a utility knife, score the wall along the lines you created in the previous step. Then, Peel away the paper around the hole. What we’re doing here, is evening out the two surfaces by making it one layer of paper thick instead of two.

Step 7

Using a putty knife, apply spackling paste around the hole and on the patch. Try not to get it too thick where the paper will lie against the wall, but apply a thin layer so that the paper will stick.

Step 8

Re-insert the patch into the wall, SLOWLY, just until it feels even with the rest of the wall. At this point, you probably want to give it a few hours to dry so it’s a little more solid to putty over. Once it is, apply a thin layer of spackling paste over the entire patch. Allow this to dry, sand and repeat until the wall is smooth.

That’s it. Once you prime and paint, nobody will ever know the hole was even there. If this was helpful, or if you have any additional tips, please feel free to leave them in the comments below.

Update - 1/27/2007: If you are doing this type of patch on a ceiling or anywhere that might need more support, put a scrap piece of wood into the hole as shown in the quick diagram I made below. Use drywall screws to fasten the wood to the existing drywall before putting your patch in and when you’re done, put a couple more screws through the patch and into the wood backer to be sure it doesn’t fall on your head before it dries. I used this method when I removed some old can lights in a hallway and it worked great.

Good Luck! - Jason

After a long period geocaching quiescence, I’ve been re-inspired to get out there and start caching again. Last night I attended the Geoholics First Anniversary Meeting and met some people who were new to geocaching, some (like myself) who had recently become addicted, and quite a few “hardcore veterans”. So what does the average geocacher look like? You tell me. We were quite a diverse group.

While there, I heard stories of tricky caches, creative containers, and lucky finds. There are quite a few geocaches hidden in the area around where Ames and I live, and I just picked up a bike mount on eBay for my GPSr, so I’m looking forward to getting back out there and using multi-billion dollar military satellites to find Tupperware hidden in the woods…

Living in apartments for the last 5 years has really limited Amy and I’s exposure to the whole Halloween/Trick-Or-Treating thing, and although I’m not as big a fan of Halloween as Jason Santa Maria, I am excited about giving out candy this year at our new house. We live in a very well-established neighborhood with lots of families, so I’m guessing we’ll have droves of Pirates, Princesses, and… iPods? to treat. We’ve got a long, wooded sidewalk that winds up to our front door that would be great for luminaries, and last night we carved a couple pumpkins to go by the front door:

You can click on the picture for Amy’s post (and more pictures), or just hover over it to see what they look like in the light. Amy found a pattern for her Shrek Pumpkin online at CarvingPumpkins.com. I decided I wanted to do a Gators pumpkin, but couldn’t find a pattern anywhere, so I made my own using a wallpaper I found online. I had to work with it a bit in Photoshop to get a black and white pattern to go by, so if there’s any Gator fans out there wondering how to make one of these:

1. Download this image.
2. Print it out as big as you can.
3. Clean out your pumpkin and tape the pattern on where you want it.
4. Poke holes around all the black areas.
5. Remove the paper pattern.
6. Cut along the dotted lines with a pumpkin carving saw.

I probably make it sound too easy. It took us both about 3 hours to get our pumpkins carved, but neither of us have done intricate pumpkin carving before…so I’m sure it might take some people less…but it’s really not that hard.

Update - I’ve gotten 8 more of these non blacklistable comment spams since I made this post. Apparently my little random letter doohickey didn’t do the trick. I think I need to go ahead and upgrade to MT 3.2. In the mean time, I’ll be deleting comments. Argh.

I’ve been having a lot of comment spam slipping past MTBlacklist lately and the bummer is that most of it is non-blacklistable. If you have a blog, you’ve probably seen a lot of it too. Comments like this:

Interesting site, and very organized too. Good work. About a year ago I started: http://matrixsynth.com/blog/index.php/2005/09/06/ exclusively_analogue_sequencer_on_the_ba_1 , hours drive from where

and this:

It’s been a long time since I so enjoyed reading posts in the net. Two thumbs up! Naked truth: http://www.andrewsblog.net/?p=40 , Extensive methods for this

These comments usually have a generic sounding and random name like Christopher Freeman, Thomas Davis, or Jacob Chapman. The email address is always a random first name at msn, gmail, or yahoo. And the link is always to a real blog entry at a real blog, like Marco’s Mint Review. I’m not sure if this is some backwards way of linking to sites that link to sites of linkspammers to increase google rank, or if they’re just trying to piss off people like me who are using off-the-shelf spam prevention measures. Either way, I’m pissed off.

I wanted to come up with a custom, but easy to setup/change spam blocking solution that didn’t require my visitors to go through some drawn-out authorization or a separate comment preview. My original idea was to have visitors type a random word. I figured somebody had to have already done this, so I Googled around and found this post. Their solution was simple. Look for the code in (mt cgi folder)/lib/MT/App/Comments.pm that validates whether the text field is populated and add another if statement that checks to see if a new text box contains the secret letter. That filled most of my requirements, but I wanted to have a question whose answer wasn’t hard coded on to the comments.pm file, and I wanted a question wasn’t static. I added a little php to my individual archive pages to generate a random letter:

$spoon = mt_rand(0, 25);
$alphabetSoup = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ';
$randomLetter = $alphabetSoup[$spoon];

I then added two new inputs to my comment form. One was the textbox for the user to enter a letter, and one was a hidden field, both with a value populated with $randomLetter. I know, I know…this isn’t so secure, but if it stops all comment spam for a week, I’ll be happy. When (if?) I do get comment spam again, I’ll be ready to change it again. Now that I’ve got this authentication built in, I can think of all kinds of fun ways to change it to throw off the commentspam engines. Until then…it’s late, Amy just finished her homework (Yes, she was working on homework till midnight on Sunday.), and I think we’re off to bed.