Yeah, yeah, I know, the book is "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," but...

There is a satisfaction in getting things done on automobiles as well, even if you don't do it all yourself, although doing it yourself definitely provides some extra satisfaction.

Today, Jeanie and I replaced the rear liftgate lift struts on the Durango.  The Dodge dealer was going to charge $100 to do it, we did it for $62 in parts.  It was quite simple.  While Jeanie held up the liftgate, I removed the old lifts - one at a time - and replaced them with the new aftermarket gas struts from Advance Auto Parts.   I also replaced the wiper blades.  The nice folks at Advance Auto replaced the battery which was definitely on its last gasps.  Jeanie and I both love our local Dodge dealership's service department (Rick Keffer), and we do have them do oil changes and major service, but I just couldn't justify spending $125 to have them replace the battery when Advance Auto installed an exact replacement (750 cca, large case) for $75 or paying a $40 premium for the lift struts that took us all of ten minutes to replace.

Saturday was nice...

Jeanie, Cali and I left the house at 11:00am and drove into town.   The plan was to park downtown, walk to center street, go to the farmer's market, catch the Veteran's Day Parade, then go to the Art Fair.  Unfortunately, either we misinterpreted when the parade would go down Center street, or the parade started early.  We parked on Beech street because that was as close as we could get, then walked to Center street.  We ended up catching the tail end of the parade.  We missed the marching bands which was a disappointment for me, but did see the pirate ship, which reminded us that our planning wasn't so good, as in hindsight, we wouldn't have taken Cali and subjected her to the booms of the canons on the ship.

After the parade, we walked over to the farmer's market where we ended up purchasing a meatball stromboli, a spakakopita and a raspberry turnover from one of the baked goods vendors.  We found a bench in the shade on Center Street, and the three of us enjoyed our baked goods.

After brunch, we walked through the art fair.  Cali was very popular.  There were some nice pieces - especially some stained glass - but alas, it was all too rich for our budget.  We walked around the marina for a few minutes then walked back through the art fair and back to the car.

After leaving downtown, we drove to the Publix shopping center where there were two Florida Georgia Blood Alliance bloodmobiles and I gave blood while Jeanie and Cali did some window shopping.

After completing my donation, we drove down Sadler and got a dipped cone at Dairy Queen.  We then drove to the north end of the island and parked at the North End Park parking lot and tried to go for a walk on the beach but were blocked by the sand replenishment project's large pipes which ran the length of the beach for quite a distance in either direction.

After watching the replenishment folks work for a while, which was quite interesting, we drove to the north end of main beach, parked, and took a short stroll on the beach.

After our walk, we drove back past home and while Cali and I picked up Chick-Fil-A sandwiches for dinner, Jeanie picked up a movie at blockbuster.  We didn't end up watching the movie Saturday evening, but I'm sure we'll get to it later in the week.

Sunday was okay...

I went to the airport around nine for my weekly get-together with the regulars at the airport.  After sitting around the FBO and chatting for a while, I walked around the T-hangar area and chatted with some other folks.

Around 11:00am, I returned home and Jeanie and I ate a nice brunch of green salad with grilled chicken.

Neither Jeanie nor I slept well Saturday night, so after lunch we took a short nap.

After the nap, we decided to tackle the garage.  The goal was to clean and organize the garage to the point where we could make room to actually park the RAV-4 in the garage.  While we did make quite a bit of progress, we did not actually achieve our goal.  Had we had another hour or two of daylight and another hour or two of energy, we might have succeeded, although I am not sure as there is still about 7 1/2 pounds of "stuff" that we are trying to cram into a 5 pound sack.  We did end up with a number of items going into the round file and a number going into the Goodwill box which did help.   With a fresh start, we may be able to increase the efficiency of our storage scheme, or we may find some more nominees for relocation.  Even if that is not the case, by early next year, Jeanie will complete the refinishing of the bookcase headboard her dad made for us, as well as the refinishing of one of our old oak end tables.  Once we get those into the house, that should make enough room to start parking the RAV-4 in the garage.

Since we were both tired and neither of us was in the mood to cook, we drove to the new McDonalds in Yulee and went through the drive-thru.

I sometimes have the desire to display HTML code in a post rather than having the browser interpret it.

Lately, I have been using the wonderful WLW plugin Insert Code Snippet to accomplish this.

In my wanderings today, I learned about two alternatives - the HTML tags <pre></pre> (for preformatted text) and <xmp></xmp> which indicates a block of text where all HTML tags are ignored.  Of the two, <xmp> more precisely accomplishes what I want, but it is deprecated.

As an example, consider the following:

<> & &plusmn; <ahref="http://www.blogdom.org">test</a>

using the <pre> tag, you end up displaying:

<> & ± test

with the <xmp> tag, you get the full desired string of:

<> & &plusmn; <ahref="http://www.blogdom.org">test</a>

Interestingly, while entering this entry, I discovered that if I just type the HTML in any view other than the HTML Code view in WLW, what I type is what gets displayed in the blog entry (i.e. WLW translates the special characters into HTML entities rather than writing them to the blog for them to be interpreted by the browser).

Hmm...

ScottIsAFool wrote a wonderful WLW plugin he calls the Insert Placeholder plugin.  It can be found here: http://groups.msn.com/windowslivewriter/generaltopics.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5698

The plugin allows you to include text you want to appear in your blog entry that you don't want WLW to munge or to interpret while you are editing.  The example Scott uses is adSense javascript code, but it also works for any HTML type code that you want to protect from the WYSIWYG munger.

For the example below I entered the regular characters into the Writer Editor box and the HTML entities into the blog entry box.  As a note, I could have also entered the HTML entities into the Writer Editor box - the plugin protects the HTML entities from the WYSIWYG munger.  The advantage of doing this is that you can see what the HTML entities will look like in the posted entry prior to publishing.

The one negative with the plugin is that it forces the blog text onto its own line, so you can't use it to embed inline HTML within a sentence.  Still, it is a great plugin for what most people would want to use it for.

A couple of times, I have encountered an issue with Windows Live Writer related to the handling of special characters like in Crème Brûlée.

The issue was that in WLW everything appears fine, but when posted to the blog, it displayed as Crème Brûlée.

The only way I could get the text to display properly was to enter the special characters as HTML entities like this:

Crème Brûlée

I should note that in the above initial example, I did not enter the characters directly into WLW, but instead copied them from a web page then pasted them into the WLW editor.

I posted an item on the Windows Live Writer MSN Group and got a very quick response.

The net of the solution was:

Ah, here's the problem. The encoding is simply declared incorrectly in your blog template. If you change this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

to this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

everything will work fine. You can confirm this by forcing your browser to display your homepage in UTF-8 (in IE7, right-click on the page and select Encoding | UTF-8; in Firefox, it's on the View menu).

Here is a sample of Crème Brûlée that was copied from another page and pasted into WLW so you can see the difference between the display with iso-8859-1 and UTF-8 encodings (you'll have to force the display as noted in the solution above).

So, one option is to edit each of the master templates in Movable Type to use the charset-utf-8 directive and then rebuild the site.  Since I don't use special characters that often, I am going to hold off on doing that since I am concerned that the change might break something else.

The other option is just to convert the special characters manually to HTML entities.  Of course, to do this, one would need a list of the characters and their corresponding Entity Names.  Fortunately, there are many pages out there with this information concisely captured and nicely formatted including:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

and

http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html

just for starters.  For a longer list, Google HTML Entities.

Unfortunately, there is what I consider to be a bug in WLW.  If I enter the HTML entities into WLW in the HTML Code View, then switch to any of the other views, when I switch back to the HTML Code View, the HTML entities are converted into their character equivalents, effectively overriding the HTML code that was entered.  The only way I have identified to work around this is to not switch back to a WYSIWYG view prior to publishing. Of course, if you have want to edit the entry at a later date, you will have to remember to switch to the HTML Code View prior to opening the entry, or the HTML will get munged.

One of the great values that Blogdom provides to me is that it serves as a repository for helpful tips and tricks that I have discovered along the way.  Unfortunately, my mind usually isn't sharp enough to remember the tip or trick, but fortunately, at least sometimes, it is sharp enough to remember that I had encountered the challenge previously, came up with a solution, and maybe even recorded the solution for posterity in a post.

Such was the case today.  I had received a Lotus Notes email at work with an animated GIF as an inline (or embedded) image.  To my knowledge, there is no easy way to save such an image from Notes as a GIF file - even saving it as a BMP is a bit of a challenge.  But, I figured I could forward the email to my personal email account, then extract the image from Outlook.  Ultimately, it turned out I was right, but I needed the trick captured in this post from 2004 to accomplish it.

And boy did I spent a lot of time in the air...

The weather for the last few days has just been glorious - crystal clear skies, comfortable temperatures on the ground and gentle breezes.

On Saturday, I rode as safety pilot for one of the CAP members doing instrument approaches.  We went up to Brunswick GA (SSI) and shot a couple of approaches, then returned home.  It was a little bumpy, but not bad, and the sky was clear and beautiful.

On Sunday, I flew the CAP 172 for a little over an hour.  It had been a while since I had spent an hour just focusing on proficiency, so I spent the time doing touch and goes, slow flight, steep turns, turns around a point, etc.  When I am doing that kind of flying I don't get to enjoy the scenery much, but I think it is important to regularly focus on the basics, and even if I don't get to look around much, I do enjoy the skills work.

After I landed, I noticed a couple of the flying club members pushing their airplane back into the hanger, so after I got the CAP plane back in the hangar, I walked over to chat.  As I was chatting with them, another flying club member who happens to have a hangar facing theirs walked up and mentioned that he was going to take his Citabria up for a spin, and asked if I wanted to go with.  Gee, twist my arm...  Turns out, he was literal in his offer to go up for a spin.  And a loop, and some rolls, and a half-Cuban, and some snap rolls, and...  To say I had a blast would be a massive understatement.  It had been years since I had ridden in an airplane doing aerobatics - back then it was also in a two person tandem airplane with a stick rather than a yoke; the main difference between that plane (a Super Decathlon) and this was that the Decathlon had a fully inverted fuel and oil system, a larger engine and a constant speed prop so it could do more "stuff" .  It was just as much fun as I had remembered.  For years, I have had a dream to one day own an aerobatic airplane and learn how to perform aerobatics - maybe some day...

As I was walking back to the truck, I happened upon our CAP squadron commander who was just getting ready to go up to do some proficiency flying in the CAP airplane.  He asked if I would like to go with.  "Sure," I said.  I quickly changed back into my CAP golf shirt, and off we went.  I hadn't gotten to do that much "sightseeing" on either of the day's earlier excursions, so I took the opportunity to fully enjoy the view while flying with Nick.

I guess this weekend was a good demonstration of that old definition of luck: when opportunity meets preparedness.  I definitely felt lucky this weekend.