WOW I feel like such an idiot. I was just experiencing this bizarre phenomenon a few minutes ago where my website looked about 80% it’s normal size in Firefox, and I went mad for about 15 minutes trying to figure out why. I thought maybe I messed up the coding of my theme so I tried applying a different one, but nope I opened my site in Internet Explorer (in which it was perfectly normal) and it was still abnormally shrunk. At first I thought it was just the fonts and images but no it was the whole enchilada: backgrounds and tables and divs and everything, just SHRUNK. Even an external image! And if I visited a direct link to an image of mine, it would look all happy and normal at first, but if I clicked to a different tab and came back to it–SHRUNK.

It was driving me crazy and since it was happening to EVERYTHING as a whole, whether I visited it as part of a page or not, I was completely lost as to what could be causing it. It wasn’t happening to any other website or even any other sites on my hosting. Finally I went and sent a message to Dreamhost Support, and not 2 minutes after I did that did the idea finally hit me…

“View, Zoom, Reset.”

I must have accidentally smashed a bunch of keyboard keys while I was painting (had my canvas basically sitting on top of it most of the time and I kept hearing little beeps and whatnot) so when my site was open it must have entered the command in the Firefox menu to “Zoom Out.” Gosh I felt like such a moron, I was happy to see that Dreamhost’s Support section had a link to “Withdraw Message”, so hopefully they never see it at all hahaha.

Anyways I wasn’t in the mood to start on more new pictures so I had been updating old ones, and I’m going to go ahead and cram them all here because they’re pretty scattered and I don’t want you having to hunt around and try and figure it out…

Enjoy! More coming hopefully soon. Btw, EVERYTHING in my portfolio is now being added to my DeviantArt, so feel free to visit there to comment or favourite or whatever ;)

Oh and new affiliate!

Well obviously I can’t wait to finish editing ALL my photos before sharing any with you!! I’ve just added 50 pictures to my new album, Botanical Gardens (from Atlanta, Georgia), so take a look and enjoy!

There’s still at least 35 more going into that album, if there’s no other updates I’ll probably just modify this post to let you know.

I also want to share my great excitement because I GOT MY FIRST RAISE and it is just so totally awesome :D Work is going great, today was MADNESS though because I had to play Musical Dogs X-Treme–there was supposed to be about 25 animals coming in between today and tomorrow to board over the weekend (BTW for those who don’t know, I work at an animal hospital) and there seemed to be a crisis in fitting them all so I was running around like a psycho with two lists, a sharpie, and masking tape, trying to sort out where our current animals needed to be moved to and where the incoming ones were supposed to go. MADNESS. And then of course 5 of those animals were no-shows so it almost wasn’t even worth it…that’s the second time we’ve had to play MD though so we’re gonna have to figure out a better system for having a place for everyone and everyone in their place. It’s not that they overbook reservations, it’s just we have some unexpected boarders, some that are always there anyway, and during open hours we have “drop-offs” that take up space too. MADNESS. And it was a dark dreary rainy day which made everything seem even more MAD. Don’t get me wrong though, we all had a BLAST. It’s amazing how much fun we can have while we’re working hard, and believe me, we work HARD. We’re all crazy, the whole office is, but Kennel Techs are a whole other level of crazy since we’re behind closed doors all day hahahaha. Ahhh what good times…

Well I don’t think there’s anything else new and exciting since last time, so I’ll leave you here! :o

[UPDATE July 20th, 2008]
25 more pictures in Botanical Gardens! There’s only like 3 left I have to process but they’re not inspiring enough for me to battle the blindness that is approaching due to excess hours photoshopping…

To anyone that didn’t receive this gift from me, here it is for the taking.

Alright so today was a total nightmare. If you don’t know anything about Wordpress or MYSql databases, skip the following paragraph because it won’t mean anything to you. If you do, skip it anyway because it’s boring and I’m just ranting…

Once again I had to do a Wordpress update, but I hate doing it manually, and since Dreamhost made changes to their site since I originally installed it using their “One-Click Installs”, they no longer recognized it so I couldn’t just use their handy “Update” button to let them do all the work for me. So to save me time and effort in the future, I spent SEVEN hours today trying to make a fresh installation of the new Wordpress which meant having to backup and take down EVERYTHING in my root directory and all my database information. That part wasn’t a problem, it was PUTTING EVERYTHING BACK that brought on the horror. I had made a regular XML export of posts and such so that I wouldn’t have any database conflictions in importing those, but I was having to go through and change their permalinks, and fixing all my settings, and trying to get my plugins reactivated properly–several of which I had made custom modifications to and they weren’t behaving–and then my stupid REFERRER script. Oh how I love and hate that script. It uses a database to record all its information, and because I’m so SMART I had it mixed in with my wordpress database and since I didn’t know how to separate it out of the file, I had to go to Dreamhost to restore a backup, then make a new backup file with just those tables, then create a new database, but I couldn’t import the data because the file was too big so then I had to figure out how to do it using Putty with SSH, so finally did that, then had to change the names of the tables, then change the database information in the files that access them. UGH. And then of course I lost my most recent changes to my header.php for this theme so I had to go and change that again. To make ALL MATTERS WORSE, my server started getting overloaded, either just because it felt like it or because I was working it too hard (most likely the latter) so then it started going REALLY SLOW as well as all sites on my hosting (Sorry Megs lol) and even stopped working altogether for a short while. Eventually sped up again and is all normal now, and I’ve got everything all up-to-date, and future Wordpress updates will now only ever require the press of a button…*knocks on wood*

I have some bad good news though…now that my mad Photoshop skills have gotten even madder, I’m re-enhancing all my Photography pics. Yes, I said ALL. So now I have that in addition to the ones I haven’t even done yet. That puts me at a total of about…880 pictures I have to work on. I did 30 in about 4 hours last night, so you do the math *sigh* At least they’ll 1. Look much better 2. Have a larger resolution 3. Have a consistent border because I know I kept changing it everytime I added a new set and some didn’t even fit all the text in x.X I’m going to finish the new pictures first though, cuz I know you probably are more interested in that, I know I am ;)

I got new pencils and paintbrushes so I’m going to be doing some traditional art as well…yeah updates are gonna be small and random and scattered haha. It’ll be worth it though. I’m really trying to bring this site back to life. Trying to bring my life back to life too heh.

I cleaned up my affiliates since many seemed to have fallen off the planet, and added a new one:

Well it’s getting late (late to us working people) so I’m probably going to paint for a bit then head to bed…

Thanks for dropping by, ciao!