This is my dog's last day.

She stopped eating, so a last meal seems out of the question. She loved cottage cheese (who knows why). Perhaps it was the lumps. Sure wasn't the flavor.

I didn't seek her out, but she attached to me like... like a dog who lost her best friend and needed a new one. I hope she thinks I was good enough.

Now we sit together on the porch, feeling the breeze one last time. For these next few hours everything will be right until it isn't.

Ever try to vertically center text in a div and it's just not working correctly on the Mac? But it's spot-on correct on the PC? Or vice-versa?

You've tried everything: the line-height set to font size, or 1px lower. You've vertical-align'ed: center the hell out of evertything in your CSS file. No matter what you try, nothing seems to make a difference.

In desperation you switch from your beautiful (expensive, too!) custom font and fall back to plain old Arial as a last-ditch effort to get something to look right. And BINGO it's now perfect.

What the....?

Have you received the yearly GoDaddy ICANN grind email about verifying your contact info? DId you click the link and the form says the credentials aren't valid?

Do you only view emails in text format (like you should, really)?

These two things are related, it seems. Try viewing the GoDaddy email as HTML, then click the little button-thing and you can verify your domain details. Until next year, when you forget and have to figure it our all over again.

GoDaddy is as GoDaddy does.

So I am fortunately late to the 'GoDaddy screwed the pooch on ICANN rules' party. Evidently their internal account system cannot deal with email addresses that have been valid for a dozen years. An inconvenience, but not a terrible one.

Unless you own more than one or two domains. Oof. But at least it's smart enough to know that if you use a single registrant email for all of the domains in your account it should take just one verification to handle this, right?

Nope.

Fine. I will click the 'Resend' link. And wait.

Wait some more.

More....

.....

Okay, maybe that didn't take. Let's click it again. And while we're at it, let's get the rest of these domains taken care of, with many more clicks. And let's get back to waiting.

After an hour or so, it's time to call. And guess what? They queue emails. So, the labels for the links should read

Mail is in the queue

instead of 'Mail has been sent'. Clicking the link again actually means

Welcome to the end of the queue.

THANK YOU SIR MAY I HAVE ANOTHER!

Explaining your design choice with "I saw it on an episode of Dragnet" seems like a bad idea. #Green #Shiny #WhatHaveIDone

The trouble with code refactoring is knowing where to stop.

Updating a codebase developed over 15 years is a miserable endeavor. So much that made sense in 1999 really doesn't hold any water today. The trouble is, you can find this everywhere you look. "I really should do it THIS way, and while I'm at it best practice says do THAT tooARGGGHHHHH I BROKE IT!!!!"

Trying to find the sweet spot you just wind up with This Is Good Enough Move On.

I am pretty sure feeling guilty about having a bowl of Raisin Bran Crunch is a sign of an eating disorder. #WalterJr #WordsOfWisdom

So here's a hard-found tip about how to call a Smarty plugin function -- you delineate parameters with spaces, not a comma or a bar. You need to do this

{customer_functions expires=$cust[c].expires paymenttypeid=$cust[c].paymenttypeid assign='rowclass'}

This lets you visually show whether a row is overdue and what payment type they are using. Comma-separated would be a lot easier to read.

Let's see what else it takes longer to figure out with Smarty than it should.