Pretty . . . weed

I was walking across the "lawn" from the parking lot to my office building this morning, and came across this lovely flower:

It's really quite pretty - if you look at the full-sized version of this photo, you'll see that each little blossom resembles a tiny little snapdragon flower.

In reality, this plant is really small. The flower couldn't have been more than an inch tall, if that. And I'm quite sure it's some sort of weed, as it was growing merrily across the grassy strip surrounding the parking lot. Plus, the leaves remind me of another weed found pretty much everywhere in Florida, the dreaded spurge. But I've never seen one with such pretty flowers.

I looked through the book "Weeds of Southern Turfgrasses," pulled from the shelf of my coworker and Master Gardener, Kim. Nothing - no tiny, low-growing weeds with itty-bitty-pretty flowers.

Perhaps someone will recognize it here? Hmm, I'm not sure how many botanists who specialize in Florida landscape weeds read my blog.

Office garden and a correction

First off, I must make a correction: Kyle's grandfather, who passed away Sunday night, was not his last grandparent. His grandmother is still alive. In a nursing home and unaware of her surroundings, but alive nonetheless. I'm a little embarrassed. I guess I was thinking about how his grandfather would be the only grandparent in attendance at our wedding. I feel guilty forgetting his poor grandmother.

With that faux pas out of the way, onto the pictures!

I was leaving work last night just as the sun was going down, and the lighting on the garden around our building was beautiful. I couldn't resist taking a photo of this odd stand of very tall, yellow flowers which stands alone and a short distance from the rest of the garden:



I should have taken more, but I was running late (as usual). I did snap a picture of our garden gnome, though:



This was mainly for one of my coworkers. She is strangely enamoured of gnomes, and I don't think anyone had photographed "our" gnome for her.

Too Hot to Blog

The AC is broken in my office, and it's 82 degrees - in the office.

Me and Emily are dying, while the rest of our coworkers are trying to make the best of it (easy to say when you've got a fan, adorable-coworker-who-shall-remain-nameless!).

I don't mind heat. Hell, I grew up in Florida with no air conditioning. I love the beach. I like working up a good sweat. But sweating at your desk while you're supposed to be thinking - that's not a good sweat. Usually when you're sweating, you're enjoying yourself, be it exercise, outdoor activities, lounging about in a bathing suit, engaging in, you know, a loving moment. Looking up information on shallots as a plant for your fall garden? Not so much.

Add the hassle of evil, sneaky Best Buy credit card minions and a bed that won't be showing up for another month, and you've got misery. Seriously - imagine the hell of trying to find a human to speak with on the phone, and then that person's first language is obviously not English and their whole job description is "Whatever you do, don't let them drop the 'credit protection plan.'" Now add stickiness and heat.

Yeah, it's that kind of day.

Wildlife on the Job

Our building has a nice swath of nature around it. Thanks to our fabulous landscape instructor Erin, we have a beautiful garden right outside the door. We haven't taken photos since it got gorgeous (just installation photos of guys in jeans and camo hats with shovels and dirt). But I did take a photo of a butterfly feeding from our firebush plant.

Most of our flowering plants are popular with butterflies, which means there are days when walking up to the building is a lovely, Disney-like experience.

We have a bit of wildlife, mostly squirrels and birds. My coworkers have been entranced by a huge hawk that frequents the pine trees. I'm not much of a bird person, so I've been blowing them off: "Pfft, you guys are obsessed with that thing."

But yesterday the hawk sat on a pine branch long enough for everyone to start talking about it, for such a time that finally, I figured I should at least be social and go look at the thing. Having a chance to size it up, I have to admit I was impressed. It's HUGE! And it's a beautiful golden brown color.

He (they've decided it's a "he") was obviously stalking something or chilling, because I actually had time to grab my camera and ease outside for a photo. I really had to zoom, so it's fuzzy.

I'm Coming Clean

This is supposed to be my professional blog. But then I realized - I don't want to write about my job - at least, not the technical aspects of it. Because I'm not a techie.

There, I said it.

I fell into this web thing by accident, and it turned out to be a lot of fun. I like it. I like the technician aspect; I like making things, having something to show in the end. I'd be a terrible manager. I just don't find "technology" being that exciting to write about. Use, yes, but write about? I'll leave that to "Wired."

Maybe I'll write about the other parts of my job, like how I'm learning so much about plants and stuff, due to that being the point of the organization that I work for.

The web site that takes up most of my time is http://gardeninginaminute.com, for the one-minute radio show produced by my department.

But I also have Florida Master Gardener Program, Florida School Gardens Competition, and the Center for Landscape Conservation and Ecology.

As you can see, they all use the same template, and that's the template created by Solutions For Your Life, the public face of the University of Florida Extension Service.

My department works closely with the UF environmental horticulture department. What's "environmental horticulture," you ask? Good question. Stupid phrase. It means all plant stuff, except the stuff you eat. Flowers, landscape plants, turf (that's what the industry calls grass - they don't like the word grass).

But since we our show covers all sorts of gardening, we do the food stuff, too - fruits and veggies.

Like I said, I'm learning quite a bit. My coworkers are experienced in agriculture, botany, sustainability - and they're all writers. With masters degrees. Yeah, I feel a little stupid every now and then. But I try to take in every they're teaching me.

Maybe I'll write about that.

"Find and Replace" Stupidity

Sometimes my dumb mistakes are so dumb as to make me laugh.

I've always used target="_blank" in my HTML to make a link open in a new window. I like my links to external sites to open in a new window keeping my site open for the user. I think with our assumed audience that's a good idea.

But the Gardening Solutions site uses XHTML Strict, and target=_blank is apparently a no-no in XMTML Strict. Your code will not validate if you're using it. Say what you will about the purity of validation versus "the page works, why fix it?", I'm trying to play by the rules of the huge institution for which I work. I noticed the web guy who built many of these pages that I inherited used rel="external" and that seemed to work, so I did a handy-dandy search and replace and did the good-doobie thing - I replace any mention of target="_blank" with rel="external" -- not really knowing how it worked.

Guess what - now it wasn't working at all! Opening my site in IE7, I found that none of my links were opening in new windows, not even ones that had previously worked before my little s'n'r - ack!

So after a little research, I realized that rel=external only works with a little Javascript workaround (I know nothing of Javascript). I open up the file called external.js and compare the code to one I found on webmasterworld.com. (Which rocks, by the way.)

It was looking correct until one line. The correct code had:

anchor.rel="external";

My code had:

anchor.target="_blank";

My search and replace had replaced it everywhere - including the one place I needed the "wrong" code.

What makes this even more stupid is I had done the exact same thing with another piece of code a few day ago!

Ah, the adventures of an inexperienced webmaster.