How to Buy a Fall Coat

Pick a maximum of 3 non-negotiable criterion for your coat. I chose 1) either red or blue, but preferably red, 2) Can’t have that buttons to the side style because my old coat was like that and I’m bored with that look and 3) under $100 but if I really love it, then a stretch budget of $150.

Everything else was up in the air. If the coat wasn’t red or blue, I didn’t look at it, if it was the same style as my old coat, I didn’t look at it, and if it was over $150 – I didn’t look at it (okay, so I did accidentally try on a $325 coat and fell in love with it and then it broke my heart because I didn’t want to break my rule and buy it, but it taught me my lesson and I looked at the price tag before trying others on). Continue reading →

Let’s Not Be Bullies

I was in the car going home and I tiredly remarked, “When will life become something steady?”

Within an hour or so, the feeling passed. I didn’t sign up for a safe life. I’ve always done things things a bit..differently? weirdly? I don’t always do things people agree with. Actually, I can usually be found doing something a host of people don’t agree with.

I was 18 years old and I remember going home from university to find out I had been the talk of town. Somehow I had become notorious in the small tight knit desi (South Asian) community of Fort McMurray because someone saw me hanging out with a boy – nevermind that he was my partner for philosophy class and we were working on a project. I was the talk of parties and the gossip behind my back became so far flung it was nothing like the truth. Continue reading →

Running a Service Business: Operate in good faith, act with good will

I’m part of a number of Facebook groups – some related to WordPress, others about creativity, and many small business communities. A couple days ago, someone posted about their shipping rates having disappeared on their website and if someone could help, because their original developer wasn’t responding. I offered to take a look. The original developer had used an outdated and unsupported plugin that had known issues clearly documented in the reviews and around the web from way before the website was ever created. Yet he had used it, because it was free and seemed to have worked when he installed it.

Then when it stopped working and his customer frantically reached out to him, he gave her the cold shoulder. I also learned that he frequently did that with the client and failed to ever explain how things actually work. It left the client feeling bewildered and afraid to change anything lest their site broke. Continue reading →

Building a Cleaner Navigation in WordPress

This is something I’ve played around with for a couple years. I dislike the default output of the WordPress navigation walker, however, it has some useful qualities. Specifically, the classes on links, I use them quite a lot to style different states.

A lot of websites have a flat one-level navigation, which means, ideally the nav can and should look like this:

<nav>
    <a href="/">This is a link</a>
    <a href="/">This is a link</a>
    <a href="/">This is a link</a>
</nav>

Continue reading →

The Signature of All Things

In one of the chapters of Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert describes the origins of her novel The Signature of All Things, it ties directly into the idea of passion emerging from following a spark of curiosity. This intrigued me and I immediately committed to reading that novel after finishing the book. It’s 3:30 am on Feb 15, as I start this piece. I started the book on Wednesday after publishing the review of Big Magic and I finished the book a couple of hours ago.

This is not a novel with a plot, not really. I think it is best described as a character study, sort of. Gilbert explored the world of botany through a family she invented – the Whittakers – particularly through Alma Whittaker, as we watch her grow up surrounded by botany and then obsessed with botany, herself. The entire book leads up to the emergence of the theory of natural selection. Continue reading →