Something Stinks!

Last week we told you of the terrible smell polluting our office space. We called the building management company to have the problem investigated. They sent some "handymen" over to snoop out and clean-up the smell.

After much strolling around, sniffing the air, cracks, crevices, and duct-work, these brilliant minds concluded there was no source from inside. I insisted that 4 employees abandoning the office suggests otherwise and that they would be best advised to keep looking into a solution.

From there, they approached the front of the building by my desk. One of them spotted a beautiful circular hole cut out of the floor and bent down to sniff from the hole. I've never seen one of these guys move so fast in my life. He leaped up and backward with a shout of surprise and disgust.

"I found it," he declared! "It's coming from right here - under there!" And he gagged and choked again from the awful stench.

This got them digging up the ancient hardwood floors to get at the source.

Cutting the floor out where he smelled through a hole, they tried to look underneath to see what was there. Unable to see much, they started pulling the insulation out from between the floor joists. Seeing that the floor joists ran from my desk toward the door, they dug up another chunk of floor (photo) right inside the front door. Watch your step when you come visit. We found we can easily convert it to a trap door. ;)

Once they had the two ends of their 'tunnel' open now, they were trying to glimpse in without getting their heads too far into the stench under the floorboards. It was a little awkward, and no doubt eerie, to stick your head through this small hole in the floor. And who knows what you'd find. I had the camera with me, and I wanted to see too, so I volunteered the camera's services. Have a look.

Not finding anything from one end or the other, the debate continued about the source of the offending odour. They insisted they must have eliminated it by removing the insulation batting. I wasn't convinced and need much more convincing. With the floors in the condition they were now in, I suggested prying a little further over the other direction to investigate along another section of floor joists.

Pulling up another section along the door, more insulation was pulled out. This time there was a slightly longer pause. The camera went down for a photograph and came back with another section of insulation further along. There appeared to be a shadow requiring a closer look. Seeing this image, I suspect the small rodents have been tunneling along underneath the insulation.

Standing back to let them dig around more, one of the guys stopped, grabbed a long-handled scraper and reach in to carefully lift something out. Here is what he found.

Along the bottom edge is the spinal cord. Where the spinal cord reaches the right-most end of this lump, you can make out the hind-leg, and the long slender hind foot and toes. This little creature didn't smell, as you can see it had been picked clean for a considerable time now. Nonetheless, it was a gross and fascinating find all the same.

With all that effort, we didn't find anything else. We eliminated the carcass we did find, a couple sections of floor were torn up, the insulation pulled out and disposed of, and with the cold weather and windows and doors wide open all day, we couldn't tell if there was a smell anymore.

Along with all this fun, when they began the job they started using their industrial vacuum cleaner to clean up after themselves. Unfortunately, there is a trick issue with this shop-vac; the filter falls off quite often. The very first time they turned it on, the exhaust spewed enormous clouds of fine dust everywhere inside the building.

Note the footprints in the photo. We'd just had the whole office cleaned the day before. With such fine dust it had the floor so evenly coated, photography would have difficulty conveying the extent of the mess. Then, I saw the footprints.
Without anything further to be done today, I sent them packing with specific instructions to return the next day to clean up the mess.

how to use the CMS in XLsuite

How to use the CMS in XLsuite

http://liveinstrathcona.com
which is also

http://liveinstrathcona.xlsuite.com

This is what is showing on the home page

At this point you go to yourdomain.com/login (which will bounce you to the login page /sessions/new)

Login with your email and password and then go to the “resources” menu as shown below

From Resources you want to drop down to the CMS menu and select “PAGES

this is what the “pages” page looks like

Notice the “LIVEINSTYLE.CSS” that is the ACTUAL CSS page – where your style sheet goes.

Simply paste in the CSS and note below where the “layout” drop down is... you select CSS STYLSHEET – to define the page as a style sheet for the system.

Note also that the parent page has been automatically entered and above it the “slug” is the address of the page. Normally you DO NOT need an extension here – good for SEO. But for the style sheet you need the .css extension in the file name – so in slugline you can direct exactly what “folder” you want the page to be in - (“folder” because it's all virtual)

Below, I'm showing one of the pages that is NOT the home page, you can see I've defined EXACTLY where and what that page is called without any .php / .html ...

Note above here, we've called the page /photos in the slug line – so the address for this page will be http://liveinstrathcona.com/photos -

We've used HTML and have the behavior set to “plain text” (better) but you can also switch to “Rich Text” and use the fckEditor in a more WYSIWIG environment (but it produces crappy code – which is why we normally just hand code it).

You can see also I've asked it to INHERIT the layout from it's parent page - “live in strathcona” (the home page)

Also note I've set the page to “published” - (otherwise you can't see it – even in draft :( )

OK NOW ON TO LAYOUTS

In here, I've selected HTML layouts (This is a page that I had to create)

You can see there is the basic layout info about the style sheet etc.

The idea here is that anything that will repeat on multiple pages that can be inherited, can be put in the layout page.

IE – the header graphic, the navigation bar, a constant side bar, a footer... all this is layed out in the LAYOUT and then referenced in each page.

If you had a front page layout and a secondary page layout (or list view... )

You would simply make 2 different layouts and then in PAGES, when you are setting them up, you simply choose the right one, and then each page that you set up as a “child” of the parent, adopts (or inherits) that layout.

NOTE: at this time we do not have our own image manager. Therefore, all images must be linked to an off site folder (your own, or if you need one, we can provide you one on another domain) so rather than having the image path be “picture1.jpg” it will need to be a full url like “http://ixld.com/livein/img/picture1.jpg” -

UPDATE: We now have the start of an image manager:
Under the Resources / Content / Files section you can now upload images and other files.