Friday, November 12, 2004
Attention ER Writers
The writers of Joan of Arcadia will be holding a seminar on how to write tearjerker, dramatic, big sad episode of the season scripts designed to support the facial tissue industry, as well as to be compellingly watchable.
If you can’t be there, a close enough alternative takes place on Friday nights, 8:00 PM eastern time, on your local See BS station.
Watch and learn, ER writers. Watch and learn.
Gosh, keep this up and Cali will lose its reputation as bad verdict central.
Director Mitch tackles another topic I’ve been ranting to Jay about…
My one word review of Lair’s six word review of the Ray Liotta special episode of ER
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
Sadly, I did not get anything entered into it this week. But don’t let that stop you! The newest Carnival of the Recipes is up, hosted by The Common Virtue. Well worth checking out for new food ideas.
If you’d like to contribute to the next edition, which will be hosted by Boudicca, send your entries to recipe.carnival -at- gmail.com by next Thursday evening.
For what it’s worth, I am particularly intrigued by this recipe.
What’s the Greatest of Them All
Go toss in your small change into the discussion of the ultimate rock song over at Jeff’s. He named some song I never heard of. One of the commenters, of which there were way too few for such a fun topic, thus this post, presented a superb list. What do you think? Go opine!
CotC Reminder and a Note
Hey, remember that Carnival of the Capitalists thing? It still exists! How cool is that? Hey, that was a rhetorical question.
The next edition will be hosted by Trader Mike, and he awaits your entries. I checked the Gmail account - you know, the one you send entries to at cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com, and there are only four so far. Whatcha waitin’ for?
On another note, if you have continued to send your CotC entries to the old capitalists at elhide dot com forwarder, you’ll want to stop. I tried to be very careful in using that, never to put the address out in public without spambot protection, but people did post it raw a couple times. Apparently the capitalists alias is the source of all or most spam going to the Gmail account, and it’s up to as many as a dozen a day.
Thursday, November 11, 2004
Comment Spam Update
It stopped cold after I used a SQL query to reset the oldest 80% of the posts to allow no new comments. There were only two more after that, on newer ones, but it’s as if they gave up when whatever or whoever pumps in the comments failed repeatedly.
Now?
No more new comment spam, but I started getting comment notifications dated the 8th, in my e-mail, three days after the fact. Worse, half of the posts I have gone to to delete lone spams had multiple spams, so know for a fact I have not received comment notifications for every spam ever posted. Great.
At least there should be few or no new ones.
Update:
WTF?!
I did a default install of WordPress at a client’s domain, in the web root, in preparation to try to create a business site based around blogging software.
Nobody links that site. Nobody knows about it. All that was ever there before is a placeholder. The only links that exist on the blog are to wordpress.org and w3.org.
I just deleted 52 comment spams from the big two test posts on the site from the 8th.
Do they spider back through wordpress.org to anything that links it or what? How the frick would they know to leave spam there, and why on earth bother when the site is a dead end no search engine is likely to pick up?
That just ridiculous! Good thing the comments will be turned off by default.
Meanwhile, another WP site I am setting up has attracted zero spam, starting from the same day. Doing the one first is teaching me what I need to know to do the other, more complex one expediently.
Jeez.
I just turned comments off there, but I noticed I have e-mail notification of comments turned on, going to a valid address, and I received none. Lovely.
Space Food Sticks
I remember those! They were strange, yet tasty to my childhood palate. I liked the peanut butter flavored ones, as I recall. Sadly, they were enough of a fad that they faded away on the heels of Apollo. But not, as Ith has found, completely and forever.
Thank You Indeed
Get out the tissues and read this poignant thank you to veterans by Val.
We had a house kind of like that in the neighborhood, except the one time we went to it on Halloween we got yelled at by an angry old man who wondered what the heck we were doing bothering him.
Carnival of the Kids
Jay Allen is starting yet another carnival meme-like thing, which some of you may find interesting. It’s Carnival of the Kids. Here’s the meat of the announcement:
The Carnival of the Kids is a new weekly showcase of blog posts dealing with children and parenting. You have until Saturday evening to mail in your favorite blog post from the week concerning anything child-related: cute family photos, funny stories about your kids, bad parents in the news, book or product reviews, legislation that impacts parents - if there’s a child in there somewhere, it’s fair game for CotK. Blog posts may be from your own blog, or they may be from another blog that you feel deserves some extra publicity. I’ll publish the list on Monday morning (or afternooon, depending on how many of these I drank on Sunday night).
Send entries, or requests to host, to zeroboss -at- gmail -dot- com.
This and That
Oops. I need to go to the bank, but after a surprisingly long time with Google I determined that banks in Massachusetts are in fact closed for Veteran’s Day. Oh well. It’s one of those pseudo-holidays where you can’t be sure.
Sadie didn’t do quite as well last night, but almost. Her sleep at length time seems to have extended well into the morning, from something like four hours ago. She seems to be having a growth spurt. The swing is great. She sits in it intently watching the shadow of the support going back and forth against a white piece the supports hook to (which on one side contains the motor and controls), then falls alseep.
It’s funny how many sounds she makes. Yesterday Deb said “hello” at her, and she replied “ehh woe,” which just has to be pure coincidence in getting out the right sounding coos.
We’re cold. It’s irritating.
How is it that you can get so acclimated to cold that going outside ina T-shirt in 50 degrees feels okay, but when it finally drops to 64 inside the house, and you jack the heat up to 66 so the temperature stays between 66 and 70, you’re just cold all the time? I think the trick is that it dropped to 34 outside. The cold finally got into the foundation and chilled the cellar, which we are mere floorboards above. Good thing most of it’s carpeted. The cold now gets through the windows in force. I need to get plastic to cover most of them. After I go to the bank. Tomorrow. Worse, it seeps through the very walls.
Thus the thermostat in the hall may claim it’s 68, but the air is highly variable, and anywhere near an outside wall or a window is unnaturally cold.
But still… If I can go outside in the fifties dresses as I am in the house, I object to being bothered by sixties inside. It’s just wrong.
I have dueling things for this weekend. One is to go back at the van, try to find out what the broken part is and try to get one and have my brother replace it. There are two weekends before Thanksgiving, and I would prefer to drive the big, comfortable, well-heated van four hours to Vermont. There are two weekends to Thanksgiving, I’ve done very little billable time for over a month, and there is a backlog of things needing to be done that could amount to 40+ hours in a single weekend, a good portion of which can’t be put off.
Enough rambling. Off to the office today, where I am needed and can no longer futz around doing web site work at home and avoiding the cold air outside.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Mail One for the Gipper
Via Stephen Bainbridge, excellent postal news. The Ronald Reagan stamp being issued in 2005 has been unveiled. It looks great! I’ll be proud to make a point of buying and using them.
Subservient Beer Wench
Via James, this young lady is much more fun than the chicken dude.
Hints: read, sing, exercise, and especially strip tease. Heh.
Update:
Try also knee, orgasm, flash boobs, flash buns, and, best of all, as in ROFL-level, the word fight.
Happy Birthday!
PoppaBear also has a birthday today yesterday! (How’d I miss that?) Happy birthday to an extremely cool guy. We got to meet him, along with MommaBear, at the New England mini blogger bash thingie in Moo Hampshire this past summer.
Is it possible not to legislate morality?
Paul at Right Side of the Rainbow has a post that’s tangentally related to my last post and says something I’ve been thinking I should point out (only far better than I could), in response to a commenter.
But that isn’t what interested me about Roger’s comment. I’m interested by the oft-repeated suggestion, implicit in Roger’s comment, that Americans—perhaps especially Christian Americans—ought not to translate their moral views into law. I think that’s intellectual silliness.
Go see why.
I have a confession to make:
I still miss living in Jesusland.
I’ve been groping around in the far corners of my brain for several days now, looking for something useful to say about the Jesusland meme, both because it amuses me and because it does have a little truth to it, like most good bits of propaganda, and because there’s something that fascinates me about the strength of the faith that some have that the faith of others is a threat to them. If I were feeling less charitiable, I’d point out that now they very likely know how some Christians have felt for years; however, that would be not only uncharitable but inaccurate, since the forced conversions to Christianity (which is an oxymoron, but is also on the perimeter of my point, if I have one) ended in this nation years ago, while the attempts at forcing conversion to “progressive” values continues mostly unchecked. This, too, is on the edge of whatever I’m trying to say, but it’s worth noting. It is quite possible to have a religious faith in something not conventionally viewed as religious.
In any case, what I keep coming back to as I think about this meme is that I miss the hell out of Jesusland, in large part for the reasons that Acidman talks about here. I lived for a time in northwest Florida, AKA Lower Alabama, AKA the Redneck Riviera, and you know what? Not only did I know my neighbors by name, they helped me move in and, when the time came, helped me move out. Not to mention the small kindnesses, like the night that Bill came over and chased the drunk fellow away from my front door, or the loan of a flashlight during a hurricane, or...but the point isn’t really in the thing itself, it’s in the fact that these folks wouldn’t stop to think twice before they did it.
If that isn’t shocking enough, let me tell you something else: people said please and thank you. Even in the Wal Mart. Even in the Wal Mart at Christmas. Really.
They’d say “God bless you” and really mean it. Not in a nasty now-come-to-my-church-or-burn-in-hell kind of way, but in a wishing-the-best-for-a-fellow-traveler kind of way.
They would--and this is truly shocking--let you into traffic. Even at a busy corner where you really should have known better than to try to get out of the parking lot that way.
Yeah, there were bad seeds. There always are. But for most folks, kind seemed to be their default setting, and they brought that out in me, too. Honestly, I think I liked myself a little better when I lived there.
Which is not to say, either, that it’s impossible to be a decent person and live outside of this mythical “Jesusland.” It’s just that if you want to go inventing correlations, you need to be careful with your connotations. You never know who you might make homesick.
Received In E-Mail
Not Fred
Count me with those who like the idea of Fred Thompson as AG, even though he’s so good on Law & Order.
Unfortunately, it is not to be. Ashcroft’s replacement will reportedly be Alberto Gonzales. Good choice? I dunno. Guess we’ll find out.
Economics Bloggers Wanted
Nope, this isn’t about Carnival of the Capitalists!
Kevin at Truck and Barter has posted a cattle call for people who’d like to blog about economics to join T&B and post there. You could start your own blog, sure, but going there gives you an established audience of some size on an excellent blog.
Sadie Report
Sadie is six weeks old today, and boy are there milestones.
In the past couple days, she has suddenly taken on a more mature look. She noticed her feet yesterday, explicitly, and stared at them while she curled her toes. That’s on top of her love of kicking, to the point where I pissed her off last night by “burritoing” her in a blanket so she could barely move her feet. If she’s in bed and you spread a blanket on her, she makes a fast game of kicking it off. She also gripped my finger for an extended time last night, and seemed to know what she was doing.
Last night she slept for more than five hours! Straight. During which Deb got to sleep.
Then she ate efficiently and slept for another three hours! During which Deb got to sleep.
This fit nicely with her seemingly minimal sleep yesterday.
The funny thing is the first 5-odd hours of sleep were in her swing. It’s a wonder the batteries haven’t died. She woke up for a change and food shortly after I started to worry at how long she’d been doing her dead baby imitation. The other big stretch was in her bassinet. Deb got to spend all night in the bed, rather than the recliner with Sadie alternating between eating and sleeping on her. Woohoo!
For a long time she has been aware that if she needs changing and we carry her toward the bedroom, changing is what she will get. That also helps identify what’s making her fuss. That she goes silent as we approach the bedroom means diaper is what she seeks. It’s pretty cool. She does the same if she needs to eat and Deb carries her into the living room. That’s the most usual eating place.
This morning she sat in the spare carseat in the computer room, then started complaining after a while. Picking her up didn’t help, and she protested vigorously sitting on my leg in burping position. Carrying her in the direction of the kitchen made her shut up. Ah, but this time the complaining started back up as I got close to and went through the bedroom door.
Curious.
Her swing is in the kitchen. I put her in there. She’s been happy for a couple hours now. Seems to enjoy the puddle of sunlight shining on her through the window.
So there’s another milestone; she “asked” to go in the swing, rather than merely being put there and deciding this was okay.
Six weeks! We’re in trouble when she can apply that brain to full effect.
There are lot of pictures. A big backlog. I’ll try to post some soon!
Cross-posting this to Sadie’s blog for the sake of people who only read that.
NASA Scramming
It amused me to write about the totally private America’s Space Prize a couple posts ago, then go read here and here about a NASA project.
However, just because it’s NASA doesn’t mean it isn’t cool, or even kewl. I’ve been waiting for the scramjet work to amount to something for a long time, and this basic research and getting technology to, well, exist at all would seem to be more in keeping with a proper NASA mission. Assuming you accept that there should legitimately be a NASA at all, which I will for the purposes of this post and the world as it is rather than could be.
Besides, I’m thinking that this is likely to be used heavily for military applications. We’re rather… naked with respect to our vast reliance on satellites, and the bunker busting possibilities are interesting too.
Anyway, the article referred to is here.
People >> States >> United States
Well, apart from Deb advises reading the Federalist Papers if you just don’t get it.
Update:
I overlooked linking this post on the same topic. Shame on me!
Happy Birthday!
Caltechgirl shares her birthday with the US Marine Corps, surely an auspicious day.
Which reminds me, my brother in law’s birthday is tomorrow…
America’s Space Prize
Via Catallarchy, there’s some rather cool information out about America’s Space Prize.
This one is sponsored by Bigelow Aerospace, maker of inflatable orbital habitat modules and thereby consumer and instigator of passenger and freight services to orbit. The basic prize is $50 million, as opposed the $10 million X-Prize for getting momentarily to the minimal definition of “space” privately and repeatably. There are also purchase orders for future business at stake this time.
This time it’s orbit that’s the goal, 400 km minimum, at least twice in 60 days, at least two orbits, able to carry at least five passengers, with an actual five on the second of those two launches. The deadline is January 10, 2010; not so far away, really. The big caveat is the competition must be American. Only contestants based in the United States, and not government-affiliated, need apply.
Fully details, including Bigelow’s motivation and thoughts on the current state of orbital transport, are in the article.
I can’t tell you how cool this is.
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
Expansion Through Attrition
I seem to have developed this odd pattern of adding clients by attrition. People leave my big client to start or join other firms, and they hire me for their computer support.
The latest is joining a heretofore one-person law firm, working for an old friend of hers. It’s unexpected, but will be more flexible for her having two squirts, one born not that long before Sadie, at home.
What tickles me is that she said:
I honestly can’t imagine how I will function without you.
How’s that for a testimonial? And she’s way ahead of most in geek leanings, due to her husband’s influence. She has to put up with, or has the benefit of, several computers all over their house. Her husband was building an arcade game console out of a new TV, computer parts, etc. Their first baby had her first computer sometime around the age of one or so. Not that I disagree with that…
Anyway, it’s always exciting to help people get setup and going in a new environment. Plus she’s cool, and Sadie just loved her.
I don’t know what came over me.
So this morning I got up feeling mentally clear in a way that I rarely do, and I thought I’d jump on the blog and actually--gasp!--post and stuff.
Somehow I wound up bustling around the house instead. I did three loads of laundry, packed away my maternity clothes, cleaned up the kitchen, cut my bangs, and even cooked part of the supper. Sadie got a bath and we started packing away the clothes she’s already grown out of, too.
So no posting, even though it’s a week after the election and thus I consider myself officially blogging about any old thing that strikes my fancy again. It’s such a relief to worry about what’s to be done rather than who’s to do it.
See you soon.
A random observation
I type much more quickly now that the swelling in my hands is gone. And it’s a great feeling. :-D
Need Some Laughs?
Glenn pointed out a look back on the history surrounding Hillary’s election in 2008 and 2012, and found and translated from a 2150 French history textbook.
At the very beginning I was thinking it was serious. Not that it doesn’t make some excellent, serious points, but it degenerates rapidly into satire both subtle and bold. I was in stitches. It’s well worth reading, despite the length.
Here was where it hit me that it would at a minimum make fun of the French:
Carter, of course, did not live up to his campaign record about getting tough with the Soviets, and was removed from office in a landslide in the next election. A few months after Reagan was inaugurated, his most important ally, French President Francois Mitterand was elected. Although Mitterand and Reagan disagreed entirely on economics, they were both staunchly anti-Soviet. The Mitterand-Reagan policies, assisted to some degree by British Prime Minister Thatcher, led to the collapse of the Soviet Empire during the administration of Reagan’s successor George H.W. Bush.
Grand Rounds Is Up
This week’s Grand Rounds, a collection of links to medical-related blog posts, is up, hosted by GruntDoc.