Friday, December 31, 2004
Thank goodness for our friendly local 24 hour CVS!
When did everything start closing early on New Year’s Eve? I don’t remember Wal-Mart, grocery stores, et cetera closing early on the eve, just on the day. Have I been missing something all these years?
Multiple Mentality
Josh Cohen has notified us of a new group blog in which he is participating. His d-42.com won’t go away, but the focus will change.
The new site is called Multiple Mentality.
How is it different? It’s a forum-structured blog, which is similar to what my brother created when he migrated off Blogspot to his blog.
Josh posted a lengthy announcement introducing the new blog, which covers it better than I ever would in sending you to the new place
Officially it “goes live” tomorrow, but feel free to check it out any time.
Jen Speaks From Another Place For Now
Jen’s blog is inexplicably down today. Her host is working on it slowly, but meanwhile, you’ll want to keep an eye on her backup site, http://jenspeaks.blogspot.com.
Tsunami Update of Sorts
A couple more tsunami items. I haven’t gone out of my way to cover it, apart from being one of the first blogs to note the event initially, courtesy of having been sleepless at the right time. Too many others are doing far more than I ever could. But still…
First, it doesn’t surprise me that Burma would be hiding the true scope. The government is of the irrational, hyper control freak variety. They’re in the right place to have damage and casualties as massive as some of the other countries.
With pictures like the top ones here, it would be no surprise if the deaths exceed 400,000 in just that one region. I’ve been surprised at how low the figures were running, at the risk of sounding morbid or unhopeful.
It’s interesting seeing this firsthand report from Helmut Kohl, who was in Sri Lanka when it hit.
For those who weren’t turned off completely from donating anything beyond tax dollars by Sri Lanka’s rejection of Israelis, Command Post continues to be as good a source as anywhere of links on how to help. They’re keeping that post locked at the top of the page. For other news and links, go to the main page and scroll past it. McGehee has a similar post, much briefer, that points to the Amazon donation page. That has just been amazing.
But then, Chuck can tell you in great detail how stingy Americans are not. Pay no attention to any daft pricks at the UN or in the communist organs somewhat left-biased major media.
Update:
There are some excellent on-site stories from the affected areas at India Uncut. I’m not surprised about the problem with excess clothing donations. That always happens in disasters. Usually the best thing is cash, unless there is a specific, requested need (from a source “on the ground” in the know), not stuff.
Amazing!
Via Steven Taylor, something almost right out of Lucifer’s Hammer. A British surfer caught out on the water when the tsunami came in surfed the initial rush, survived, and escaped to safety with his family.
Carnival of the Recipes Is Up
This week’s Carnival of the Recipes is up. Sadly, we are not in it. I’ll have to stop slacking in my cookery and associated food porn photography.
Amy had fun with some serious wordplay, which is something I can always appreciate.
Thursday, December 30, 2004
I’d actually planned to blog a bit more…
Now that the holidays are drawing to a close, but since my wonderful, wonderful husband bought me this for Christmas...well, lets just say that a new Crichton takes precedence. Yummy.
And after the skydiving, you just might need the painkillers…
King of Fools points to a Thomas Sowell column about a rather odd facet of human nature...of the kind that would be amusing if it didn’t result in illnesses and deaths. Perception is a really weird thing sometimes.
Congratulations Sarah and Frank
I had missed Sarah K‘s unsurprising announcement that she is moving in with Frank J. It’s so cool to see others have the same good fortune as Deb and I did.
This is progress.
I can barely hear, but I can breathe!
Sadie’s a couple of days ahead of us with this cold thing, and she’s starting to really seem better now, so hopefully the end is in sight. What a drag, though. I am so ready to sort of semi feel like myself again. Not that I remember clearly what that feels like, really, but that’s another story.
I guess my point is, “Yay for breathing!” 
I’m just fascinating this morning, I know. Heh.
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
So then…
What do you think?
Reciprocity Is A Cool Word
Much like fungible, or defenestrate.
Anyway, we’re updating the blogroll. It’s generally our practice to link those who link us, unless we really can’t stand them, or they have lain fallow too long. Trouble is, we don’t keep particular track of who permalinks us. So if you’re out there, linking us, and we aren’t linking you, let us know.
By the same token, we appreciate being linked if we link you. Some paring will occur, and that will be focused on blogs we have linked, yet haven’t found ourselves reading much, or that are fallow, that do not link to us. Naturally this won’t always happen, but can’t hurt to mention it.
Whew!
I thought it was going to be worse than this. I mean, I *am* from Fresno. Heh.
I AM 41% WHITE TRASH!  The white trash in my blood will not keep me from becoming a doctor or a lawyer, but it will keep me from a good haircut and any sort of fashion sense. |
Via Tiger.
Accumulated Baby Pictures About 12/18 Through 12/25
Sadie is three months old today. Yay for Sadie! Seems like a good time to post more pictures. A lot more pictures…
She makes the cutest, funniest sad faces. Unfortunately, this usually gets her laughed or cooed at, rather than responded to in the manner she might want for addressing whatever has pissed her off:
These are on Christmas, in her hand me down “baby’s first Christmas” suit, which was too small for her cousin to wear:
This is Sadie in a pile of Christmas loot, before we went to my sister’s house and she got more. In the left of the top one you can also see my spice rack:
Here she is at my grandmother’s house. My grandmother came home from my cousin’s house, where there is a baby just slightly older. She cranked up the heat, which had been turned down to a more bearable level while she was gone. That made Sadie freak out from being too hot, so we had to listen to my grandmother about how my cousin’s baby is soooo good and never fusses. Irritating normally. Infuriating coming from the apparent cause of the sudden freakout.
My older brother was too busy with his own kids while I got to be the doting uncle. He’s crazy about her, even if he does have the odd idea that it’s okay to give her ice cream and frosting.
Here she is with my grandnieces, Emily, Katherine and Julia in the first, and with Julia only in the second. I had a lot of trouble with redeye on these pictures.
Yay, back at home in these two, a face shot, and a side shot where you can see how the hair has thinned.
Next are some efforts at posed pictures, including on her belly, against a dark blue blanket on our bed. That makes a great backdrop.
Attack of the giraffe…
Giraffe hugs…
You should have seen the one that got away…
Gee, this looks interesting…
Maybe this will help me solve that tricky FTL drive problem.* You know, string theory…
Sadie uses the Force to be one with the ribbon…
I’ll take that ribbon to go, please…
When in doubt, there’s always Pooh…
Bye everyone!
* This is a running joke about what she’s going to do when she grows up. I keep asking her how she’s coming on the faster than light drive, and we sometimes joke about naming her Zephram Rose instead.
Dear beloved readers,
In light of your repeated requests, I’ll be changing the colors on the site sometime hopefully todayish. So ignore any combinations that hurt your eyes worse than the current scheme until I seem to think I’m done for the moment, por favor.
Any other complaints suggestions while we’re at it? I know there’s blogroll work to be done…
Rest In Peace Jerry Orbach
Sad news via Jen. Jerry Orbach has left us. Acidman’s prostate cancer list will need an update of the worst kind.
I never warmed to him in Dirty Dancing, but perhaps that was the nature of the character. At the same time, it took many episodes of Law and Order before I saw him as smartass Lennie, rather than the father in Dirty Dancing. I thought he did a fantastic job as Lumiere in Beauty and the Beast, which is arguably my favorite Disney animated film.
Congestive Insomnia Ramblings
I am having awful coughing and congestion. Sleeping in the recliner helps, but I woke up to use the bathroom, wandered to the computer and got wide awake enough for the previous post.
I actually managed to clear things up to an impressive degree and move some mucous by strategic use of Listerine. On top of the cold pills I found and took earlier. Now I’ve spent long enough awake for that to have gone away and put me back where I was. Doh! Perhaps another treatment is in order. Followed by an attempt to sleep further. Yeah… sleep.
I’m hoping with the extra room in the bed that Deb is getting a better night of sleep than has lately been the case. She needs it badly.
One Year Ago
On the 28th of December last year, Deb and I made the trek from Fresno to Monterey to meet and hang out with Ith and Nin. That was cool.
We stayed overnight on Monterey Bay, as reported in a post titled to hint at what was about to happen, then returned to Cannery Row and went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium on the 29th. In the pouring rain. Later the 29th, we drove to Gilroy and stayed a night there, waiting out the rain before meandering back to Fresno. One of our stops was Marina Beach on Monterey Bay, and as far as I can determine, I only ever posted one picture. That despite having several cool pictures. Maybe I’ll rectify that. Along with some Sadie and other pictures I need to post.
That was fun. Who knows when we’ll get there again. By the time we get around to visiting the Jedi parents, they will probably be in Utah rather than Fresno. Though that’s subject to a final decision when the time comes. Ith and Nin will probably be in Utah as well, possibly the same town. Convenient. But less of an excuse to go to Monterey. It looks like the target destinations in California in the future will be the Bay area and San Diego. We’ll see. Before we can travel, we need to make enough money to live on, and perhaps have slightly older kids. Eventually, if not every time, we’ll drive rather than fly.
But I digress. A year ago there was no Sadie, not even in the oven, unless you count the dream I’d had in which she, as a child of perhaps as old as seven, chastised me for being slow to bring her and the other potential children into the world. If the dream is any indication, she has a sister and a brother waiting as well. I wasn’t at all surprised she latched on as soon as we were married. We sometimes ask her if she’s sure she should have picked us as parents. Sounds mystical, but that’s how it often feels.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
I Rock
Well, Deb always tells me I do, if that counts.
I solved the Expression Engine relocation problem. As far as I can tell, completely. It was all about file locations and permissions.
To recap, we started by setting up EE in a folder off of AV called, surprisingly, ee. When all was setup in the modified dancing raisin theme, and the pMachine data was imported, we sought to move it to the root, so it would come up just by going to accidentalverbosity.com, no directories or subdomains.
That worked. Partly. It kept using some locations under ee for some stuff, including paths to posts, and the main page at AV didn’t show all the newly added categories, only the original three Deb created. One of the holdups on changing color schemes has been that we wanted to be sure it could be made to work right.
I found a couple of PHP files with improper permissions, but it seems the most important find was the cache location. In EE, under your control panel directory is one named cache. That has to be set to 777, which in FTP shows up as drwxrwxrwx. Full read, write and execute across the board. Under that is a db_cache directory. It also must be 777. Under it were some directories with GUID names. That is, randomly generated sets of characters designed to be unique. It all must be 777. Some of this existed in the new location, but not with correct permissions.
In addition to the db_cache, there were two other cache directories, both empty, in the old but not the new location. Also 777 permissions.
I copied those, set the cache and db_cache to the correct permissions, and copied everything in the db_cache to the new db_cache. Figured that way it can look at the old location and still see what it needs, but if it does look only at the new one, that too has everything.
Then I refreshed the page and… yay for categories! It seems to have worked, assuming there’s no residual oddity I have yet to uncover. If I really want to be sure, I can rename the old directory and see if it all works.
All this while feeling like getting in bed for some extra sleep. Go figure.
The law of unintended consequences, example #7,442,381
Legislating people into buying SUVs.
Actually, sometimes I wonder if these things aren’t some sort of thinly-veiled disapproval of people who breed; after all, if we take away your ability to transport your family, you’ll have to stop having kids, right?
Heh. That’ll work about as well as not building roads in an attempt to keep people from going where you don’t want them to go. Or, say, restricting the housing supply with weird zoning to keep people from moving to town. Proven winners, those.
And yes, the bulk of this post is a thinly-veiled attempt not to go off on my normal rant about government mandated safety devices threatening the lives of your children should you attempt to decide for yourself where in the car they should sit.
Books!
Michael Williams speaks highly of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series, having just read the seventh, concluding volume. He compared it to a couple other major series; Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, and George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series.
Mitch jumped in, recommending Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series.
I know there are other fans of some of these series out there, and I commented so extensively I thought I would copy it here as well. I said:
I’ve never read the Dark Tower Books. Between you and my nephew, I am now most intrigued. My nephew mentioned it when he opened the Michael Whelan calendar I got him at Noreascon for Christmas.
I couldn’t get into the first Martin book. Maybe someday if I try again… My sister loves those.
I’m a big Wheel of Time fan, but agree on the later books having bogged down. Hopefully he will crank it up as expected in the next one, and come to a grand conclusion in a total of not more than two books after that.
Sword of Truth I like but have mixed feelings about. As Deb observed when she couldn’t make herself finish the second one, it’s boring in places. I didn’t really notice the libertarian overtones, amazingly, until the one I described as Goodkind channeling Ayn Rand, but more entertainingly and concisely, into a fantasy novel. I forget the title, but it’s the one where he makes the statue.
SoT is one of those where I will read the cover blurb, say “eh, whatever” because it sounds uninteresting, then eventually will read it and find it anything from an acceptable read to excellent, but not so compelling that I scramble to get the next volume and read it no matter how bad the cover makes it sound.
I’m afraid that despite Jordan’s failings, I am a Wheel of Time addict who will buy Knife of Dreams within days of its release in hardcover, and read it relatively promptly. I know, they have doctors for that.
Last Carnival of the Capitalists of 2004 Is Up
Dane Carlson has the last CotC of 2004 up at Business Opportunities Weblog.
As you can see at the hosts and info page, Dane will also be hosting the January 24 edition, which balances out having volunteered for arguably the worst slot of the year. Yet there were still a nice number of fine entries.
More importantly in the nearer term, Management Craft will be hosting the first CotC of 2005, the January 3 edition. Entries go to cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com, or use the Gongol.com submission form at:
http://www.gongol.com/random/cotc/.
Last Grand Rounds of 2004 Is Up
The last Grand Rounds of 2004 is up at CodeBlog. Lots of good reading on medical topics.
I noticed this entry relates to this excellent post by Caltechgirl on drug safety and responsibility. The latter not in Grand Rounds, but worth reading.
Monday, December 27, 2004
Snow. Lots of Snow.
I am trying to psych myself up to go out and shovel the eleven inches of snow from around the cars. Not to mention cleaning it off the cars. Yay for snow rakes!
The cool thing is that the end of each driveway has been plowed quite well. If I wanted, I could hop in the van and back right out. Walks? It should be interesting to see what kind of job Slacker Dude did on those.
I’m going to leave my Sentra where it is in the upper driveway, until after Slacker Dude and the other tenant have shoveled out their own spots. Help get them used to not stealing mine after it’s the only cleared spot, as happened last winter. They’re less likely to steal a spot in the lower driveway, and I can always leave it obstructed by moving the truck slightly. It’s worth the trouble to train them.
Meanwhile, Slacker Dude didn’t put the rubbish out two weeks in a row, and before we put out any Christmas trash (besides the box for the rolling butcher block-like counter/storage unit I got for “Deb” for the kitchen, which I used to make a shelf across two overflowing barrels to hold more bags on top), it’s already as bad as it got last time he went this long. Except the animals haven’t torn into it this time. So now the mountain of rubbish is buried under mass quantities of snow, and will be even more fun. I feel bad for the trash pickup guys. The week after Christmas is already the biggest of the year. From us they’ll have the Christmas excess plus two weeks worth.
Someday he’ll learn. I was a twenty-something “kid” once myself.
In case you’re curious, here is the original Mount Trashmore. There is this much there now, so it’s comparable. We have a big green bag, three grocery bags, the box the spice rack came in, and will soon have another big green bag to add to the pile. Pickup is Wednesday.
Perhaps I’ll take some pictures of the snow here and post those eventually…
Stay Tuned For CotC
Carnival of the Capitalists for this week is not up yet, but when it is, it will be at Business Opportunities Weblog. It appears there were nearly as many entries as in a non-holiday week, so there’s plenty to look forward to later when it’s up.
Sduffy Ziduses Are Addoyeenk
Ugh. This has been coming on for days, if not weeks, but last night it blew up, full-fledged, much like poor Sadie is experiencing. But nobody attacks my nose with an aspirator to help clear things. Heh. A little while ago when she was yelling at me in baby tongue and pummeling me to try to avoid the aspirator I wield without quarter, I told her that what she wanted to say was “no, stop!” Not that I would, but she may as well start learning words other than “Pooh,” which we swear she sometimes says in the correct context. Probably wishful thinking and it’s just a variant on her “ahhh- booooo” word. Then again, she seems to recognize Pooh if she sees him other than on her mobile.
So I am on my third cup of coffee. Instant, since we haven’t yet replaced the coffeemaker, which in something closely resembling the model is apparently irreplacable. It was designed and made by GE especially for Wal-Mart, and isn’t anymore. Which makes me wonder about the new hand mixer I got Deb, also a GE made for Wal-Mart. Six speed! With a surge button, rounded blades, small dough hooks, whisk, and a storage case. Ooooh. The coffee is helping. A shower ought to help even more.
I snored worse than ever and kept coughing. Got up in the middle of the night (well, 3:30 or so, if that’s “middle” when you went to bed at 2:00 after watching Spiderman 2, which was as excellent as everyone said) with a cough that a nose blow and sip of water wouldn’t help. Horizontal seems to be bad, and I never did get propped on pillows as much as I’d have liked. Took a Sudafed at that point, for what it was worth. Ended up getting out of bed again at 7:30 for the same reason, and almost fell back to sleep in the recliner watching the news and seeing what accumulations and conditions were. Then Deb and Sadie got up when Sadie was having too much trouble breathing.
I guzzled a cup of coffee and it was like a breath of fresh air. Yay for coffee! So I had another. Two is my norm. That made me feel so much better, I have chanced a third. Plus drinking coffee delays the inevitable shoveling and cleaning off cars.
I hope this goes away fast. Just as likely I’ll have one of my sinus infections I used to have almost annually. Ugh.
Sunday, December 26, 2004
ROFL!
Via Walter in Denver, John McCain.
Regionalism?
I keep forgetting to post this.
We were riding around one night recently, admiring the Christmas lights in the course of the drive, and Deb asked me what was up with the individual lights in windows.
I was jaw droppingly surprised, and explained they were essentially electric candles, very common around here all my life. Something to do with an ancient practice of putting candles in windows to light the way for the Christ child, or something. Many houses use only those and perhaps an inside Christmas tree visible in a window; no outside lights.
She had never seen them and I was surprised to learn it’s apparently a regional thing. Is anyone else aware of it being regional to use the candle-like single bulb Christmas lights in windows? If it really is regional, I wonder how widely it is practiced.
Carnival of the Dogs Is Up
Mickey has the latest Carnival of the Dogs up today. Also don’t miss last week’s, which consisted of adorable foster puppy pictures.
Send CotD entries to mickeym -at- comcast -dot- net if you’d like to join in, or point out a good post on someone else’s blog.
The Global Is Local These Days
Kathy Kinsley has friends in the area affected by the tsunami, and is keeping a close eye on things. She has some interesting links.
