Thursday, March 03, 2005
Evil
Deb is busy feeding the baby, but I think she would agree that this is a good example of why John McCain is a vile, evil man who should never be elected to any office, ever again.
Not to mention why McCain-Feingold is hopelessly unconstitutional, along no doubt with at least some of the preceding laws that took us in that direction.
Bonus Sadie
This is Sadie with my brother, Wayne. They hadn’t met in person yet. She looks excited, doesn’t she?
Expression Engine Hiccup
Fascinating. I post the “Your Daily Sadie” posts with the same title each day. Expression Engine builds the URL for the post from the title, adapting to the problem of duplicates by incrementing a number at the end.
Thus the link for yesterday’s “Your Daily Sadie” ended in your_daily_sadie48 and was presumably the 48th such post.
Today when trying to publish exactly the same as all the previous times, I got an error:
An entry already exists with this URL title. URL titles must be unique.
All well and good, but why now? You don’t work and then stop working. If there is a limitation, why 48? I started over when I got the error, and it did it again. I’ll test again tomorrow, but meanwhile I put the 49 in for today myself. How annoying.
Update:
I was thinking I’d post a “bonus Sadie” anyway, or maybe a more generic family pictures post, so I used Bonus Sadie in order to test the URL numbering. It worked, tacking on a 6 so the URL would be unique. Which convinces me more and more that EE has a set limit on how high it will autoincrement.
Which I suppose is better than nothing. In a forum I found where people are talking about the unique post titles issue with a pMachine employee, the person seemed mysified as to why anyone would ever want a duplicate post title and thereby inadvertently generate a duplicate URL. How about “Carnival of the Whatever is up” each week. Yes, for more than 48 weeks on the same blog. It won’t just be the daily kid picture…
Your Daily Sadie
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Blog And Media Consumption Survey
Via Kevin, Henry Copeland of the “needs more server capacity and/or bandwidth to run effectively and not bog down page loads on blogs that host the ads” BlogAds network is doing a short, quite painless survey on blog readership.
The results will be made public at some point, which ought to be interesting.
I encourage you to take a couple minutes out of your day and fill out the survey, being sure to list Accidental Verbosity both as the referring blog, and as one of your ten favorites, as surely it must be.
Again, the survey is here.
Ironic
I just wrote about the severe smell created in the stairwell by the upstairs people leaving their trash outside their door at the top of the stairs in the summer. For a week or two at a time.
Then I smelled exactly the same smell!
That was one foul diaper. The post-digestive exodus made itself instantly known from several feet away.
Which led to my trying a new trick. I have an outrageously strong gag reflex and couldn’t even unfasten the diaper without trying to retch. So I went I gargled with a little Listerine wintermint before trying to change it. That was sufficiently overpowering and distracting to get me through it.
Anyway, ironic I should mention the particular smell and then she produced one like it.
Slacker Dude Faces Regime Change
All the time we’ve been here, Slacker Dude has been getting $50 a month off his rent to:
Essentially it’s $600 a year employment as an on the spot maintenance guy. I was offered a $50 discount for doing stuff around the place, but without even asking what it would involve, I turned it down because I assumed it would involve things like mowing the lawn and being tied to the place too intensively for the money. Not so.
The reality has been that Slacker Dude has milked it as a way to save $50 on rent with minimal effort. On the day I found out his job included replacing bulbs, the front hall light had been off for a few days, and I had recently replaced a bulb in the cellar.
He has yet to clear off the steps or dig a walk from the snow that ended yesterday morning. This is not unusual. Meanwhile, he had friends over for a late night, boisterous some kind of sports watching party, ensuring the snow on the steps got trampled to the point where he’ll never get it off. When he does shovel a path, it is too narrow to navigate while carrying a baby or groceries; basically a desultory single shovel width as expediently as he can make it appear he kinda sorta did the job.
To the best of my knowledge, the common areas have never been cleaned by anyone for the entire time I have been here, except for the time I cleaned the back hall thoroughly, and the times I knocked down cobwebs out there subsequently, and swept and reorganized parts of the cellar (which was to my benefit and I am just as happy not to have other noses in). An electrician came in and added an outlet in the front hall last summer because not having an outlet was the excuse for never cleaning out there. I wonder what the next excuse will be.
Taking the rubbish to the street has been an every second or third week thing, and he has developed the habit of never removing the barrels from beside the road. He allowed one of the four barrels to blow away and be lost completely. He’s unemployed, and that has made it worse. He has no reason to leave the apartment, and so he skips doing anything and hangs out being stoned instead. This has developed into keeping his own rubbish up there and not taking it out for as long as two weeks. The secret being that it goes outside his back door, where it stinks up the whole stairwell eventually. Last summer, at its worst, the smell started to permeate into our kitchen. At least in winter it’s cold enough to preserve it quite a while.
Anyway, things got so completely out of hand, I complained in detail. The result is that his rent went up $25, mine went down $25. I take care of the back, he takes care of the front, and we each get our own trash to and from the road. Of course, I don’t start getting the $25 until the month starting the 13th. Last week he knew about this change on Tuesday, didn’t take out the rubbish for Wednesday, probably figuring that I’d take it all or something. We got confirmation on Thursday. They called me coincidentally on the very day the noise from up there had gotten so unbearable we were on the verge of complaining and/or moving sooner rather than later.
This morning we had three overflowing barrels, a bag of ours on the ground, and a bag of theirs on top of that. I took to the street the one barrel that was all ours. To separate the rest, I had to handle every bag of their rubbish, because after knowing of the regime change, they made sure their stuff got into barrels mixed with our stuff. Theirs is now neatly overflowing two barrels, still by the garage. Ours is on its way to the landfill. Heh.
The bad thing about the regime change, especially given Slacker Dude’s loss of the fourth barrel, is that we are going to have to get a couple barrels or some kind of trash handling system of our own. He’ll just keep mixing his in with ours freely otherwise.
The score so far:
The back doorway and access to the rubbish was cleared by me shortly after the snow was over for good yesterday. Sand is spread as needed.
The front steps and path were not touched by him yet, a day later.
My rubbish went to the street, and his got rebarreled neatly by me in the process.
His two plus weeks of rubbish remains by the garage.
The front hall light is still out, more than a week later, despite having been pointed out to the landlord by us and the landlord to him.
What a loser. At least he hasn’t flooded our apartment and the cellar again, while stoned or otherwise.
Your Daily Sadie
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Eleven Inches
I just spent an hour shoveling and clearing off cars. This was the most work of any storm we have had, if only because we were away for the deepest snow, and much of the area I just shoveled had been plowed for us by the landlord because, well, nothing was in the way.
This gave me a chance to measure. It was 11 inches. It looked deceptively shallower from the window than it was in reality.
I sure hope that’s it for the winter.
Grocery Brand Preferences?
Sharon is asking whether you are particular about brand preferences when shopping for groceries. She usually buys what’s on sale, and was curious.
Go here and scroll down (currently the 2nd post down) to opine (or she’ll see it if you comment here). The permalinks are by the day, not the post, but it’s easy to find.
I posted some of my grocery foibles, most notably an overwhelming preference for Heinz ketchup. I forgot to mention that we’ve developed a preference for Geisha brand tuna, but we tried the Roche Brother’s store brand and that’s the next best thing.
How about you? Always simply the lowest price? A mix of price and strong preferences?
Sadie Antics
Sadie just woke up and reminded me of something she did yesterday. She always wakes up so happy, and she’ll even play by herself in the crib for a while without making a sound, then grins when you go find that she’s awake. She doesn’t go to sleep happy. She resents having to sleep, as she might miss something.
Anyway, yesterday she was in her exersaucer and held her dolly out toward me, shaking it enticingly and making the bell inside jingle, exactly as I would do with that or a similar toy to spark her interest. It was both cute and one of those “scary smart” moments. She looked quite pleased with herself. Probably just one more example of her trying things to see what happens or what reaction she gets.
I’m trying to remember if Deb mentioned last week when she apparently wanted the rag doll that was in the top of three plastic bins containing some of her toys, so she pulled the whole thing down on herself and got it.
Yesterday I put her under the baby gym for the first time in several days. She proceeded to grab each of the dangling toys and study them carefully, rather than playing with them. Which is the same thing I have seen her do with other toys, though usually she just plays.
Congratulations Joe
Joe Katzman has the best love story I have seen since Deb and I met through our blogs. It’s well worth taking the time to read such a happy, memorable experience that sounds like, as with me, something not expected ever to happen.
Spring Is Coming
Probably by about May, anyway.
Looks like we’ve added about eight inches to our record winter. I am totally looking forward to going outside and shoveling. Again.
And we could get another inch or two this morning. Yay.
Grand Rounds Is Up
Medical blogging meets food blogging? The 23rd Grand Rounds is up, menu-style, hosted by Intueri.
Your Daily Sadie
