Blogging Nonsense
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Saturday, December 25, 2004
Best Christmas Ever
I need to make this fast, as we have to get our butts to my sister’s house within an hour or so.
So far I got two presents, one from Deb and one from her parents. They are two of the best gifts ever!
Once upon a time, I absolutely loved the Bee Gees. This goes back to before their Saturday Night Fever days. Eventually I owned seventeen different albums and eight tracks by the Bee Gees. This included obscure, early stuff. Did you know they did a passable cover of The Vogues Turn Around, Look At Me? I always liked the mellow stuff like
The big collection suffered from the Great Vinyl Drowning of 1994, and by my lack of something to play them on. Ironically, my old stereo that I inexplicably kept in storage rather than tossing will still play eight tracks, but won’t do anything else, and only puts sound out of one speaker (probably the speaker, not the stereo). I have never gotten around to getting any CDs by them. Partly just coincidence, partly being less crazy about them after a while, and partly my general reluctance to buy CDs over the years because they have always been overpriced. I have a couple of their songs in MP3 courtesy of my brief usage of Napster, which I used primarily to get things I had on vinyl and missed.
Deb got me the box set. Woohoo! It’s been a great mystery what she’d ordered for me that wasn’t Spiderman and/or Spiderman 2. Now I know, and it’s amazing.
But wait! There was still a box from her parents with my name on it, mysteriously weighty.
It’s something I’d put on my annual Christmas list for years and never gotten: A spice rack! A totally cool, rotating metal rack that comes with twenty bottles, only two of which duplicate things we already have on hand, and some of which were things I was working up to buying soon. Yay!
Deb got the perfect view. I opened the wrap at one end, saw what the end of the box said, and gasped! Then said “Oh. My. God.” in perfect Rachel Lucas period after every word for emphasis fashion. I was completely floored and overwhelmed. Deb was thrilled to see it too.
That on top of the fun of having the baby presents and taking pics of her sleeping surrounded by her stuff made it like the best ever, without even having gone and seen other relatives yet. Um… pics will follow eventually. Really.
Okay, gotta go. Yay for perfect presents!
A Year Ago
A year ago I was all excited, and a little nervous, because I was preparing to fly to California to meet Deb, the Accidental Jedi. It was kind of an abbrieviated day. Get up, pack, have dinner and do presents, drop stuff at home, grab my luggage, get dropped at the airport by my brother-in-law, breeze through security and then wait.
Then an interminable flight to LAX. When I saw the lights of Denver I thought we were there and was very disappointed. Then a puddle jumper to Fresno, for which the wait was longer than the flight.
Finally! At about midnight Pacific time, I was in the Fresno attempting-to-be-international airport, walking down the hall, grinning like an idiot as I approached Deb.
Now here we are, one year later. What a year!
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Christmas Plans and Traditions Poll/Discussion
Ith has a Christmas poll for you. Whether you go out for Chinese and a movie on Christmas, or traverse lots of rivers and woods to get to Grandma’s house, she’s looking for your answers in her comments or in a post of your own.
This is one such post.
I traditionally spend the day somewhere else. This year will be a mix of here, obviously, where we have actual presents and an actual family to open them here, and the usual going elsewhere. Lately that has been my sister’s most years. In the past it had been my grandmother’s. It has changed over the years. For my sister it has gotten hard, with the MS (for which the drugs are $1500 a month, so the new insurance company has started jerking her around), so a lot of the cooking will be done by my mother and grandmother. But she has more room for a bunch of us. As in at least twelve.
When we have more kids and they are enough older to make it matter, we may stay home, have dinner at home, or someday actually host dinner for the multitudes that are my family.
I am not sure what’s on the menu. Probably turkey and something, which will most likely be ham. Sometimes there’s roast beef or pork as one of two meats. If there’s one, it’s usually turkey and sometimes ham. One of the most wonderful things ever is ham with my late grandfather’s raisin sauce.
For dessert, which is the main thing my sister is making, there will probably be pumpkin pie, another kind or two, including likely lemon meringue that one of her kids is crazy about, and date nut bars for me because I mentioned how much I liked them last Sunday. My mother always made them and I haven’t had them for years. Want the recipe. We will probably bring the cobbler-like cranberry pie, which will be something different.
We will probably eat about 1:00, which means probably by 2:00. Which means “early,” to folks who have evening dinners.
Favorite gift when I was a child? I can’t remember offhand. Is that sad or what? Not sure I remember or if one stands out as an adult either. There are gifts I could expound upon as memorable, or praise in some way or another, but favorite… well, as an adult perhaps the pocket computer I got in 1983 would count. As opposed to the winter coat I got in 1982 and am still wearing 22 years later, which was an excellent gift, but notable more for its longevity and extended usefulness.
I have nothing intensely specific on my wish list. I wouldn’t mind Spiderman, Spiderman 2, and some other videos, but I hadn’t given it much thought, and gifts from relatives this year will be for the baby, now that I have one. And that is gift enough for me.
Unique tradition? Not really. Until my uncle moved to Maine, it was traditional to go to his place on Christmas eve. We tend to be into stockings even for adults. It hasn’t been that long since my mother last did one for me, and around the time I was in my teens we started doing a stocking for her, which lasted many years.
Deb and I are at the start of making new traditions and Sadie’s memories. We’ve declared Christmas eve to be “ours” to balance the running off elsewhere on Christmas itself.
We recently talked about when to open presents, and a tradition her family had of opening a single present the night before, which for the kids took the edge off waiting. Maybe I’ll let Deb open one of hers tomorrow night. In a sense we got that by going to my uncle’s and getting a present from him, and some years we’d get to open something else too. I always thought it was weird to open everything before morning. Unless maybe there’s a practical reason, like traveling on Christmas itself.
Anyway, help Ith out; go comment, or write a post on the topic and link her Christmas post.
Is It A Post… Or A Commercial?
When I was attempting to create the guest account to invite people to post here last night (which attracted zero interest so far, but we’ll leave the option open for the next week or so if it doesn’t get abused or out of hand), Deb heard me commenting from the other room “Expression Engine is soooo secure!”
It took on the order of ten minutes for me to find all the right settings to allow the guest account I had created to not only log on, but also publish. You can control things to a pretty fine level of detail.
I’m totally impressed with Expression Engine so far.
My big feature request would be for it to add a table that maps each imported pMachine post URL to the new, EE-style URL that gets assigned. Someone clicks an old link, it hits the site, doesn’t immediately see the page, says hold it, this was a pMachine import, does a lookup and redirects. Currently it goes to the main page for any link to a post made with pMachine. Which is better than generating an error, but not all the way to perfect functional grace.
We do manual blogrolls. That is harder in EE, at least given that we have made sure all sidebar content shows up in all views, as is necessary if we get around to having ads or sponsored links. But it’s not a big deal, really. Copy and paste is our friend. There will be major changes soon. I guess if we aren’t linking you and you think we ought to be, you could let me know. We’ll probably do some categorizing, but nothing like my original planetary scheme. More like a segregation of business/CotC blogs from the rest, and perhaps a separate New England Bloggahs list.
Anyway, if you consider the hobby of blogging worth the money, Expression Engine is just amazing.
Update:
Hmmm… I just checked referrers, went to one from Google, clicked the link to us, and it 404’d instead of going to the main page as I described. That’s not what it had been doing with the pMachine-style links before today.
Happy…
Not that there’s anything wrong with yet another holiday. (YAH!)
Via the father of tireblogging
While I Was At It…
Perhaps in the previous post I ought have mentioned that Sin City has Jessica Alba, Alexis Bledel, Rosario Dawson, Brittany Murphy, and perhaps others in it, but not Erica Durance, Allison Mack, Kristin or Kristen Kreuk, Jorja Fox, or Emily Procter or Proctor in it, naked, nude, or otherwise.
For my friend Paul, it also has Frodo. Um, I mean Elijah Wood, favorite of pervie hobbit fanciers everywhere. Not to mention Bruce Willis, who rocks and is always a crowd favorite.
Guess that’s enough baiting of Google for one post.
Wednesday, December 22, 2004
We Are Santa’s Elves
This is an invitation, via a test post to make sure this works, to guest post here.
I have created a guest account that will display as “Little Elf,” since it’s always fun to have little elves running around; making toys, pulling teeth, blogging…
You can only do limited things and can’t see most of the options in the control panel, but it is a chance to get a look at Expression Engine if you’d like to get some idea.
Anyway, this is your chance to post in a foreign place - or at all, if you don’t have a blog, maybe link yourself if you have something that deserves more of an audience, and have some fun.
You can go here to get the login page. Name is littleelf and password is dentist.
Enjoy!
- Posted by Jay -
Update:
Added this to the latest Beltway Traffic Jam
If The Food Doesn’t Kill You, The Dying Will (Audience Participation Post)
How many of these things have you eaten? I think I count about 27 for me, out of the 50, depending how you interpret some of them.
I have not had Thai, but we have a Thai restaurant right down the street, half a mile or so, where one of my favorite Chinese places used to be. It’s only a matter of time.
Some of them are too weird for me, and they aren’t entirely the ones you might expect. The whole idea of caviar has always weirded me out. I’d be happy to try alligator or kangaroo. Is it strange that I’ve had squid (calamari), but the idea of octopus seems… unappealing to me?
Venison is good. I’ve had it as burgers and in chili. Possibly otherwise that I don’t remember. The burgers were at my uncle’s house way up in Maine when I was a kid, served without telling us what it really was, so we’d eat it without complaint.
I thought the whole list would be “extreme” foods, or else foods widely considered so tasty they aren’t to be missed. I’m surprised it’s more of a mix, and that it’s partly broad categories and partly specific dishes. Odd.
What items would you put on a “try before you die” list of foods?
Merry Chr- Oops, Happy Holidays
Yesterday I went shopping at Wal-Mart for presents for the house Deb and Sadie. It went rather well, besides spending too much.
One funny thing I noticed, though. Periodically they had a “thank you for shopping Wal-Mart” guy come on the PA system with announcements. It became obvious he was under orders to say “happy holidays” and not merry Christmas. He kept goofing and trying to correct himself with the more correctly political phrase.
I dunno. These retailers rely heavily on Christmas shopping. Seems kind of… dangerous, almost… to start dissing the reason for most of their sales this time of year.
Jay’s Law
"The busier you are with real life, the more things come to mind to blog about, even as blogging has less time and energy left to happen, and you tend to draw a blank and forget all those posts that might have been.”
Or something like that. My posts would have been something about shopping, the bank, the cars, the baby, presents, sending cards, some links to people, the weather (which relates to the cars), cookies, and other stuff.
Instead I will say good night and leave you wondering what might have been.
Sunday, December 19, 2004
As Frosty Would Say…
May your “answer year” be as superb as mine was, before I turned unanswerable in April.
Saturday, December 18, 2004
Categories
See the categories over to the left? There are only three of them listed. There are actually about 19 in all!
When Deb setup the new blog with Expression Engine, it was in accidentalverbosity.com/ee so we wouldn’t have to be down at all on the old one from pMachine.
After the old one was imported, I set out to move the new one to the root, just accidentalverbosity.com. There are a bunch of settings for file locations you change, and I did that, as well as copying everything to the root and the relative positions occupied to the location of index.php, and changing permissions on a couple of files.
Trouble is, the primary locations you have to change in the control panel revert right back to the EE folder. They won’t take. No matter; it all works and people coming to the original URL see the blog.
The first thing that went wrong was the categories. I added a mess of them and they didn’t show up. They are available options when publishing. They show up in the posts, like the one below categorized under both rugrats and moosic. You can click the category in a post and see the whole set of posts for the category. But you can’t see the categories in the sidebar. This makes me very sad.
I’m sure I’ll figure it out when I bother to expend effort to that end, or I’ll be able to hack it into submission or get help from the EE support/forum people, but hey, if I mention it here, someone might have thoughts offhand. Plus it makes everyone aware we have categories, which we didn’t before. I went back and applied them to some old posts, but not all. Thus the baby pictures I posted do show up under baby pictures and it’s a shortcut to see the more recent ones, and the older ones are still at http://accidentalverbosity.com/alien for now.
The Dog Ear Question
I must confess, I have been know to do this to books. I try to use a bookmark, but if I own the book and there’s none handy, especially if it’s just some paperback…
Lately I’ve been really good about it, and even when I do it, I try to flatten them back out as neatly as I can.
If You Can’t Beat The Taxman Any Other Way…
Well, this is one motivation for becoming a dictator.
Via Rand Simberg
Friday, December 17, 2004
Abusing the Warranty
We went to target and then Wal-Mart today. Wal-Mart for some digital prints and a couple loose ends. Target for Christmas stuff and the bulk of other items.
We bought a 2.5’ tabletop Christmas tree with fiber optic lights built in, a big $20 for the year or two we can’t have a bigger tree. We also got some tiny ornaments for it, that would not be too heavy. Holiday Christmas stuff for your giving Christmas tree and other decorating, wrapping, etc. needs is insanely cheap these days. Not to mention varied and innovative. We forgot the hangers for the ornaments, so I’ll have to run to Brooks or whatever for some, or find some paper clips and adapt them.
Meanwhile, I setup the tree. Plugged it in, flipped the switch, and the switch wasn’t flippable, but more like flappable. Broken. Doh! This after Deb dug for one that had an undamaged box.
I took it apart. It’s made to be able to do that, because if the halogen bulb dies, it can be replaced. The whole thing is simply a motor turning a multicolored lens at an offset above a light that shines into the base of the tree and comes out the fiber ends in whatever color is between the bulb and the fiber in question.
The switch is a slider that makes contact between two wire connections on a tiny circuit board. The board the wires attach to was not connected to the switch mechanism. Easy enough. But then it was fussy about making the connection right, and would arc and flicker. No good.
Determined not to have to return it and deal with the madness, but to have a working pre-lit tree, I ended up soldering it so it’s always on. It’s controlled by the switch on the power strip or by the state of being plugged in or not. It’s sitting there, gracing the room as I type. Go me!
This would not have been possible had my father not given me a used soldering gun and small supply of solder when I was up there for Thanksgiving. He brought out his good soldering gun to improve my car’s wiring situation, and I remarked that I had always wanted one of those, ever since my older brother got one when I was a kid and I was all jealous. Sooner or later, I would have bought myself one. The one I lusted after is big, powerful, gun-shaped, and has a trigger for turning the heat on and off. You’d not actually want it for smaller, more sensitive electronics. Strangely enough, most of the soldering I’ve ever done was with a propane torch, doing metal work, not electrical at all.
My father gave me a little soldering gun that is always on when plugged in, better for small electronics, and just needed the tip sanded down a little. He never needed it any more, with the larger one around. I stuck it in my toolbox with the thin, solid solder.
Then tonight came along. Yay! My father saved our tree. And me a trip back to Target. Not that I might not end up there anyway, as I still need to get something for Deb… But I hate returns.
Now to hang Sadie’s stocking under the tree…
Wednesday, December 15, 2004
Checking It Twice
Ha! Here’s an amusing, comment-provoking artifact. I was searching on my computer at the office to see if I had a handy mailing list for holiday Christmas cards for clients and vendors. I came across my Christmas list for the year 2000.
My family demands one of these most years, else they have no clue what to get me. However, nobody mentioned it this year because I am no longer single and childless. The emphasis is always on the kids in the families that have them. I do now, so Sadie will get the presents.
Some years even I had no idea what to list, but apparently in 2000 I went all out to come up with a variety of items. That people could afford. Sometimes as a joke I would put something expensive nobody could possibly buy for me. But hey, they asked what I wanted…
So let your mind go back four years, long before Deb, less than two years after I left my full time job to be self-employed, a year after I became the only one of several partners working full time for the business, a year after I got my previous apartment, in Quincy, after sharing a house with my stepsister for several years, two years after my peak “watching movies in theaters as they were released” year, and less than a year after I got my first ever VCR. Here, verbatim, is the list, in approximately the same format as in Word, with everything I have since gotten or that Deb has, as best I can remember, in italics:
Jay’s Famous Annual Christmas List
For the year 2000
For the Apartment· Grater, one of those big metal ones that does something different on each of the 4 sides is what I am picturing
· Can never have too many paring knives
· Or anyway, something specifically designed for slicing cheese might be cool
· A couple more spatulas wouldn’t hurt, for non-stick pans specifically
· Tightly sealable containers made for storing cereal
· And other such storage containers for things like pancake mix, flour, etc.
· Only kind of pans I could possibly use would be a couple small to medium sized saucepans
· A container appropriate for maple syrup
· Wouldn’t mind some kind of blender/food processor thingie, the easier designed for cleanup the better
· I wouldn’t mind a couple wooden spoons
· Decent wooden cutting board (scientifically proven more sanitary than plastic)
· Spoon holder thingie for top of stove
· I am most in need of large plates and cereal bowls when it comes to dishes, but not direly so
· Set of measuring cups
· Some new mid-sized towels, by which I mean ones that many would call “bath size” but to me are just comfortably oversized hand sized. About the size some of you have seen me put under dishes on the counter.
· I wouldn’t object to a dish strainer thingie in a color that goes with the kitchen (unfortunately that means shades of beige, white, yellow, peach, orange rather than colors I personally prefer like blue, purple or maybe green… though green would kind of fit and blue wouldn’t clash)More General
· Any Beatles CD, though especially interested in White Album
· Videos of
Star Wars 4: A New Hope
Star Wars 5: The Empire Strikes Back
ET
The two Toy Story films
Beauty and the Beast!
The Wizard of Oz
Dogma
Princess Mononoke
The Die Hard films
The Truman Show
Fantasia
Fantasia 2000
High Fidelity
The Sure Thing
Life of Brian
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
The Lion King
Aladdin
Sleeping Beauty
Lady and the Tramp
Jungle Book
Bambi
The Little Mermaid
Cinderella
Pocahontas
Clueless
The Breakfast Club
Top Gun
When Harry Met Sally
The Love Letter (big screen version with Tom Selleck, Ellen Degeneres, etc., not the Hallmark one with Jennifer Jason Leigh)
The Green Mile
Titan A.E.
The Batman films
The Superman films
Simply Irresistible
Every James Bond film
Armageddon
Deep Impact
· Gift certificates for any major book store or cinema chain in the general area, Filenes, South Shore Plaza in general, any place videos are sold at a reasonable price, Best Buy, Comp USA, Bed and Bath or similar stores, etc.
· Snow broom (Dad knows what I mean)
· Shirts of the long sleeved button down Oxford variety, size 18, 34/35 sleeves, basically any color but white and any pattern that doesn’t accentuate my need to lose 50 pounds. I tend to prefer ones that have a certain… weight and texture to them, which I know doesn’t convey what I mean, but most shirts labeled Oxford seem to have it to some degree. I have had good luck with Stafford brand Oxfords, and just bought the same thing in Van Heusen which seem to be thinner material and are a higher percentage cotton, but have traditionally been a brand I’ve had luck with. I’ve had mixed results with L.L. Bean shirts.
· Pants of the “Dockers” genre, which can be Dockers, The Original Khaki Company, Hagar and others. Not the waistbands that have stretchy sections in them. Waist 40, Leg 30.
· Socks, as long as they aren’t short ones, and have a reasonable degree of thickness to the material. I prefer colors other than white, but do like multiple socks of the same color/pattern making them fairly generic to match up.
There you have it, a blast from the past. Some things not in italics need comment.
I did get more knives, but not the good paring knives I wanted, and I have lost my favorite one since then.
My grandmother has a hand me down blender waiting for us at her house, which we didn’t take last time because the car was too full or something. But that’s not what I really wanted for a “food processor.”
Now we’d like some pans that aren’t non-stick, of various sizes. And need a medium saucepan or two, non-stick or otherwise, since I boiled my good non-stick one dry and ruined the coating with excess heat. I’m very fussy about treating them just so, and overheating with nothing in them is one of the best ways to harm them. Now things stick instead of not. I like non-stick cookware but would like some of the other kind too. Deb prefers the other kind.
I forgot how much I like the word thingie. I haven’t used it nearly enough lately.
Deb has a number of Beatles CDs, including the White Album and the red and blue compilations. I subsequently bought One after it came out.
I may have some of the movies wrong, since Deb has an extensive collection of mostly non-overlapping movies, and I can’t even remember everything I bought. The most amusing thing is between us we have three copies of The Cutting Edge.
I think it’s funny I had to start making my family a list as an adult. I never did that when I was a kid. Not as far as I can remember anyway.
Update, as I review the post:
I have the first and best Die Hard film, but didn’t mark that because I stated it there as plural. It’s about the time of year to watch it again, being one of the best Christmas movies.
I think Deb may have at least the first Toy Story, but again, plural and wasn’t certain.
I eventually got the first two Batman films. I think it’s two, not three.
This reminds me I need to watch While You Were Sleeping, another great Christmas movie, with Deb, who has never seen it.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
We Now Have Weiners
The results are in for the 2004 Weblog Awards.
Pretty cool, but I’d take it more seriously if all the winners were, you know, weblogs. Anyway, congratulations to the winners! I even voted for some of them, yet amazingly they won anyway.
Monday, December 13, 2004
No Stormy Eyes Here
Jennifer has issued awards!
We’ve won!
It’s such a relief, after not being nominated in the 2004 Generate Traffic While Being Abused Mercilessly Weblog Awards. They like us! They really really like us!
They are the Windy Awards. I assume the name is a play on hot air in the blogosphere, and nothing to do with soongs by The Association. And Windy has great awards, that strike up responsive chords...
Then again, Windy the statue does have wings, if not “to fly above the clouds.”
Anywho, here it is:
We won the award because Jennifer likes to live vicariously through us, in memory of might-have-beens you would know about were you a relatively regular reader over there long enough. Happy to oblige, and thank you. We appreciate the honor.
There are many other fine winners in a range of categories. You should check them out.
Well, That Was Interesting
Deb got the new EE version of the blog setup in a subdirectory and ported the pMachine blog to it. That was a breeze, and we can’t recommend Expression Engine enough so far. Apparently it’s what MT wants to be when it grows up, or something.
Anyway, next thing was to move it to the root of the web. Well, there are directions and everything, but it will not take 100% of the changes of locations. So by copying all the files and changing all the locations in the control panel, I managed to get the root of the web to load the main page, but all the secondary pages insist on being in the subdirectory, even though they were told not to be.
I’m giving up on it for the night. Maybe for longer. After all, it works.
Saturday, December 11, 2004
Templates and stylesheets and blogrolls, oh my!
Spent the day working on the EE templates. I’m loving these things, at least the set for the default template I’m working with...clean and simple and easy to modify. I’m just doing the bare minimum necessary to get the thing up and running...we’ll probably look much like the default for quite a while, but it looks good, so what the hell, right?
Anyway, I don’t suppose you’ll be hearing from me until the swap is complete. Baby permitting, that should be late tomorrow. That, of course, could mean Wednesday. Or Friday. In any case, if you see any wackiness, please disregard. *grin*
Saturday, November 13, 2004
First Entry
This is a sample weblog entry. You can delete it from your Control Panel.