Announcements
General announcements and administrivia, grand or otherwise
Now relegated to Blogblivion...Sunday, January 09, 2005
Jack L. Chalker
I only just learned that Jack L. Chalker is having a rough time and has been in the hospital for a month. I had the pleasure to meet him in 1991, and he’s quite a character and a nice guy. While I haven’t read any of his stuff recently, I enjoyed several of his books. I hope he pulls through and keeps going for many years to come.
Health updates page
Chalker’s new page
His son Steven’s blog
His wife Eva’s blo
His son Dave’s blog
Thursday, January 06, 2005
Looking For Jim?
JimSpot is temporarily at http://server91.totalchoicehosting.com/~jimspot/, due to having been screwed over by Bloghosts.
I suspect he may have to go get the .us version of his domain, as Ocean Guy had to do pending maybe getting his domain back.
Tuesday, January 04, 2005
Dead Capitalists
The old submission address of capitalists -at- elhide -dot- com is gone. I have forwarded misdirected entries to it (and received spam from it) for the last time.
Sadly, I just discovered today that the update I am absolutely sure I had done to the Carnival of the Capitalists page, reflecting the new cotcmail -at- gmail -dot- com address, was not evident. Not as a bold announcement across the top where I was sure I had done just that. Not in the fine details later on the page, where I am really sure I had made the change.
I’m not sure what’s up with that. Possibly I made a change from Not At Home where I keep the master copy, then forgot to synchronize. Possibly I am growing senile and only thought I’d made the edits. Anyway, they are there now so nobody can be misled. I can only hope I didn’t also lose any hosts with waylaid edits or revision reversions.
Of course, you can also use http://www.gongol.com/random/cotc/ for submissions, avoiding the issue of what address entirely.
Monday, January 03, 2005
Rest In Peace Frank Kelly Freas
I just learned from Laughing Wolf that Frank Kelly Freas has died. Rite Wing TechnoPagan has more here.
Sunday, January 02, 2005
Arisia Bound
Anyone else out there planning to attend Arisia this year? It’s the big, all-encompassing science fiction convention in Boston. It’s January 21 - 23, which in case you missed it is a date change from the original. The convention is normally the same weekend as MLK Day.
It’s interesting to note that a blood drive is being held during the convention, in association with the Heinlein Society. Sadly, I am unable to give blood. Not because I’ve been to England or anything; just the same reason they have to use the back of my hand for drawing mere samples of blood.
Anyway, we will be there, staying at the Park Plaza Friday and Saturday nights as I prefer to do. It’s not the same if you commute in, what with the almost 24 hour nature of the beast. Unless something changes, we’ll be on the 15th floor. Elevators are crazy during the convention, but that has the benefit of starting empty at the top when going down. Otherwise one of the low floors is the place to be, so taking stairs is practical.
Figured I’d promote it a bit, and see if there’s anyone from blogdom who might want to bump into us that weekend.
An MIA Returnee
Oceanguy is back. He’s been having issues with his oceanguy.com domain, so is on oceanguy.us, at least for the time being.
Got You On My Mind
Happy anniversary, baby.
It’s been one wonderful year since I made the Best. Move. Ever. It’s almost like a dream, from which I keep expecting to wake each time it occurs to me how my life is now and how amazing that is.
I find myself thinking that if this is what a year is like, then the lengths of time people like my grandparents were married seem too short by, well, forever. I only thought I knew what love was before we met, but the whole “two shall be as one” thing only became clear, and becomes clearer all the time, since you chose to share your life with me.
Friday, December 31, 2004
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
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.
Sunday, December 26, 2004
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.
Don’t Look Now…
But I am about to attempt my first turkey cooking. Well, in the sense that a “hotel style turkey breast” weighing almost 10 pounds counts as “a turkey.” It’s enough to give us plenty of sandwich leftovers. I’m probably going to do something approximating my friend Tom’s method. Seems like everyone is different! My uncle’s method is to put pats of butter or margerine under the skin liberally, tightly cover the whole thing with foil, put in the oven all night at 250, then cook the last while at 325 or so without the foil to crisp the skin. Tom’s method is to preheat to 500 and cook the first half hour uncovered at 400 or higher to crisp the skin and make it hold in the moisture. He says:
It crisps the outside of the bird and keeps the interior moist and yummy. When I do the bird project, I also baste at least once an hour. My basting mixture is about 1/4 cup soy sauce with some sesame oil, water, vinegar and seasoned with garlic, pepper, whatever you like best. As the bird juices flow, use that too. What is left in the pan when the bird is done will make a base for an unbeatable gravy.
He also generally uses strips of bacon on top for flavor and some self-basting. One of the best turkeys I ever had was done that way by him, so I thought I would try the bacon trick.
Sadie’s cold seems to have improved, and she doesn’t seem to mind it much as long as it doesn’t keep her from breathing. She slept quite well after all. She’s also becoming quite talented with her baby gym, hitting the dangly things hard enough to make the musical play regularly. It’s like night and day over about a week ago.
I’m still keeping an eye on the news from South Asia. Glenn has some good links to bloggers in the region, some of which I’d read earlier but not followed up with a mention. I immediately thought to check the Asia resources listed in Blogs Around the World. Mostly I have continued to check back at Command Post periodically.
Okay, Turkey now, perhaps some pictures will be posted later. Ooooh… pictures.
Massive Earthquake Reported
I thought I would post this, for anyone who hits here first thing this morning without having seen the news elsewhere first.
There was an earthquake of 8.9 magnitude in the Indian Ocean. That’s the largest in 40 years. Tsunamis have killed thousands and counting. Speculation is the number could ultimately be millions in India.
Regular updates at Command Post’s Global Recon page. Newest posts at the top, scroll for a great deal of detail, including reports from people with specific local knowledge. The current top post reports on a specific beach, picturing the damage. Death toll on that one stretch is expected to be at least 100.
It’s currently the cover story at both FoxNews and MSNBC. Also CNN, now that I look there too. CNN says it’s the fifth largest quake since 1900.
Ouch. Here’s hoping, if not expecting, the damage and death toll is inexplicably minimal for such a major event.
Saturday, December 25, 2004
Merry Christmas
Here’s wishing everyone a wonderful day, whether you celebrate in the most devout religious sense, enjoy it as a secular holiday with various fun trappings, pagan, commercial or otherwise, something in between, or are merely going about your life.
Thursday, December 23, 2004
Mapchic Returns
One of my favorite bloggers was once Mapchic, at a blog called Geographica.
Her last post was March 13 this year, then nothing. I’ve been back there periodically, and happened to check again today. She’s back!
In her comeback post, she explains what a horrid year it’s been, which had much to do with the complete lack of blogging.
She plans to post at a soon to be launched group blog, but for now will continue posting at her old digs as the urge strikes. It’s well worth keeping an eye on her. What blogging she did was some of the best written, most interesting stuff I have encountered. Plus I love maps.
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.
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
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.
Monday, December 20, 2004
Don’t you just love the holidays?
This is the first time I’ve been near a computer in hours and hours and hours. I had a big stack of stuff I wanted to post on today, too, but I suppose a whine about being too busy to blog will have to do. And I’m not busy at all compared to my husband.
We’ll be back if we *ever* finish the Christmas cards, or after it’s too late to bother, whichever comes first.
Heh heh, heh heh. She said Christmas.
Whee!
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.
Wednesday, March 24, 2004
Welcome From Jay
Welcome to Accidental Verbosity.
I know it’s not much of a launch if I don’t post anything, but I will be busy today completing the 1065 and associated forms for the business, conjuring up numbers for same. I’m already past my “be done by March 15th” target.
Perhaps if it goes well, I will take a break and add more here later. With both of us posting, it should generally be more active than our individual blogs have been.
As far as Carnival of the Capitalists goes, the pages will remain hosted on elhide.com, along with my old blog. They are linked over to the right, just lower on the sidebar than they were at my old place.