Not sure what this is but just stumbled upon it and assumed that it was some kind of forum for...Oh man. Kepler’s is out of business. I can’t believe it. That was a wonderful bookstore, one of the few independents in this area. (For such a literate area, we have a complete Hobson’s choice of bookstores: B&N or Borders. Whee. Ha.)
If Kepler’s couldn’t make it—whenever I went there it was packed—the independent bookstore is truly doomed.
Since an MT employee stopped by to say howdy and ask about some of the things I said in this entry, I figured it was only fair to post an entry about how MT’s been working for me since I got it, you know, working.
It’s great.
Seriously.
If you use MT, upgrade to 3.2 Especially with the licensing sale they have on. I guess I should get a license, if my brother-in-law’s singing group is still doing a blog. (Aha! They aren’t! I should get on the stick.) The integrated commenting features alone are worth it! I was very happy that MT-Blacklist gave me some control over comment spam, but MT really seems to have a handle on spam now. I haven’t seen one get in in the past couple of days, and I’ve deleted a hundred or so from the “Junk Comments” area.
I still think MT uses way too many resources building and rebuilding entries, so whenever I see the spinning wheel of doom, I do something else on the computer for a while. But I don’t think it’s that much worse than previous versions of MT. And considering the extra features? Totally worth it.
Just remember: if you do that upgrade? BACK ALL OF YOUR BLOGS UP BEFORE DOING A DARN THING. Seriously. Don’t make me cry.
Her Highness the Most Excellent Sophia started Kindergarten yesterday. Somebody tell me how a baby I just brought home from the hospital can possibly be starting Kindergarten?
I looked at the list of stuff she’s supposed to know for Kindergarten. She was well past that level about 2 years ago. I looked at the list of the stuff she’s supposed to learn this year and, well, let’s see…she does not in fact know how to tell time on an analog clock yet. So we have that to look forward to.
We walk to school in the late morning. (I signed her up for the “afternoon” kindergarten because I don’t want to have to have her out the door by 7:45am any earlier than I have to, which turns out to be 1st grade.) So far she’s not pleased at the walk—”Mommy, I get tired!” It’s 6/10 of a mile each way. I think she’ll adapt. Also, extra exercise for me.
She’s been very excited about the whole Kindergarten thing for weeks, if not months. Now that it’s started she’s a little unsure about the whole thing—while we’ve run into preschool friends at the school, none of them are in her class. She’s outgoing, though: I don’t sense that she’ll have much trouble making friends. Which, let’s face it, is what this is all about, as far as I’m concerned.
(Pssst: Can someone please tell me how to put some space between the picture up there and the text next to it? I’ve been playing with the style sheets and html for 30 minutes now and seeing no improvement. Just a little space from the text, that’s all I want!)
Like I wasn’t before. But today I have a whole new appreciation for his accomplishments.
I took some medication yesterday afternoon, which was a big mistake because it’s meant to be taken in the morning. There’s something in it that leaves you wide awake for hours, and it’s best if you’re wide awake when you’re supposed to be. I thought 3pm would be okay, but at midnight I thought: Uh oh. I have to get up at 6 to go running with Rob. So I dug into the medicine cabinet and came up with Valium, which yes, put me straight to sleep. (This is the second Valium I’ve taken in my life. I am not a closeted pill-popping housewife. A closeted bon-bon-eating housewife, perhaps. But not pills.)
I woke up before the alarm this morning, at 5:45. I got up, got dressed, drove to Rob’s house to meet up with him and our other running buds, and went for a run at Stevens Creek County Park. Rob figured it to be about 5 miles, but I think he was off by at least a mile and several hundred feet elevation. This trail kicked my butt. I was the drag on the whole group: during one ascent I finally just started walking and said, “Meet you at the top!”
Drove home. Showered. Dressed. Kissed kids goodbye. Went to go write.
And I’m sitting here unable to form much of a coherent thought besides, “Wow, Mike Oldfield’s soundtrack to The Killing Fields is totally my favorite writing music.”
Hemingway could write with what, a couple fifths of Scotch in him? Damn. One Valium and not enough sleep and I’m down for the count.
That worked.
Always back up your templates.
Clearly, I have to figure out how to use external template files with MT, because having to recreate new template files every time is very wearying.
What the hell, wanna redesign this place anyhow…
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Yeah, I’m with this guy… Sigh. I don’t know why Movable Type is such an unwieldy pig—probably for the same reason MS Word is. Because it’s all things to all people. And in the immortal words of a computer science prof from Stanford: “(Insert name here) is a power tool. And power tools can kill.” (I think he was talking about C. It’s been a while.)
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Although, I have to agree with John Scalzi on this: MT 3.2 is pretty faboo. The Junk Comments filter (much better interface that MT-Blacklist). The Junk Trackbacks filter (we can use trackbacks again!). Much better division of labor between tabs, instead of scattering it all on one page. And a way prettier layout for a lot of this stuff.
The font size they use is way too small. Not everyone lives in a 9-point world, people.
I wish MT weren’t such a resource hog. With a tendency to destroy sites when you upgrade. Other than that it’s perfect. (Just remember to back up.)
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Okay, and now I’m begging for comments, to make sure that the commenting function works for people besides me.
Yes, Otto, I KNOW: Switch to Wordpress. Well, if using MySQL were easier…
I just upgraded to MT 3.2, and as you can probably tell, I’ve f’d up my site. Well, this is nothing. At first the upgrade locked me out of the site. Then, when I finally got MT working, I discovered it had blown away 99% of my comments, so I had to delete the entire weblog—Three times I had to delete it, because MT kept timing out—then reimport all the entries.
And now I have to fix the template. Well, I was getting kinda tired of the old one, but damn: don’t want to start futzing with a new one. Jeez.
Life is too short to have blood pressure this high.
I’ve put this under “All About Moi,” but maybe it should really be under “Politics.” One comment I read a million years ago was by a Russian (I think) director who mentioned that American films are extremely political. When called on this statement—don’t we, after all, make mass market apolitical films?—he said, In every film, someone opens one of these giant refrigerators and it’s full of food! That’s an amazingly political statement!
I think about that a lot when I watch movies. Also, when I look at kitchens.
Today I went to the park with the kids, and while they played in the fountain I looked at some of the most dynamic political material I’ve seen in a while.
It’s available at any bookstore or magazine stand. Go ahead, take a peek. It’ll flabbergast you.
These incendiary political tracts go under names like “Better Homes and Gardens Kitchen and Bath.”
Page after page of loving tribute to expensive modifications to already wonderful houses. Kitchens enlarged to encompass 6-burner stoves and double ovens (plus microwave, plus warming drawer), extra beverage refrigerators, prep sinks.
The amazing quantity of raw materials required to create these countertops and built-ins and imported Italian tile backsplashes. And then what’s needed to use the kitchen as intended! The amount of water that flows through the double sink and the two dishwashers and the pot filler connected to the stove… How much gas does a 36,000 BTU stove burn in a minute?
The reason I had the magazine in my hot little hands, of course, is that I want all that stuff. Here, now, on the floor…on the kitchen floor, at least.
We had the floors done this summer: out with the ugly old stained orange carpeting, in with the lovely maple wood. Except we’re not done with the floors yet: they have to be sanded and sealed, and that’s not going to happen until we get the interiors painted. They desperately need painting. Between the overused (and currently to me abhorrent) peach walls and the decorations left by my budding Picassos, they need painting.
And once we got started talking about painting, of course… did we want to change any of the furniture? If we turn the kids’ toy room into a TV room, should we get a new (giant, flat) TV?
In addition to all of this nonsense, the room we spend the most time in save the bedrooms, the kitchen, started crying out for attention. The cabinets are all in this dark-stained oak that we’ve never liked to begin with but now looks terrible next to the maple floors. Do we paint them? Reface them? Replace them? They are kind of old and beaten down— the lazy susan in the corner cabinet doesn’t even turn. And the shelves where the pots and pans are has some kind of dust or something coming in.
The gigantic swath of fluorescent lights on the ceiling that we’ve hated since the day we moved in? Well, one bank of lights gave out entirely, and in the other bank one of the three bulbs gave out. On the electric stove (that we’ve hated, etc.), the biggest burner gave up.
But we can’t just go get a gas cooktop to replace it, even though we’re pretty sure there’s a gas line to the kitchen. The cooktop is in the island. The electric stove has a built-in fan; what would we do about the gas one? Did we want to install a hood over the island in the middle of the room? Or should we, you know…
…remodel entirely? Make the kind of kitchen we’d really, really like?
With the extra sinks and the dedicated baking area and extra ovens (hey, after all, I do cook now, you know!) and…
Just thinking about it makes me breathe a little harder. And the pictures! Oh, the pictures! So fabulously laid out, undoubtedly air-brushed, but just a little (the whole thing couldn’t be fake, could it?)! My kitchen could be one of those glossy, perfect, stainless steel and marble palaces too! A veritable temple to American consumption and use of resources! I could come home to one of those superfabulous testaments to our position in the universe! Yes! Yes! I want mine, dammit!
No idea how we’d pay for a complete kitchen remodel, not to mention the other things we’re thinking about. (Every bathroom needs updating. In some cases…a lot of updating. And in my wilder moments, I wonder what going down to the studs and redoing the floor plan might gain us, because I’m convinced there are better ways of laying out this house.) Maybe after Simon gets out of preschool and we don’t have that monthly expense. Or I make some money. And the stock market doesn’t, you know, crash or anything. Or we could just go wildly into debt and get a home equity loan! It’s the American way! It’s my due, baby!
Wow: those pictures. Woo. Oh yeah. I’ll be back in a minute, I just gotta have a private moment in the bathroom.
Via John Scalzi, I have discovered Google Talk, which is Google’s latest foray into Taking Over The World. (All I can say is: Google Coffee? It’s coming. Seriously, Starbucks’s days are numbered.) Google Talk is an online-chatting service that uses the Jabber protocol.
Mac users can’t download the Google Talk client, since it’s currently Windows-only, but we can use iChat (which is wonderful, because who wants to use a whole different app anyhow?). Turns out—oh, the things I learn during random moments—that I can use iChat for MSN and Yahoo Chat too. It’s one-stop shopping for online chatting!
I was having trouble setting up Jabber in iChat, until I found Google’s helpful page on setting up Google Talk in iChat. (Hot new food? Arugula-Google-a. Hot new car? The Hybrid Google 3000. I’m telling you: it’s one-stop shopping for Evil Overlords!) I tried to add Scalzi to my list, so as to test this out. At the moment, all it says is, “Waiting for Authorization.” No idea what that means. Do you have to approve people adding you to their lists? And if Scalzi doesn’t approve, what does that mean? For my ego, I mean. Not for Google Talk or Jabber or iChat or whatever.
Anyhow, if you’re trying out Google Talk, I’m D i a n e . P a t t e r s o n >at
Most hilarious board thread ever. (You only need to read through about post 20. After that, the fun dies down.)
It’s better than Cats!
I have a lot of bags. I have several rolling briefcases for my powerbook (ain’t toting around no computer with my back, no sirree); I have rolling suitcases; I have a diaper backpack (that’s transitioning to an all-kids-stuff bag); I have a little sport sac type bag that serves as my purse, because it’s easy to carry on its own or stick into aforementioned diaper bag; I have a really nice Coach purse that I bought shortly before having kids and that has more or less sat there forlorn ever since, because I just haven’t had a lifestyle (did I just say that sans irony?) that allows me a big ol’ purse.
And yet: I need another bag.
I realize I need a bag to tote around my stuff that isn’t my powerbook. My drawing equipment (10″ by 7″ watercolor book, paints, water brushes, pens). My Alphasmart Neo, which is a great little device but I haven’t gotten to use it much yet because I never remember to take it with me. (it weighs a pound, my iBook weighs…7 pounds? No contest.) Maybe my Moleskine journal, maybe a paperback.
So, not a huge bag, but one big enough to carry these things around. Stylish is good. Lightweight even better. I have some bags that I’ve used, but they’re cheap and poorly designed to the point where I can’t find anything in them.
Pooks (an admitted bag-aholic*) has already suggested these manufacturers:
Have any recommendations? Cautions? Testimonials?
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* Hey Pooks, I could have used “bag lady.”