Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for August 2005

I am now in awe of Hemingway

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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.

Phew

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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.

At my wit’s end

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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.