Operating under the assumption that a change is as good as a rest, I’ve swapped the computers in my room. Now the computer I spend 99% of my time on is situated at the desk which features actual legroom. Oh, and the monitor is now much, much closer to my face so I’m not leaning across the desk all the time just so I can read.
Mind you, I’ll still use the other desk when I have company over for computer gaming. This means, yes, that guests will now be enjoying the badass compy instead of the slightly gimpy “gaming” compy.
I should have done this months ago.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to try out Unreal Tournament.
Afterward I plan to work on a 3.5 gigabyte collection of my favorite songs so I can load up my Insignia Pilot portable player. This way I’ll be able to just switch it on, tell it to play everything, turn on “random” mode and hear a whole bunch of songs I like all the way to work and back. The previous plan (selecting some of my favorite albums and swapping them out from time to time because there isn’t enough room for all of them) left me agonizing over what to listen to each time I fired up the player, and skipping songs because very few albums are completely perfect, and hopping from album to album periodically, and… yeah. Screw it. Nothing but songs I love, as many as I can fit in, and I should be golden.
I should whip up a colophon page listing all of the neat bits from hither and yon that go into making this journal work. Some day. Yep.
In other news, the tags have all gone away because I got sick and tired of fiddling with them. I didn’t actually delete them but, other than in the handful of postings in which I used them, they won’t appear anywhere at all. (Even in those posts they’re barely noticeable.) (EDIT: Oh look, there’s a mass delete function for tags built into WordPress 2.5! They’re gone for good now!) It’s for the best, really: I went batty at times with trying to figure out what existing tags fit a given post and having to create new tags all the time because none of the existing tags fit. Forget it. If tags are what the cool kids are doing, I’m okay being uncool. The last thing I need is something else slowing down my posting output!
Of course, crossposts to LJ continue to be automatically tagged… with the category from WordPress. Go figure.
Every now and then I find myself bothered by the fact that I can’t connect with individuals from among the vast sea of humanity. I’m not talking about a particular kind of connection, rather about anything beyond the most fleeting and superficial minute or two of small talk in passing. My lack of common ground with almost everyone I meet forms the basis of the problem, undoubtedly. Allow me to collate, if not elucidate, via this incomplete yet extensive list:
I am not (in no particular order) a drinker, smoker, taker of drugs, religious believer, fan of sitcoms or reality television or the evening news or sports, dedicated follower of fashion, fitness nut, vegetarian, vegan, organic foodie, artist, musician, home owner, licensed driver, owner of a vehicle, golfer, tattooed person, early adopter, member of a political party, activist, punk, rocker, goth, businessman, hippie, gun enthusiast, iPod owner, hacker, student, teacher, scholar, devotee of the classics in literature or music or film, indie snob, dom, sub, fetishist, or financial investor.
That’s not to say I have anything against most of those categories (with some notable exceptions), merely that these are things I simply cannot relate to. Those people and I have nothing to talk about.
Let’s be clear: I am some pretty damned cool things. I’m a father, for instance, which is among the best things in my life. I’m a boyfriend twice over, and I’d have to be a lunatic to gripe about that. I’m a skeptical free-thinking computer-techie grammar-geek animation-fan dilettante, and I like it that way. The problem lies in the fact that the masses see me as boring… and more often than not, the feeling is mutual.
Most likely, I’m already a bit late to this one. I know that some of my friends don’t read the sites on which I’ve seen this posted, however, so please allow me to share:
Because I think everybody could use a smile this Monday morning.
Every week in the bathroom at the office there’s a new brand and/or scent of handsoap. I don’t normally pay too much attention to the labels, but today’s new bottle decal startled me a bit by claiming that the contained product is non-comedogenic.
I’m sorry, what was that? Are you telling me that washing my hands with your product won’t make me laugh? Is The Joker involved in the handsoap industry somehow?
It turns out that non-comedogenic means that the product won’t block pores. I suppose that acne could be considered funny under certain circumstances, eh?
After one night of pizza for dinner I slept poorly and had weird dreams.
After two nights of pizza for dinner I slept quite badly indeed and had nightmares, which woke me up several times. Oh, and some schmuck was walking around near MLK yelling obscenities loud and long enough to wake me up. Oh, then there was the guy whose car wouldn’t start. Oh, let’s not forget the random coughing spell shortly before midnight. I think I spent more time awake than asleep last night.
Add a tepid shower to all of this and it’s a wonder that I’m in any kind of halfway-decent mood at all…
I tried out several new themes out over the last couple of days, but this one’s the winner: Mandingo. It sports a 1024x display option, the ability to use two or three columns, two options for banner height, a built in banner image rotation mechanism, and plenty more bells & whistles besides. What’s more, all of them can be managed from its options page, integrated with the WordPress admin interface. I don’t have to fiddle directly with the theme code at all. People, this is sexy. Oh, and it actually displays my category hierarchy correctly! No matter how hard I fought with the old theme I just couldn’t make that work. Oy.
So. All I have to do now is… er… build a whole new library of rotator images. Ahem. I’m long overdue for working on the rotator images libraries anyway, so some extra incentive doesn’t really hurt.
(A note to my WordPress clientèle: If you’re interested in a conversion to Mandingo I can make it happen in a jiffy. Mari, especially, would benefit greatly from the upgrade to a theme which supports modern WordPress code and features.)
My hosted server rebooted spontaneously some time around 7am Pacific Time. I’m not absolutely certain but I believe that this has to do with DNS problems at the hosting facility causing massive churn in the mail processing chain. Infinity Internet is still working on the problems (it looks like a complex cascade-failure situation, partly resolved as of this writing) and Duckpond is ticking along on a borrowed nameserver setting.
To torture-test the newly-restarted machine, I decided to upgrade greyduck.net to WordPress 2.5. So far only one of the important plugins gave me any trouble, and that was remedied with a one-minute hack to the plugin code. (The LJ crossposter, if you’re wondering.) Almost all of the updates seem to be in the admin interface and the backend code, not in the frontend or the database structure itself.
The admin interface looks very different, it’s true. I don’t actively dislike it, and I’ll probably get used to it. Such is the way of things.
Every time I do one of these upgrades I think about getting a new theme. Is now the time, do you figure?
Apparently half of the pranks on the Internet this year involve something called “rickrolling,” and I guess there’s some 80’s pop star involved. Apparently you’re not one of the cool kids until you’ve “rickrolled” somebody.
Fine. I can do that. Here you go. I’m getting it over with. This is a one-time opportunity, so enjoy it while you can.
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