greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: January 2006

  • Once again, my body hates me.

    I don’t know what it was I ate, or if it was a combination of things I ate and things that happened, but I woke up with queasy innards and no strength this morning. I’ve spent most of the day so far (it’s almost 2pm as I write this) in bed, with occasional bouts of hopping online to write emails and read stuff.

    That’s right, not only do I have a difficult time getting to sleep but I also have a digestive system that seems to enjoy making my life truly unpleasant on an occasional (but still too frequent) basis. Am I a catch or what? Ladies, don’t all rush me at once. Heh.

    Now, however, I’m showered and dressed and must go forage for foodstuffs, ’cause no matter how upset my body may be, it’s also absolutely craving decent nourishment. Since I haven’t exactly been a frequent shopper lately (bad roomie, no biscuit… literally) the cupboards are surprisingly bare of simple, basic foodstuffs I can put together without relying on (nonexistent) cooking skills. Whoops. My paycheck is only a few days away, right?

  • Go ahead. Say hello. Introduce yourself.

    As Lisa informs us, this week is National De-Lurking Week. If you’re a regular visitor here, feel free to say hello, introduce yourself, tell me what a great guy I am, and that sort of thing. If you’re irregular, I don’t want to know about it. (Ba-dum, bump! Thank you, thank you! I’ll be here all week. Try the riblets!)

    Not one to play “do as I say not as I do,” because I’m all about the One Standard Will Do Nicely, I’ll be poking about in my blogroll and other assorted link lists, visiting sites and making a nuisance of myself in kind.

    That’s a good thing, right? Right.

  • Not that I was going to see BloodRayne anyway, but.

    Some guy over on Livejournal by name of Howard Tayler (okay, so he’s got a webcomic) really, really didn’t like the film rendition of “BloodRayne.” And I quote:

    I’m serious. If I find out that you went and saw this film after I told you not to, I’ll phone your friends up and tell them to go to your house and pour ants in your bed. And when you wake up screaming, covered in ants, you’ll think “at least I’m not still watching BloodRayne.”

    […]

    I’m not trying to tear this movie a new anal orifice. I assure you, the film already has SEVERAL, and it defecates simultaneously through all of them. You don’t want to get any of this on you.

    His review is a fun read, if only to see how a writer of decent talent can thoroughly eviscerate a movie.

  • Pesky Metal Mystery Discs

    It’s been bothering me ever since the first time I walked along a sidewalk on a block the city had converted to the new “pay to park” meter scheme. Glued down at every parking space I saw a flat, round lump of metal that served no obvious purpose. Last week I noticed that the discs along one stretch of sidewalk have a website address stamped into them. Huzzah! And so I jotted the information into my trusty phone and hurried home to check out the site.

    Well, okay. It took me most of a week to remember that I’d jotted the information into my trusty phone. Ahem. At any rate, I now know what the heck those things are. They’re gorilla post mounting plates.

    Huh?

    The idea is that the city can quickly and easily attach one of these gorilla posts in case there’s a need to mark a space as off-limits. Since there’s no actual meter present at the space anymore, what else are you going to attach the “no parking” sign to? It’s actually rather clever, though I hesitate to ask how much of the average Portlander’s tax money went into all of this extra equipment (above and beyond the electronic gadgets, that is).

    At least I won’t have this mystery keeping me up nights anymore. One insomnia trigger down, hundreds to go.

  • Striking A Balance Betwixt Old And New

    I accomplished my first post-switch goal today. Most of the old content and linkage resides where it should once more, and the theme generally matches what came before. I think it looks cleaner and snazzier now. Of course I would, though, wouldn’t I?

    As I indicated yesterday, however, a considerable motivation for making the platform change was the ability to do fun and interesting new things with the website without actually becoming a programmer. To this end I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins which you can see and enjoy on the new Status page. I found the myStatus plugin while looking for examples of how WP’s standalone Pages feature works, and that led me to the incredibly-cool plugin modestly named “The Execution of All Things” as well as to a succession of last.fm plugins, one of which tried to break my site (fortunately EZ-Scrobbler works like a charm).

    I need to bring over the old Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater material, the NaNoWriMo ’02 excerpts (in later years I simply posted them in the main journal’s Art category) and decide what to do with my old “bio” page, but otherwise I’m done. Whew. Heck, I even cranked out some new rotator images to liven things up at the top of the page.

    So here’s the new site, as finished as it’s likely to get, ready for me to play with, ready for you to enjoy. It looks a lot like the old site, but behind the facade lies code that makes me happy.

  • Gee Dee Vee Three

    I bet you weren’t expecting this, were you?

    Let me make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go: I loved Monaural Jerk. It let me do some fun, geeky things. I could, in theory, do almost anything I wanted to with it. Unfortunately, over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly trapped by what I wasn’t able to accomplish without taking the time to fully learn the PHP language. I may be a geeky sort of fellow, but that’s more involved than I really have time for anymore.

    After many months of using WordPress for the anime site, as well as sporadic tinkering with the Portlandbloggers page, I decided that this is the platform I want to run with from here on out. (That is, until the next big thing comes along in a few years. I am a geek-dilettante, after all.)

    The process of getting from point where-I-was to point where-I-am was, indeed, quite the learning experience. Starting with an import script from Monaural Jerk v0.43 to WordPress 1.5 graciously provided by Michael Alderete (who also helped with a lot of the debugging) and kludging in some dotcomments import code, I set to work finding all of the fiddly little bits that went wrong. This included such fun as misnamed variables, non-escaped apostrophes, mismatched database insertions and just plain pig-headed stupidity on my part. Oddly enough, considering that as of this very morning I’d all but given up on making the conversion work, I was surprised to manage two major breakthroughs in the space of an hour. And here we are!

    Of course, now I need to get all of the fun extra bits from the old site back up and running on the new. Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the basic “look” of my website. I just need time to construct a working template that more-or-less matches the kludgey old stylesheet rig I was using before. That project is now on the top of the list. Cross your fingers, folks.

    Welcome to Version 3 of greyduck.net. I hope you like it here.

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