Ree’s musings

I'm crushingly, crashingly behind in my blogging and blog-reading and all things blog. Except template editing. I've been tweaking when I should be comparing Galileo to Darwin.

Wait. That's great fun. Hell, I do that for kicks anyway, and now I can get a grade on it. Why'm I still here?

Oh yes. To explain that I haven't hardly opened my email in two days. I asked for help and I got truckloads, for which I am enormously grateful; I have a letter from a dear longtime friend that desperately requires a thought-out reply (and the time to peruse her journal so I know where he's at); there are pictures and compliments and I'm so happy and overwhelmed that my emotions get pushed right past glee into fear. It's an anxiety disorder thing, I suspect, else it's just another Ree thing.

First: class
Second: Friends
Third: Bloggery, including (if I can summon the courage) the story of Ree and how she got a lobster claw for a hand, and then turned her face red to match the theme. It's... er... entertaining at my expense.

Wish I had time to comment on this god-awful silly movie. The original was humorous but this is only laughable.

Aha! Shades of registering my laptop for the campus network in college. Never thought I’d remember that clearly several years later, or that the seeming inanity of those settings would help me in any way, ever.

Knoppix was able to work with the cable modem, so at least I knew it was a Windows setting and not a loose cable or a hardware malfunction. Turns out all that was needed to to run WINIPCFG (whose name I never remember when I need it, so I end up Googling for it every time), release DHCP, and renew. Thank God!

I kick ass. *g*

I finally got Spybot to successfully scan upon restart. It hadn’t worked previously because I disabled most startup items on my login. Restarting and using a generic login with all startup options worked. Finally!

I am a bitter woman right now. I can make a design with lists for navigation work splendidly in Opera and Mozilla. In IE there’s a wretched 3px bug; I can’t tell if it’s margin or padding. I tried putting 3px of padding for all the list elements, to which IE added its own 3px. WTF? I’m going to burst into tears over this flaming wreck of a browser.

I finally cobbled something together with some CSS hackery and managed to get the display looking really pretty nice in IE and Mozilla — but not Opera. The browser I use.

Excuse me. I have to go shove my head up my ass. I figure maybe the experience will help me understand the IE point of view.

ETA: Diddling with “display: block” has somehow made everything work as I wanted. Why? Don’t know, don’t care at the moment. I’m leaving my CSS untouched till morning and caffeination, at which point I’ll examine it to see what fixed my problems.

So freaking tired. Later.

Trying to find errors in CSS after a toss-and-turn night isn’t much fun. To be honest, there’s some fun in it anyway. I’m a masochist like that.

I’m making a Xanga skin for someone else. I’d gotten so used to Diaryland’s automatic paragraphs that I forgot Xanga doesn’t do that. On Diaryland, a careful template can style paragraphs to control font size for the whole post, but Xanga just slaps the text between line breaks and shoves it in a div.

Solution to the lack of paragraphs: style text within the td and th. Took me long enough. Man, I hate doing Xanga styles. Though — there is something to be said for doing fair work under such poor conditions.

Knoppix is the best thing that ever happened to my Windows install. Bork a graphics driver and need to get the current version to the hard drive, but safe mode won’t access the Internet? Knoppix will! Can’t get safe mode to allow your USB drive? Knoppix does! Need to restore a backed-up system file that Windows won’t touch while it’s running? Knoppix doesn’t run the file and lets you move it right where it has to go.

I don’t care if I sound like ad copy. This is good stuff. And XMMS is growing on me with almost alarming alacrity. On that alliterative note, time to goof off with bad poetry.

I should know better than to code while on Tylenol Sinus. Despite that, today has actually gone very well. I got a three-column table converted to four-column, which is should have been in the first place (but I’d been lazy and didn’t want to mess with colspans).

Yes, I am using a table for layout. It’s a Xanga skin. Xanga borks most anything you throw out it, so I have no remorse. I use CSS positioning instead of tables when the system used can handle it.

I also… crud. There was something else I got done today; now what the hell was it?

Oh yes! I got some show/hide Javascript to work. It still needs massaging as it doesn’t quite meld with the rest of the design yet, but I think it’s promising. It’s being used to hide a comment form for an online journal. The journaller’s form has been abused by comment spammers (human spammers hitting the form, not automation hitting the feedback script itself) and she hopes the spammers will be put off if they don’t see the form where they expect it. I hope it works. I don’t much expect it to though. We still need to put some JavaScript “security” on the form — useless against automated spams, but hopefully a deterrent to rude humans — and possibly switch around her insecure comment system, but she wants to keep the same system.

OMG the pieces just clicked into place in my brain.

I’ve been playing with a WordPress install on some free PHP-enabled webspace, testing options that aren’t available to me on Blogsome — tweaking the XML templates, editing the index.php that exists instead of the index.html that doesn’t, and a few other things that make the WordPress admin console make sense. I also exported some DiaryLand entries of mine from 2000 using Liberate, which uses the MovableType export format.

WordPress will import MT entries so of course I had to try plugging my Diaryland entries in MT format into a WP blog!

It mostly worked, kinda, except for the part where it had no visible effect and the posts don’t show up in the public blog or even in the edit posts list. They exist in the SQL table but they have no publish status. Apparently WP expects posts to have a status of public, private, draft, or password-protected. Posts with no status don’t show up in the edit posts panel but do affect post count in the category panel.

The Dland-to-MT script is hosted, not downloaded, affording me no chance to tinker. I may be able to do a simple find-and-replace to add post status to my exported file. If that doesn’t work I’m stuck setting over 200 entries manually. And that’s just the year 2000 entries. Eeek.

Hallelujah, I am registered for spring classes! Not waitlisted. That's a first. Historically, I have always slacked and ended up on waitlists for everything.

I may be growing up or something. Alert the press.

Now to check email.... "16 unread messages"?! That's after deleting the spam. Oh shnikes. *runs in fear*

Or maybe I've used the last of my maturity for 2005. Hard telling. But enough joking -- been owing Peanut a reply for a bloody week and I am going to get that done today. The rest can wait till I'm less scared of its bulk.

There's... interest in the War? Honest-to-Diea interest? From someone willin to build an empire?

It really is Christmas! Rejoice! Deck the halls! Jingle bells! Et cetera!

Must go eat and then must gleefully catch up on the boards and any War prospects and perhaps some studying for finals, if I can fit it in. But mostly food and War. If I can cram them into the same session I'll have Fward! Or something.

Yep, hallucinating for lack of food; fix that first. *bounce bounce bounce*

I'm studying, I promise; I'm just taking a break to clear my head before I dive back into the French monarchy. Ugh. And then finals! Double ugh. And then Yuletide gifts! Yay!

I have to ask this question because it's been driving my bananas for weeks now, and perhaps someone will know the answer. First some background: as near as I can tell, the smallest bill or note of English paper money is the £5 note. Yes? There are amazingly dense £1 coins, but no bills that I've seen.

So... jokes of nationality aside, how do the English tip strippers? Five quid in November 2005's exchange rates is right around $9 USD -- one hell of tip. Coins, er... I'm not going to finish that. But how then? And what other countries have a similar problem of lacking small bills -- Canada maybe, with their loonies?

In other questions, where would all the calculators go?

RegisterFly.com is offering free .BE domain names. Interesting. You may want to stock up (but be sure to read the requirements on limitations on .BE first). Residence in Belgium, home of .BE, is not required.

In this season of wishlists, I thought I would share a few internet-related wishes of mine. They're nothing outrageous, I hope -- just little tweaks that would make my day if they ever became real.

I wish Tabulas RSS feeds would use the RSS 2.0 CATEGORY and COMMENTS fields. The information is already attached to each post, so why isn't it reflected in the feed, which is already RSS 2.0?

I wish del.icio.us would provide daily digest versions of their RSS feeds (especially for the inbox), so I wouldn't have fifty unread posts from two days of not checking.

I wish Diaryland would fix their template editor. Currently, encoded ampersands are converted to unencoded every time you edit the template, and the "last five posts" template always encodes apostrophes. This causes problems with site validation and breaks some JavaScript.

I wish all the message boards I try to follow would offer RSS feeds for their recent activity. At least one offers a feed for newest topics, but that doesn't help me track a topic in progress. Email subscriptions for topic tracking are cumbersome and often false-positive as spam (because the server sends many email messages all the time). I wouldn't dare wish for fulltext feeds, as that's too easy for awful people to misuse, but oh, to have all those recent updates neatly queued in my feed reader! It would cut down so much on "did I read this? The link's not coloured as visited, but did I read this on the other computer? Crap, which stories was I even following?" that occurs every freaking time I visit big boards. Offer feeds and ease Ree's aching brain!

I wish people and sites wouldn't use "newsletter" and "news page" synonymously. It's a mite confusing.

I wish I could better understand MySQL. That is to say, I wish I could understand it at all beyond "databases hold data."

I wish more webcomics offered RSS feeds. People, feeds are not evil. True, I've sought out scraped feeds that include the image -- and then I set my feedreader to "titles only", to make sure that I click the title and visit the site, thereby viewing the ads that support the site and artist. All I want is a way to be notified of site updates. Webcomics that refuse to offer a feed because "feeds hotlink images and steal bandwidth" don't understand the glory that is an RSS feed under the artist's control, and that is a major loss for the readers and for the artists seeking to draw in readers.

I wish more people understood that public blog posts are just that -- public.

I wish MySpace and Xanga offered posting APIs.

I wish more blog "hive sites" would let users ping more than just Weblogs.com. (Tabulas does! I love it so very much, for that and other reasons.)

I wish MySpace accepted valid CSS instead of butt-ugly hacks.

I wish Xanga sites would be valid (X)HTML.

I wish Livejournal tags had feeds.

I wish Campus Cruiser eCollege (software for running college classes online) would let me use Opera instead of requiring -- ugh -- IE.

I wish Bloglines would fix that goddamn bug where (using Opera) I can't move a subscription to a different folder unless I turn JavaScript off, then select the folder I want, then turn Javascript back on, then submit (to their will).

I wish I knew a simple way, in JavaScript, to write "if the URL contains string x, then do function y." Equals, sure. Contains, though, that seems to be harder.

I wish I could find free (not trial) antivirus software for Windows XP that wouldn't bork over multiple user profiles.

I wish I could actually make these wishes come true somehow.

I am invincible!!!

Which is to say, I finally conquered network sharing between different Windows versions. I'm listening to a small cache of MP3s that aren't on my hard drive, but on the hard drive on the floor across the room. Sweet.

Of course, this means I get to spend Christmas break copying my mother's old email messages and address book, but I shall cope somehow. Hee.

Oh! I can ditch my older stash of music with the incorrect labels and folders, in favour of the wider collection I meticulously corrected! Scooooooore!

I just got the news that a high school teacher of mine died in a car crash.

...

I'm still reeling somewhat over the teacher's death. Between the Christmas season and the fact that he left a wife and small kids, my brain feels like a table tennis ball. Back-forth-to-fro-left-right-ten-hut. I even dug out an old toy of mine last night, a little dog I've had since I was three days old, just to somehow remind myself that I still had a daddy and ought to be grateful.

Also. I have attained optimal grades. Yay. If I would have known about the miscalculation of the last history quiz, I wouldn't have bothered doing the extra credit project since I actually didn't need it... but the project was watching a historical movie and critiquing it, and to find one I had to hit the video store, which had bins of six-year-old movies at 4 for $4. Hehehehehe.

So freaking tired. Time for a snooze.

I wondered how long this would take. *g* I'm not always a meme person, but when it's books...

1) I once bought a set of cheap, tawdry Harlequins just because they mentioned mummies in the title. I still have them and have re-read them several times. Considering their genre, they're well researched.

2) The first novel I ever read with an unhappy ending had a villainess hoodwinking the heroine, who shared my name. It was thrilling.

3) Non-fiction usually bores me to tears. I require elements of the fantastic.

4) I think my friends have all gotten sick of my behaviour in video stores: I point to slipcases and inevitably say, "I've read that."

5) I am infamous within my family for taking a stack of books out of the library and finishing one before I get home. To this day, if I go to the library with a family member, they will always ask when we get in the car, "So, are you going to have that finished before we get home?" Er, not so much anymore, but it started with kids' picture books y'see.

6) I love the classic literary vampire, but I abhor most modern vampire writers: Anne Rice, Laurel K. Hamilton, you know the types. So what do I like? "Carmilla."

7) I have a cache of young adult fiction that I bought post-high school, to revisit stories I discovered and loved in school libraries. I refuse to let my age get in the way of a good yarn.

8) I have a three-foot-high stack of books that I own but haven't yet read. I call it "Mount Readme." The backlog is due to college -- I've lacked the free time to read, but not to accumulate new unreads. I intend to dent it before spring semester.

9) I knew my favourite author at the tender age of six, at which time it was Syd Hoff (Danny and the Dinosaur). These days it's more of a top ten.

10) I re-read favourites as often as I read new material, if not more.

1. What did you do in 2005 that you'd never done before?

I flew over the ocean and met a Mutt and went to a real non-high-school theatre!

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Usually I just resolve to improve myself, so yeah, I suppose so on both counts.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Joooo!

4. Did anyone close to you die?

My daddy's daddy died in January. Fuck of a way to kick off the year.

5. What countries did you visit?

Englaaaaaaaaaaaaaand!

6. What would you like to have in 2006 that you lacked in 2005?

Adequate confidence; employment; a good place to go be alone.

7. What date from 2005 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

The day my grandpa died.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Recovering from teary breakdowns in record time, and enjoying myself thereafter.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Having teary breakdowns in the first place, though I'm doing much better under pressure than I used to.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

A bus bit my hand, which bled. Now I'm a werebus. Other than that, just the usual.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Bought, pff. Tickets to England.

14. Where did most of your money go?

God help me if I know. My tickets were a gift really. I suppose I blew my cash on tourist crap, Christmas gifts, same thing I always do.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

England! Mutt!! You sick of hearing that yet? *g* And getting an A in my history class. I busted my ass for that class and it's paid off.

16. What song will always remind you of 2005?

I don't know the name, but there's a song done in techno by Aphrodite, and I heard another version while I was in England -- a Black man singing this time. *goes to look it up* 'Kay, it's "Wishing On A Star." 'Bout the only familiar song I heard in England, outside of the tune to "God Save The Queen" ringing a few Yankee bells. *g*

Aw hell. I just figured out why the telly adverts for Narnia are wigging the hell out of me. I've seen another movie, far less hyped, that had a half-man, half-goat. He takes care of the place while the Master is away.

Damn, but I'm dorky today.

Aw. My hands are frozen solid, but my heart is warm because I'm doing something right. Visitors to my Xanga may have noticed that it looks a little different if you compare the view in IE to the view in another browser. That's because I used not a CSS hack, but valid CSS to give plain tan horizontal rules to IE, and an image of a line of scarabs to all other browsers. IE is a hater, y'see, and hates on the images for horizontal rules... and the box model... and pretty much everything the wretched blighter has ever touched.

Not that I'm deeply biased or anything. *cough*

The link is part of a web development advent calendar that I'm loving to itty bitty pieces, by the way. I've saved at least half the days for future reference and work, so I'm ecstatic to find something important to me that I'm already doing the best way.

Nooo! Dammit, no sooner do I lay hand on the frakking Amulet of Yendor than I die. Damn dragons and centaurs double-teaming me. You'd think they'd be natural enemies, but not in Rogue they're not. Not in Rogue, dammit.

I will retrieve the amulet successfully. Because I will it, that's why.

So yeah. I installed PocketRogue and Vexed on my old Palm. That was Tuesday or so. Since then, between the two games, I've already drained the batteries thrice.

Must rediscover that lovely DOS port of Rogue I found once. I found it most amusing for replacing the player character (traditionally represented by an at-sign, "@") with a yellow smiley face. It's so ridiculous that I grinned at least once per level.

I got the Amulet once in that DOS Rogue too, I died in the same room then too, same as yesterday. Huh. Maybe I need to upgrade to Diablo or something?

I have retrieved the Amulet, escaped to the surface, and sold my loot for a fortune. I rock.

Now to do it again!

Yesterday was Christmas celebration with my dad's side of the family. I got a scented candle and recipe cards. (Actually I got Dominos and one of the kids got the candle and cards, but we traded and thereby stopped a disturbance in the Force. Or something.)

Today I was merrily buggin' folks online and got pointed to a recipe for Wookiee cookies. Add that to my little sheaf of computer-printed recipes from Saturday (lemon chicken and crab rangoon) and it's like the Force wants me to be fix it dinner or something. Wiggy!

*resists urge to Photoshop a Santa hat onto Jaina Jade clipart*

I was resisting, I swear. But then I was requested. Therefore:



I don't have Photoshop so I used Paint, which refused to let me add a lick of green without turning it a sickly grey. Bastard prog. And now I must dig a meatspace Santa hat out of storage.

I hate you all.

Radiskull and Devil Doll, how we miss thee and thy boiling hot Hellbucks coffee. But now it's time to kick it:

Someone tweaked my avatar from the previous entry, turning my MS Paint blotch into ice-nipped goodness (or soon-to-be nipped...). Best Mutt ever.

I tossed a few Christmas songs into the Radio.Blog for you good folks. (Hit the "pop-up" button to reopen it in a tiny window, suitable to keep open and playing while visiting other websites.) "Home For Christmas" is currently downloadable from my content section as well, though I'm not making any promises how long it'll stick around after 2006 hits.

Today my Amazing Spider-Man candy advent calendar has come to a long-awaited day: that of the ass candy. I'm not kidding, the door to today's chocolate candy is through Spidey's ass.

Not that it means anything. *cough*

Aaaand I'm linked out. My dad gave me -- well, a couple things actually, but the chief gift of the moment is a puzzle box. Thankfully it is not the sort that is shifted to solve and lets Cenobites into this dimension. I hope.

Well, that's sure a weird note on which to end an entry.

fin.

Stuff like this makes me thankful that, when I was picking out forum software, I deliberately chose a setup that doesn't even make this an option. HTML is a hacky mess to begin with, so even when attempts are made to strip harmful tags, there's too great a chance that something will get through and that it will be something very nasty.

If you have a PHPBB forum, you should (IMHO) consider moving to PunBB. It's a slimmer system than PHPBB but has much better security.

Right, I'll get off the soapbox (for) now.

Before I read many loot lists from other blogs, I wanted to get mine down:
* a distracted dad, eagerly flipping through a book on old British trains
* a brother hollering in victory to unwrap a complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
* sound out of my late grandmother's piano, thanks to my aunt's playing, joining family voices in carols
* some wonderful moments with my sister and her family and some friends
* memories hung on my wall and bound into albums
* a happy voice somewhat like my late grandfather's, cheering me up on our first Christmas without him
* sweet pickles. P is for pickle, that's good enough for me
* P is also for P-nut brittle, which is even better for me!
* a wonderful holiday season, despite all my dread
* and some material goods that are good too -- just not as exquisite as the gifts I listed above.

Work with me here a sec? Okay, cool.

I was typing up a (non-blog) draft in Pote today when a novel thought struck me (leaving a bruise behind my ear): Wouldn't it be cool if an online blog tool had the features of Pote? Some (word count) would be novel and of occasional use; others (spell check) would be oft-used and praised, at least by this not-so-nimble typist. Saving incomplete drafts would save my bacon many a time, as I'm overfond of pouring my brain into the textbox and pressing the submit button, only to hear a loud flush as it all drains into the ether.

Mind, I have no idea how much effort that featureset requires. Spell check alone must need a sizable typo-free word list, to say nothing of the suggested corrections associated with each mistyped and checked word. Ugh. It's not a job I'd undertake myself, I can assure you. But it's cool that stuff like Pote exists to be used by whoever

On a wholly different note, I think I got a page on my website to update the copyright year automatically when 2006 rolls around, but I may have had to restore from an older backup when my shitheel hosting company died underneath me earlier this year. Guess I'll see which come the 1^st, eh?

Like a new day forming on the horizon, I feel peace. It should be a strange thing -- but I am in no mood to do anything but appreciate it. It's a growing sensation of warmth and serene joy, quite unlike the things I usually feel.

I like this. A lot. I want to wrap myself in it like a warm fluffy blanket of goodwill. I want it to last. I think maybe it will.

It can't be cold medicine because I haven't taken any today.