Ree’s musings

This weekend is Free Comic Book Day. The comics store is the next county is no longer there. Woe.

It's finals week here in Casa Ree. Woe.

The booklist for summer classes is open, but without a listing for the class I'm taking. Woe.

Woe, I tell you.

In other news, I finally heard my brother TJ's radio show. I hadn't been able to tune it in before, but for some reason it comes in on the car radio pretty well. Mom and I listened while we drove over to have supper with my other brother, Squirt.

In the space of ten minutes, TJ had given Mom's full name (even though he doesn't use his last name on the air) and informed his entire audience of my birthday (well, the week of my birthday) and age.

I need to hit him. He didn't know Mom and I were listening until afterward, so I have to assume that this is more or less representative of his show. Has he mentioned my full name on the air? My school? Argh. I'm none of his listener's business any more than my mother is, dammit.

I was out of town. On the way home, I got sick. Before I got better, I had to take my history final. It is still finals week as I write this.

I am teh dedzor from teh stresszor.

Spring semester ends Wednesday for me. I should havbe just enough time to sift through my spam filter before summer semester beats me in the face with a hardback textbook. That's if I'm lucky.

I bought a used video game (Shadowgate for NES) Friday, began playing Saturday, and completed it Tuesday. I rock and some of the required actions in the game do not. (Sometimes you have to "open" items that can't logically be closed, and sometimes you don't have to open something in order to access contents -- it's nutty and difficult, but ultimately workable.)

I can now comfortably play the game start to finish in one sitting. This is sweet! It's the only non-puzzle game I can do that with.

Categories: bloggery, JanglyGanglia

I did it I did it I did it woo-ee!

Some of y'all may recall a god-awful tile puzzle that first frustrated me beyond all reason in November:



I swore I'd faithfully replicate the puzzle and solve the humdinger. Well, today my mother presented me with a laminated replica, and I sat down with it and I solved it, bow howdy! One can assess the solution (or a solution, I should say), determine where similar pieces are placed in relation to each other, and quickly duplicate those matchings after the tiles have been scrambled.

Best birthday present of the year, baby.

Categories: Tabulas

It may just be my ramshackle computer -- it locked up complete with incessant "beeeeeeeeeep" a few hours ago, though it's seemed fine since a reboot -- but I can't seem to categorise my Tabulas posts. The listing currently above this entry text is actually Technorati tags, which I've slapped on to keep track of which posts should go where when this clears up.

If I sound like I'm complaining, that's not it at all. I am so thoroughly used to Tabulas working as usual that I am just fascinated when a minor problem like this crops up. I rather wish I could test it out by API, but the only posting API doesn't support categories anyway so there's only the one method. Poo. I am bored and on break and I'd love to try to nail this down. Alas, it seems to be an internal slip.

Posting works. Crossposting works. Editing works. Everything is fine if you don't use categories; if you try them, you get a message about a "lost SQL query" but everything still goes through, only without any categories on the post. Folks on my friends list and the same server as me can post with categories but I cannot. Tricksy!

Yesterday was an unprecedented type of excellent. I got a call from an old friend and we talked for some time. My father sent me this lovely, heartfelt card that I think I shall save and ultimately have buried with me because I love it that much. My mom and I made a circuit of rummage sales and I found five pairs of shoes that are all my size, comfortable, and so adorable they make my teeth hurt. (In contrast, usually when I go shoe shopping I try on every pair in my size that doesn't have towerin heels, and I come home either empty-handed or with a hideous pair of shoes that at least won't cut off circulation in my toes.)

Today is a horse of a different colour and it is, shall we say, facing away from me. I have fiddled with some online stuff but can't be sure my changes went through until a server updates it cache. I can't participate in an online project that I really enjoy until a different server fixes a bug, and I can't even track what I want to add without either using a separate system or slathering my text in stupid-HTML, and I am so goddamn sick of it. My email seems to be throwing out email as spam that are not spam, that I very much want to need and in fact rely on. They're supposed to come through if I have the sender's email address in my address book, but are they? Hell no! Somebody probably changed the sender address for the explicit purpose of pissing me the fuck off! Go ahead, it's fucking fun!

I do not have music loud enough or angry enough to put up with all the brokenness anymore today. I deserve better than services that say they're working when they aren't.

(To do when I come back online:)

(nerdery abounds)

No more showing my Tabulas entries on my domain. It kept showing empty entries, even though I tried crufting something in to check for empties and to skip displaying them. Piss me off.

I really hate to even think on it much -- it feels disloyal -- but I may end up restoring the blog display with one change: using the feed from my Livejournal mirror instead of from this Tabulas. I prefer Tabulas over Livejournal so much it's not even funny, but when it comes to RSS feeds, LJ's got it locked up: they don't have that weird empty entries bug, they make use of the COMMENTS element to link back to the comments section of each post, and mood metadata is contained within its item in lj: namespaced elements. On crossposts from Tabulas, they also have the "currently listening" at the foot of the entry, which puts it in the LJ feed as well but not in Tabulas'.

The irony, of course, is that if I would use the LJ feed, I wouldn't use its comments link because I want to direct people to Tabulas as my blog center, not Livejournal. Feh. I'm always behind in tagging LJ entries with category and mood too, because crossposting doesn't do it for me for some reason. (I can understand the categories, kinda, but the mood thing stymies me.)

I'd hoped to improve my website and its display of my blog before summer semester begins, but it just does not seem to be happening. Maybe there are ways around these problems that I'm just not able to see. I can't imagine what they are though -- for example, there's no way for me to show metadata from Tabulas entries, because it doesn't exist in the RSS feed I use to obtain the data. There is nothing I can do. Well, I could screenscrape if I was really desperate, but it seems like I shouldn't have to.

Most frustratingly, I don't understand why metadata isn't in more RSS feeds, regardless of platform. Mood is often one brief word. If anyone tries to claim their system doesn't put mood in RSS items because it adds bulk to the feed, but their feeds are fulltext, then that person is a twit. One more word within a similarly short element is nothing compared to whole paragraphs of text. Even multiple words for the mood field are generally constrained by the blog system, forcing them into brevity.

There is every chance that there is a perfectly logical reason why putting metadata into RSS items is a bad idea. If so, I truly wish to know what it is. I like to understand.

1. Immune :: system
2. Together :: again
3. Blank :: slate
4. Professional :: behaviour
5. Thousand :: years
6. Penetration :: *snigger*
7. Shutter :: bug
8. Upside down :: cake
9. Neck :: bite
10. Unlisted :: number

So Xanga lets you turn off your feed now. It's kinda like security, except that it doesn't actually secure anything; it just add steps to reading public content.

I'm way behind on reading Xanga subs, so I don't know if anybody I read has turned off their feed. If anyone has, they're keeping me from reading their site, because those feeds are how I read all my Xanga subs (except protected posts, which are never in the feeds anyway). If you don't want your posts to be in a feed, there's always the Protected option.

Time to catch up on Xanga and check this stuff out. If anybody I really really want to read has turned off their feed, then I get to investigate screen scrapers, which can generate a feed even if the official Xanga feed is turned off. I smell a project! C'mon, somebody out there must actually want to try this!

Today I was in a hall with my dad's side of the family, a large group. I saw my ride leaving and ended my conversation of the moment with my goodbye. My aunt heard and called, "Goodbye, [Ree]!" across the room.

And my entire family told me a loving "bye" in unison.

I know they love me, but in that moment I could feel our familial bond like a warm fuzzy blanket wrapped securely around me, warding off the cold.

I'm feeling pretty good right now. For the last few days (or weeks, whichever), I've been frustrated by some technical limitations, but I couldn't clearly describe what points were tripping me up. Today I finally took some screenshots which I'm about to annotate, saying specifically "This link does not lead anywhere; this page has a clearly broken design; this is the point where I'm no longer in control of my data."

Normally I am the person who avoids illustrations in favour of words, because I am pretty good with words and utter crap with visuals, but I think in this case a a picture really is worth a thousand words.

I, like many a cat before me, killed a mouse today.

Unfortunately it was the computer mouse.

I'd been trying to whip up a new stylesheet and it turns out that, although the CSS is valid and the XHTML it goes with is as valid as I could make it (have to leave in certain invalid bits for overall site to work)... half the layout poofgones in IE. The half with the nav menu -- the part with the links to let you get around.

Fuck.

So I beat the shit out of the mouse, which is more replacable than the laptop, at least. Guess I'm not holding up well under stress after all. Mouse no clicky no more. I opened it up in hopes of fixing it, but I seem to have damaged the inside of a tiny box component that doesn't open. It is teh dedz0r. And I keep reaching for it instead of my laptop fingerpad even as I write about why it isn't there, because I am just that clever, folks.

My summer semester starts Wednesday. I think I'll call in braindead.

I ought to be reading my brand spanking textbook, but I have a bee in my bonnet again and I can't concentrate on anything else.

Xanga has recently released several new features. One, the ability to turn off your site's RSS feed, is under the Privacy heading in the account settings. This in inaccurate. Not publishing a feed does not make your information any more private. The only thing not publishing a feed does is make it harder for geeky feed consumers (such as yours truly) to stay abreast of your site.

An RSS feed is a stripped-down version of your recent entries. Anyone can use an RSS aggregator to get notified of entries to any site that publishes an RSS feed. Livejournal's syndicated accounts use RSS feeds. My personal aggregator is Bloglines; I love it because it's web-based, so I don't have to install anything and I don't have to sync subscriptions across the several computers I use. Because I'm most familiar with Bloglines, I'll use it in my examples.

An aggregator will check all the RSS feeds it read regularly, usually somewhere from every thirty minutes to every two hours. I believe Bloglines is closer to the half-hour mark. This does not mean that Bloglines is a stalker, obsessively checking your site for updates and details! Bloglines is just dropping by on schedule. When it sees no updates, it just kinda shrugs, says "Cool," and plans to come back later. The reason it checks so often is so that I, and other Bloglines users, can know about new posts very quickly. If it only checked once a day, I might not know about a new post until 23 hours after it's been made! Because it checks hourly (or thereabouts), I can be sure that I've read everything posted within the last hour (assuming I read my subs in timely fashion, but that's a Ree thing not an RSS thing).

Bloglines needs RSS feeds to work it magic. If I am subscribed to a site that has turned off its RSS feed, I no longer get updates from that site. I have over 200 subs in Bloglines -- if you turn your site off, I will forget to check for updates, because I remember to check all those sites every day. That's why I use Bloglines!

So it sucks that Xanga permits people to turn off their feed without even informing their users what an RSS feed is. I imagine many people have turned off their feed simply because all they know about it is that they don't use it themselves. The problem is that an RSS feed isn't for the site owner's use; it's for their readers, and it's the RSS-savvy readers who get boned from use of this feature.

There are circumstances where the RSS lock may make sense. In particular, if you use the Xanga Lock so that only signed-in Xanga users can view your site, turning off your feed makes sure that non-Xangans can't see anything of your site without signing in. However, if you're letting random visitors in, there's nothing to be gained by removing a handy feature like an RSS feed. Please leave it on unless you have a reason to turn it off.

...

Nobody who's turned their feed off has bothered to read this far, have they? Dammit. I'm totally wasting my time.

A friend phoned me just to ask an HTML question. (This happens occasionally.) I was able to give him an answer off the top of my head, without having to double-check. I'd been worried for awhile that my knowledge of HTML had withered to a half-dozen tags and about as many attributes; now I realise that I haven't forgotten, I've just concentrated on what I use the most --not a bad thing.

(I need to knock off the in-joke titles, I know, but this one is making is burst out laughing. I think I'll use real titles some other day.)

I received a most excellent email yesterday, leading me into a flurry of instant messages right when that sort of thing did me a world of good. I also managed to pin down a website bug (curse you, Internet Explorer! CURSE!) in the process, which somehow seemed proper. Eventually the site will get a makeover and I rather expect to have at least one hand in it.

Man, some days it's just so good to be me, to have an inkling what's going on and to be able to fix it. I love it.

I got my final grades from spring semester. I'd been annoyed that I didn't quite hit the grade I wanted. Well, it turns out that if your percentage grade ends in .5 or higher, it gets rounded up for the final report -- so I got the grade I wanted after all.

I so don't want to go to class today. A classmate's contribution to discussion involved something that spooked the hell out of me, and I'm trembling for fear of encountering it again. It scared me bad enough yesterday that I didn't get to sleep until four o'clock, slept five hours at most, and I don't expect tonight to fare much better.

It was bad. I don't even want to talk about it, because I don't like shaking so badly. I immediately drew a parallel to a specific horror movie that terrifies me in sheer concept alone, much less in its numerous "gotcha!" moments, and I really really really could live happily ever after, never thinking of its hideous real-life counterpart ever again.

Man, you know it's bad when I, the queen of "share my pain!", have to step back and say that no, I won't inflict my nightmares on anyone else.

I think I need to watch a Disney movie now. One completely devoid of a certain type of animal, or I'm going to lose my shit and burst into hysterical tears. Fox and the Hound! Yes. Perfect.

I have to do class sometime today, but I also have to not reduce myself to a quivering blob of sobbing gelatin, too.

My mother and I put flowers on graves Sunday (Memorial Day weekend in the States). As we walked back to the car, we noticed some flower arrangements had gotten knocked over by a vigorous breeze, so I asked her to wait a moment while I fixed the loose flowers back into place. I found a few more on the way and restored those too. It seemed the right thing to do.

Mom smiled contentedly when I got into the car. Then she told me, "You're a good kid."

I'm still not sure what I did that was so special it earned that remark, but it makes me feel all sunny inside anyway.

I finally managed a bit of roleplay today. High freaking time. Squirt more or less forced me into a round of MURPG, and we're all glad he did, down the the GM. Slowly, my gaming groove is coming back.

Last night's channel-surfing turned up Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends, guest starring Dracula and Wolf Person. I'm a total sucker for horror critters in odd places, especially when they pick a laughable (but non-trademarked) moniker for their wolf/man combo deal.

I enjoyed the ride and the expected horror tropes that get trotted out. Apparently Dracula has a lab. Whatever. The heroes finally defeated Drac by... exposing him to sunlight, in the form of Firestar's superpower.

Y'all are gonna wanna hit me -- hell, I wanna hit me -- but I was (momentarily) surprised by this. Sunlight drives off vampires! How creative!

Now, my roleplaying companions are reading this, and if they have the right redhead in mind, they's confused. "Er, isn't your main roleplay character a vampire hunter with the ability to emanate sunlight, and doesn't she use that on vampires all the time?"

Good question, Spanky. The answers are yes and no. She can. But whether in plotted stories or free-for-all roleplay, I don't think she ever has. She's bumped into vampires before, but they are, almost to a man, completely immune to the sun. I think some even go tanning.

Tan vampires make Count Orlok cry.