syntaxfree

Phat Pharm

(Short update: Decided Movable Type was crap. Tried to migrate entries to Wordpress. Numerous problems. Decided Wordpress was crap. Cussed a lot. Considered quitting blogging. Solved the numerous problems. Whooped and cheered a lot. Crowned myself supergenius. For the moment, finalizing new Wordpress design but maintaining old Movable Type installations just in case.)

While gremlin-fighting continues, I'm resorting to lazy linkblogging. Check out these hip-hop animals at the Animal Pharm. (Thanks to brother-in-law James for sending me the link.) My favourite is the animal formerly known as ?uestlove.

Movable Type Misery

Due to an extended period of Movable Type related chaos involving a perfectly good MT 3.2 installation suddenly refusing to work, deceptively simple MT 4.1 upgrade instructions totally divorced from the horrible reality of the process, error messages in several different fruit flavours, lousy support documentation by Movable Type all round (you get the feeling they're trying to conceal the sheer multitude of problems that can arise - all the solutions to my problems were not found in their documentation but in blogs or contributed by users in the Movable Type forum), and much swearing, Googling and cgi patching by me, the nuts and bolts of this blog might be a bit fucked up while I sort out all the things broken by the upgrade.

For example, search doesn't work and the category archives that used to list in the sidebar have gone fishing. Also, comments don't work if you click the "Comments" link at the bottom of an entry, but they will if you click the permalink (i.e. the time of posting) and write your comment into the form there instead. Feel free to mention anything else you've noticed.

Why not just use Wordpress, you wonder? Damn good question, and I'm considering it seriously. I even installed Wordpress on my server in the midst of my frustrations last week and have been tinkering round - I'm not sold on it yet, but where I was previously too lazy to switch over because I didn't feel like having to recode my templates, I'm now sufficiently pissed off at Movable Type to see it as a matter of principle. So perhaps change gon' come, depending on whether my principled outrage manages to trump my congenital laziness. We'll see.

Dispensable

Me: Aaargh, while trying to redesign my blog I don't have any time to update it.
Alec: I could update it in your place! "Hi! I hate everything! This band sucks squid semen!"
Me: ......
Alec: No one would know it wasn't you.

Caramon The Copycat

Plagiarism disgusts me. Therefore, caramonyeo disgusts me. If he disgusts you too, please feel to drop by his site and let him know what a loser he is. (Link found via Tomorrow.)

His response to comments which pointed out that he had plagiarised sarongpartygirl?

"I am surprised that its indeed similar, however its not the same.. thanks for pointing it out.. cheers.."

I was also amused by his "About Me" description:

"Well, to know more about me is like reading a book."

Addendum: Just in case copycatyeo decides to delete the comment I made on his blog, I shall reproduce it here. In the past I've been quite sad to lose the comments I left on Xiaxue's blog which she decided to delete (and ban me as well), and I'd rather like to keep this one.

Caramon: Your flaccid response disgusts me, as it should any blogger, Singaporean or otherwise, who actually takes the trouble to apply their mind to writing their own posts. It will obviously take years for you to bed a local girl if she fears that the minute she opens her legs you will Ctrl-C her chee bye and Ctrl-V it on your blog.

It's quite easy to give credit to people whose writing you admire, you know? There's this thing people use on the Internet, it's called "linking". Perhaps you've heard of it?

You've been caught good and proper. At least be man enough to admit it and apologize.

Meeting In Meatspace

I must admit I don't actually read the blogs of most of the people who were at Hideout last night, but it was nice to see them all getting along so happily anyway. mrbrown explains how it all happened here, complete with trippy facewarped photos.

Apart from reproaching Daryl for playing Gigantic with insufficiently huge bass (contrary to what he tempted me with previously), congratulating mrbrown on having his third baby on the way, telling Mr Miyagi that rather than appearing sick to his stomach he merely exuded "quiet confidence", chatting briefly with 2 sarongpartyfrens, and being reassured by Little Miss Drinkalot that over the years, one does actually manage to re-adjust to being in Singapore and not London, I mostly sat shyly to one side with Alec and listened to the choons. Which were not as much to my taste as the last time (I prefer my house darker, colder and scarier - "haunted house", if you will), and I had to leave just as he started playing some indie, but I still look forward to future sets by DJ Slapdash. Do a hip-hop one, Daryl!

And to the few people I did manage to chat with, albeit awkwardly and plagued by my old bad habit of not making eye contact, it was a pleasure meeting you.

And The Winner Is...

...Rene, who wrote a really sweet sincere email about what this blog has given her over the years. I loved all the jokes everyone contributed, really I did, but in the end, being told that my blog actually meant something to somebody, and had done for several years, was what gave me the biggest and happiest smile. Sappy but true.

[Original post and competition rules]

So congratulations Rene, and thank you so much to everyone else who gave it a shot. I'm pretty happy with how this competition turned out, so I might try it again in the future if an appropriate giveaway object presents itself.

Till next time, let me leave you with a story:

This guy walks into a pub and half his head is a big orange. He asks for a pint of lager. The bartender says "Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing, but half your head appears to be a big orange."

"Yeah, had that for a while now," the guy says.

So the bartender says "How did that happen, if you don't mind me asking?"

"I was in this old junk shop," the guy explains, "and I found a lamp. I gave it a rub, and this genie appeared! He offered me the standard three wishes, so for my first wish, I asked for every woman I'd ever meet to fall madly in love with me. The genie waved his genie hands around and suddenly every woman was looking at me with sparkling eyes. For my second wish, I asked for a wallet with a million quid in it, which would never be lost or destroyed, and which would replenish itself whenever I spent any money. And my wish was granted."

"And the third?" the bartender prompted, leaning forward eagerly.

"And for my third wish," the guy said, "I said I wanted half my head to be a big orange."

Shout Outs

For almost all my blogging life (nearly four years now) my blog has been rather like an ostrich with its head in the sand. Until now, it has refused to acknowledge, at least on its front page, that other sites exist on the Web.

Linking to other sites is the palm grease of the blog world. At best, they notice you in their referrer logs, click on your URL and go whoo, here's a new blog I haven't read before, my god! it's fascinating, I must add it to my sidebar too! At worst, they ignore your attempt at emotional blackmail because they refuse to mislead their public by linking to a site they don't actually like enough to read much, and you languish in obscurity forever - being enough of an exhibitionist to have started a blog in the first place, this is obviously not what you want.

I, of course, have remained above all this, not out of any nobility of character, but out of sheer laziness. But no more. Tonight, sheer boredom took on sheer laziness and finally won. If your site is there but you'd rather I removed it, please let me know.

Three Reasons Why I Rock

(Bearing in mind, of course, that after reading them it is rather unlikely that you will share my view.)

1. I decided that enough was finally enough, and sorted out the multiple electrical devices that had been uglifying my desk all these months. I unplugged, untangled, rearranged, cleaned and dusted, and at the end of a sweaty hour or two, modem, router, printer, speakers, laptop, phone, desk lighting, broadband cable and ALL THEIR BLOODY ASSORTED PLUGS AND WIRES were living in harmony and beauty while taking up very little space. I now have more space on my desk, the massive multiplug has been artfully concealed, and the wires are no longer a gnarled mess. I can now abandon all the DIY solutions I had been considering before, which would have involved drilling. I rock.

2. (WARNING: geeky.) Since the site conversion to PHP seems to have gone fine, I decided to plunge right into implementing the features which had motivated the conversion. After squinting at code for a couple of hours, I now have:

• Category archives which automatically paginate themselves, courtesy of the Paginate plugin for Movable Type. Particularly useful for my ever-expanding Music Geekery category (currently 80 posts and counting).
• A right side menu coded as a separate MT template and pulled into the page using PHP Include. It won't look any different to you, but it'll save me updating time and server load.
• Gzip-optimized pages, which will hopefully load faster for you guys.
• A drop-down box menu to replace the long list of monthly archives previously on the sidebar.

3. On Singapore's Brainiest Kids, one question was "What is the name of the first book in the Famous Five series by Enid Blyton?" and I knew the answer in a split-second. Later, the question was something to the effect of "In Calvin and Hobbes, how many babysitters did Calvin's parents ask to babysit Calvin, out of which only Rosalyn agreed?" I yelled "EIGHT!" triumphantly and my mum reeled back in shock. I astound myself with my memory for useless childhood trivia. I rock.

PHP Virgin Going It Alone

I am attempting to convert this blog to PHP despite not knowing very much about it. Rather stupidly, I am also attempting this while my usual technical advisor Russ is in Italy on a charity project and completely incommunicado.

I've located a number of dummy's guides online so theoretically everything should go fine, but if things start looking a little strange around here over the next couple of days, you'll know why.

[In general, if you're looking for something here and get an error message, try changing the file extension of the URL from .html to .php. If that doesn't work, laugh maniacally. That won't fix the site at all, but it's always so therapeutic.]

Wha?!

I obviously don't check my site counter referrals enough. If enthymeme hadn't helpfully pointed out that some nice person (who? 'Fess up!) apparently nominated my site for best Singapore blog at the 2003 Asia Weblog Awards, I would have blissfully continued neglecting this blog in favour of teaching myself Dancehall 101 via Soulseek downloads and this raggalicious thread at I Love Music, as I've been doing the last couple of days.

Now I'm under pressure. Of all times to get nominated for a blog award. I live in London for 4 years, writing about my swinging life, deep intellectual thoughts, and ubercool pursuits, and no nominations for anything. Then I return to Singapore, sink into depression, boredom and frivolity, with the nearest things I have to a life being reality TV (last week I even descended to watching Am I Hot, I kid you not) and making love to the Marine Parade library, and pow.

So. Huge sycophantic grin. If you can get past the fact that all the other nominees have, like, good design and good content and are actually complete, unlike my half-arsed straddle between blogging at syntaxfree and everything else still at ineffable because I have just been too crap to transfer stuff over, and if something about this blog perhaps appeals to you a little more than the other nominees do, and if the men in white coats agree to undo the leather straps once you've convinced them of all of the above, please vote for me.

If you don't, I might just take that as a sign that my content doesn't have enough mass appeal, and start posting pictures of furry baby animals. And porn. And furry baby animal porn. You have been warned.

Clown, reveal thyself

I clicked on my Activity Log in the Movable Type system out of sheer boredom. Most of the actions it listed are fairly mundane. "Michelle added entry #614." "Search query for: portishead."

And then:
2003.09.30 22:39:04
217.148.41.216
Search: query for 'Hello, Michelle. It's Bobo the clown'

I believe this is what they call one of those what the fuck??!! moments.

Titular Titterings

When I imported my Blogger content into Movable Type, titles were automatically generated for all my posts from the first five words of each post. I didn't realize the comic potential of this immediately, but while trying out my new search function I typed in "Alec" and was presented with an array of posts, including those with the following (mostly rather misleading) "titles":

I'd initially been really excited
I'm less than satisfied with
Alec takes issue with my
Alec does strange things with
I got called a cunt
I admit it, I'm stuck
So there I was, suffering
And today it all ended

Tee hee. It's almost poetic! (Am I the only one this amuses?) (For the benefit for any friends I haven't talked to in a while who may start getting worried, don't worry, we're still very happily together.)

While doing other administrative exploration, I found this other title I rather like:

Another very short update: am.

If Soliciting Is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right

A long time ago, I decided that when this site got an average of 50 hits a day, I'd try the comments thing. It's been getting those numbers for a while now (thank you Google sex perverts), so I decided what the hell, I have only my sense of self-worth to lose.

Therefore please note the additional linky thing in the bottom left corner of each post, and do comment if the spirit moves you to. If those brackets keep telling me zero, I'll get all insecure, and cry. And then I'll start posting really offensive contentious stuff, like "You readers suck buffalo cock!" (hello again, Google sex perverts), or "Postmodernism is crap. Discuss," and we really don't want anything like that to happen, do we?

[Note: This was posted when I was still using Blogger, and hosted my comments on enetation. The original post, and the comments made in response to it, can be found here at my old site.]

Confess!

Okay, own up. Which one of you entered this site into the Ass-o-tron?

It Must Be My Good Example

So now both of my flatmates have set up LiveJournals, one of them's kinda nekkid on hers, and the other's just posted her tits. (Mammogram? Sorry, bad joke.)

Meanwhile, on a completely unrelated note, I'm thinking this antiquated site really needs a redesign...

[Alec, relax. I'm talking coding, not nudie pics.]

Tugging On Socks As We Speak

I know I've not really been in attendance on this blog lately. In the East 17 of weblogs I have been one of those two guys whose sole jobs in the band seemed to be to always make sure their heads were shaven, and then stand around making hand gestures while the other two were singing.

The Masters course seems to actually expect me to put in some work. The vagaries of household living mean that when I intend to be making a blog entry, I somehow find myself thrusting a brush up and down a toilet instead. After making attempts to maintain some sort of social life, I find I have no time left to write about said attempts. My attempts to maintain a fulfilling private life are probably my most successful, but while aspects of these may possibly get blurted out by a drunk boyfriend to random pub chums, they have no place on this page.

This doesn't mean I'm going to stop writing here at all - it's just an admission of a couple of weeks of crapness, and a statement of intention to pull my proverbial socks (still featuring toes) up. A critical mass of little things are begging to be thought about, and read about, and listened to, and written about, and at some point soon I'll manage to give them an outlet.

Testing Testing

Here is the problem: I have settled the problem of web-hosting for at least the next year, and have significantly more space in my postgraduate computer account in which to frolic. Unfortunately, as I type this I have the distinct feeling of standing on a stage in an empty auditorium because I haven't managed to post anything on my standby blog at Blogspot directing traffic here. Also, I don't seem to be able to find myself here in Google searches, which I'll try to remedy by discreetly including some keywords (Michelle Michelle Michelle ineffable ineffable ineffable blog blog blog) in this post.

But hopefully, the problem will get solved at some point, and I suppose those of you who do manage to find me are the ones who really, really want to (yup, all three of you). So this is where I will continue to brew my word stews of boring day descriptions, struggling music writing, occasional links, and inscrutable Michelleness. Keep coming here if it floats your boat and thanks for bearing with me this far.

[Oh yes: it would be nice if you could let me know you've found me again. I confess I do sometimes like keeping track of all you. :) ]

Whoops

Oh, goodness. In the midst of trying to make passionate love to my textbooks, I almost forgot: university IT-powers-that-be insist on me getting a new computer account, which will affect the URL of this site. If this site suddenly disappears, please keep in touch with me at theineffable.blogspot.com, where I'll be posting until I sort out the new webspace.

I suppose this would all be easier if I went and did the domain name thingy like all the grown-up bloggers do.

If Google Says It, It Must Be True

According to Google I am the number three resource on the Internet for indieness. Right on. I is well cool.

Quiet Blog Month

It appears that September is the quietest month, at least where this blog is concerned. Last year I spent most of September in Greece and Turkey, this year I've been in Ireland and Spain, and in general both Septembers have been exceptionally weak in terms of entry quality and quantity here. It's not a situation I pride myself on, but what's done is done, and from now on I should be well able to resume the regular programme of solipsist musings and unnecessarily detailed breakdowns of my time and money management, or lack thereof, that readers of this blog have no doubt become used to.

Phew. I was fairly worried I'd lost whatever legal mind I'd ever had over the summer, but by God this is proof I can still write the long convoluted sentences.

The Difficulties Of Summer

One thing I wonder about every summer is how my relocation affects my blog content (and yes, I won't deny it, how it affects your interest in my blog content, O reader).

First and most simply, there's the change of country - what I don't realize while I'm in London and writing about London and the people I know there, is how much more difficult it can be sometimes to be writing about a place where I have a history. Every entry in Singapore comes with scores of invisible footnotes. No name is just a name, or a place just a place, but I feel torn between explaining everything (which, knowing me, would be overly lengthy and ultimately woefully inadequate) and just coasting through it all (which means the entries could end up feeling empty).

The other simple difference is language - we speak a colourful and fairly charming mutation of English over here which I fall comfortably back into once I'm home (unlike other Singaporeans who suddenly acquire other people's accents after a few years somewhere else, and speak like foreigners at home forevermore), but which can be pretty damn incomprehensible to the rest of the world. And then there's all our names for food. I don't presume to be an Inuit trying to explain snow to a Bedouin but it can get a bit tough trying to figure out what a ang moh/gwai-lo/gringo, call them what you will, reader makes of all this.

Lest this become too Joy Luck Club, let me just say that I'll try and find a happy compromise to everything above, but will probably fail quite regularly. So be it. I don't write this exclusively for me or you, but wander fitfully along the spectrum, which is how I quite like it.

Blogspot Just In Case

A fairly important notice: if, in the near future, you come here and are told this page doesn't exist, you'll find me living out of my metaphorical Internet suitcase at theineffable.blogspot.com.

I explain this a little more at the blogspot site, but since both blogs will continue to be updated with exactly the same content, you don't actually have to go there unless this site ceases to exist at its current host. For now though, please do bookmark that site if anything I have ever written has brought the tiniest shred of joy to your life. Or if you detest me, but just keep reading this out of sheer masochism because you're kinky that way. Or if you're friends of mine who've resigned themselves to reading this site because I'm so bloody awful at keeping in touch.

Bookmark. Bookmark. Bookmark.

I was never one for subtlety. And I ain't too proud to beg.