Mouldy Speeches

I’d hoped to start posting straight away after unveiling the redesign, about my swinging single lifestyle this month while Alec’s been in Ireland on a long business trip, about the joys of overnight sexy scrabble sleepovers with old friends, about weeknight wagyu + foie gras burgers and weekend garage sale gold-digging.

Then, I found mould on a bunch of my t-shirts in a cupboard and was unceremoniously catapulted into a world of laundry pain. The washing, the cupboard cleaning, the bamboo pole fumbling, the ironing – I washed the rest of the clothes in there, just in case – have effectively cockblocked me from any sort of sexy swinging life this week, and when, in exhaustion, I declared Tuesday night a laundry-free zone, I was only fit to lie slack-jawed on the couch watching my new Entourage box set (from aforementioned garage sale, 3 seasons’ original box sets for $15).

After all this, there’s been precious little time for correcting the remaining errors I’ve spotted in the redesign or putting something in that blank About page, so bear with me – there’s a first time for every excuse and I’ve definitely not used this one before but: I blame the evil spores.

Oh, and Portishead’s Third album is still the best album I’ve heard this year. What’s yours?

Female Mechanic Now On Duty

Hello! If you see this, that means I have escaped a big kaboom! The redesign’s more or less done, give or take a bunch of borked permalinks, incomplete side pages and probably some inexplicable error messages. I just wanted to stop being such a bloody perfectionist and fling it out there, or else I knew I’d get stuck with the old template for five more years. I figured showing the new thingy to all of you would motivate me to finish tying up all the loose ends faster, rather than keep tinkering with it indefinitely.

Please let me know if you encounter stuff that’s broken, and I’ll make myself a stiff drink and dive back in to fix it. But please bear in mind that I’m neither visually creative nor highly knowledgeable about web design, so what you see here really does represent the limits of my ability. Anyway, enough blathering for now – further boffiny details will go on a side page if I bother to write it, but in the meantime I’ll just mention that major credit goes to WordPress, K2, Google, Absolut Pear, the swear words kan ni na and chee bye, and you, wonderful readers, in whose patience and indulgence I continue to trust.

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.

Pimping My Ride

A while back on this blog, a small but vocal band of dedicated commenters mounted a Make Alec Blog campaign, no doubt hoping that an Alec blog would provide more of the bizarre nuggets of Alecness they had come to enjoy here from time to time.

I’m not sure if the original Make Alec Blog campaigners still read this blog, but anyway, I thought it was worth announcing a partial victory for the cause! Some may be dismayed to learn that he has chosen to focus the blog on chronicling his bread-baking exploits rather than his miscellaneous daily humiliations, but don’t fret, some of his entries so far suggest that the two are surprisingly similar.

Before you all head off to Alec’s blog turf, never to set foot here again, I wish to state the following for the record:

  1. Everything he writes about me is a DAMN LIE! I am an infinitely supportive and understanding spouse, not in the least bit given toward irrational unnecessarily hostile pronouncements that his fucking dough fucking fermenting in our fucking fridge is going to come to life in the night and murder us in our bed.

  2. The lame blog name is not my fault. I made many excellent suggestions, which all got shot down. For example:
    • Flour Fairy
    • Master Baker
    • Yeast Infection

Anyway, do pop over to read and/or participate as you see fit. I mostly support this development in our life, but if he starts getting more hits than me, I might have to refocus this blog too. On pr0n.

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..”

Newsflash, copycat: it doesn’t have to be the same to be plagiarism. Google it yourself to find out more. After all, you seem quite good at trawling the Net for content.

I was also amused by his “About Me” description:

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

Yeah, like reading a book…written by someone else!

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.