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.

I knew almost nothing about any of the above possibilities before today. More changes are on the way. Google rocks. I rock.

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.]

Do You Want Fries With That?

Given my recent tendency to make posts which embarrass my long-suffering boyfriend with their indecency, I put a lot of thought into writing an entry which was the very soul of propriety and restraint. But then I checked my referral logs and found I was number 2 on the Internet for, er, this.

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 hilarious comments made in response to it, are unfortunately lost in the mists of time.]

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…

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 those are sappy and don’t make for good blog material.

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.