After some nail-biting and a lot of much-appreciated help from Karen it looks as if things might have moved over properly, but please let me know if you experience any errors accessing the site. I’m hoping this site’s new home will be more reliable than its last, and Karen has given me far more server space than I need. I guess it’s time I start distributing pr0n.
I know it’s been quiet around here lately, one reason being that my web host’s uptime has been extremely sporadic. The last time this happened, Karen very generously offered to host me. I didn’t make use of it at the time because I didn’t have the spare time to research moving WordPress between servers and was scared I’d screw something up, but I’ve finally managed to look into it and will be taking the plunge this weekend.
So things may be a bit iffy around here for a few hours or days as the move takes effect, but hopefully I shall emerge from the murky depths dripping resplendently like Ursula Andress. (Aside: I googled “Ursula Andress bikini” just to make sure I’d got the pop culture reference right, and this was the first hit. I know the wonders of the Internet should cease to amaze me at some point and I would have fully expected to find bikini photo galleries from my search, but not a site that apparently bases most of its analysis “upon the work of Flugel and his study of the shifting erogenous zones”.)
I saw this during some lunchtime surfing at work during the week and literally had to stuff my fingers into my mouth while watching it to stop myself from squealing from delight in the office. (Via Mighty Girl.) Best wedding video ever, totally.
Brian & Eileen’s Wedding Music Video. from LOCKDOWN projects on Vimeo.
Congratulations, Brian and Eileen who I don’t even know! It looks like you’ll be having a fabulous life together.
You may already be aware of my penchant for deliberately creeping myself out from time to time. As luck would have it, Alec is away on yet another business trip, I’m alone in our home, and I’ve just discovered the Dionaea House.
At this point I should salvage some dignity by saying my reason for linking it here isn’t actually because I find it that scary, but I definitely enjoyed the read, and based on the fun discussion that took place in the comments for my scary movie entry it seems that some of you might like it too. It’s good even if you’ve already read House of Leaves but I guess better if you haven’t.
If you’re not big into scary movies but have a literary interest in innovative Internet-based narratives, it’s also worth reading. I know Blair Witch did it first, but the technique hasn’t got old for me yet. (Also linked here for sake of completeness – Ted’s Caving Page.)
My addictions to computer games have always blatantly arisen as methods of escaping my true priorities and lapsed once I no longer have important things to be skiving. After each year’s university exams Dope Wars never seemed as riveting as I thought it was when studying land law had been the alternative. My addiction to Stars also turned out inversely proportional to the amount of civil procedure rules I had to finish studying. I only play Wordy when I’m struggling with a blog entry but can’t get it right. I’m always most successful at World Of Goo when I should be watering the plants, doing my ironing, or cleaning the house instead.
So why, on the first day of Chinese New Year, when I could be napping off the huge buffet lunch I just enjoyed with my family, or planning our upcoming trip to California (YAY!), or savouring The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, am I playing Sirtet nonstop??!!
Via Man vs. Clown!, run-don’t-walk to Cute Things Falling Asleep.
If you use Google Reader to keep up with this blog, I’ve noticed that it’s often out of sync with the latest updates, and some (like my recent blip about a Microsoft Paint summary of Watchmen) never get displayed at all. I’ve looked but haven’t managed to find out how to deal with this, so:
– if you’re a Google Reader user and it looks like I haven’t updated in a while, try visiting the page itself
– if you’re not a Google Reader user, please bear with me if you see things republished a few times, I’m just trying to figure out what the hell will make Google Reader figure out that something’s been updated here
I’m as overjoyed as most other people about the new President-Elect of the United States, but won’t do the obligatory gushing blog post for fear of descending into platitude. I do, however, want to share this Vanity Fair article I read over a year ago, and which I searched out and reread the day Obama won the elections, because it had stayed with me all that time.
The article isn’t about Obama but Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine and subject of the famous photo you’ve probably seen of her attempt to enter her newly desegregated high school while behind her, a white girl’s face explodes in hatred. The article recounts that fateful day, Elizabeth’s harrowing high school years of constant bullying and total isolation, and how she continued to struggle with these experiences well into her adult life. Most fascinatingly, it tells of the reconciliation, friendship even, that occurred forty years later between Elizabeth and the angry white girl in the photograph, Hazel Bryan.
I’ll leave you to appreciate Through A Lens, Darkly in its full length. It paints a complex picture I’d rather not reduce to a summarizing, rose-tinted doodle, but I think it’s a fitting complement to one of the last few lines in Obama’s wonderful victory speech, where he was speaking about 106-year-old Ann Nixon Cooper and what she’d seen in her life: “And this year, in this election, she touched her finger to a screen, and cast her vote, because after 106 years in America, through the best of times and the darkest of hours, she knows how America can change.”
Google’s cache allowed me to restore all the posts I thought I’d lost, but not all of the comments. I’ve manually re-entered the comments that the cache did capture, but unfortunately I know that at least some comments by James, t, dubdew and Kelly (possibly others which I can’t recall) were lost. I’m sorry about that, everyone – I do really love that people participate here, and I wish I’d protected your comments better.
As a mark of my penitence I have made this commemorative lolcat.
The short explanation is that my incredibly incompetent host 24hostingnow culminated many years of highly unsatisfactory service by descending into a massive downtime lasting several days, after which they were of course unable to restore my site to anything other than an error-filled shitfest. Since their backups were ridiculously outdated, the site eventually had to be restored from my relatively less outdated backup – which still means I’ve lost almost every post since the redesign.
I am obviously rather bummed by this, but in the context of eight years of blog content, 1.5 months is not a tragedy. It’s my own fault for not backing up more regularly, given that I already knew my hosts were nimrods. I guess I’d never got into the habit before because with Movable Type my content always survived server problems. Yet another way WordPress makes my life way more troublesome than Movable Type ever did, but what’s done is done.
I’m not sure whether to try and recreate the lost posts or just move on. There’s a lot of background work I will definitely have to do (because I’d done a lot of category resorting and tagging which was probably lost as well), but hopefully that shouldn’t affect the surface functioning of the site. But anyway, I’m just glad I could finally tell you guys I’m not dead, just technically incapacitated. In the meantime, anyone got a good, affordable web host to recommend?
Update: Praise the Lord, Krishna, Guan Yin, Xenu and above all, GOOGLE! Have recovered a fair amount of stuff from Google’s cache, and will reinstate it soon. Yay!