Taxi Jiver

Back from Kyoto! While I do the usual dawdle about processing photos and writing travel blog entries that abruptly end halfway into the holiday, have a random LOL: I was enjoying the snarky comments at Metafilter on The Cab Ride I’ll Never Forget, especially when people added their own anecdotes about their most memorable cab rides. Like much other Internet messageboard hilarity, the comic genius of designbot’s contribution is best appreciated unspoiled, and read in context with the rest of the thread, so I won’t explain here what I love about it, or post any excerpts. I just wanted to direct you to it because it totally made my day.

I Remember +353

We’re off to Kyoto, Miyajima and Takayama from tonight till next Monday for a much needed holiday.

I kept meaning to share Popagandhi’s wonderful post The Country Codes My Girlfriend And I Have Known with you from when I read and loved it last week, but tonight is still a pretty good time. It still gives me a real kick to actually walk through departure gates with Alec, as opposed to waving dolefully to each other separated by glass.

Bonus little blip of enjoyment: if you haven’t already heard Dengue Fever’s Tiger Phone Card[1. Second best song on Venus On Earth, which is otherwise rather patchy. Here’s the best song, Seeing Hands.], it complements the read really well.

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.

Sweet Juniper

I mostly read two types of personal blogs – blogs by my friends, because I am so bad at keeping in touch with people that even their infrequently updated blogs give me more information about their lives than I would otherwise have, and blogs by strangers that I enjoy so heartily that I totally wish those strangers could be my friends.

My reading list for the latter category is fairly short so I periodically go on big hunt-and-gather treks in search of new people to fall in love with, but usually end up frustratingly empty-handed. It’s not that there aren’t scads of blogs out there that are well-written by interesting people, because there definitely are. But I’ve often found that this still isn’t quite enough to make me feed a blog to Google Reader – much like with people, I guess, there are plenty of nice people who you can meet and have a pleasant conversation with, but that doesn’t mean you consciously look forward to meeting them again and rave about them to your other friends. There needs to be that extra sump’n sump’n, and that’s what makes real, enduring connections so elusive.

So anyway, the whole point of this post is a) space-filling while I recover physically, mentally and emotionally from the MOTHERFUCKING CRUELTY that is the Sweet Sweet galaxy in Super Mario Galaxy, and b) to share a little yay with all of you that I’ve found a new blog for my list. Via this great guest post on Dooce about public toilets, Sweet Juniper is mostly written by a former lawyer who is now a stay-at-home dad. Much like Dooce, he writes so engagingly and entertainingly about parenting that it almost makes me want to be one! For like two seconds.

Reason #3,539,284 I Love The Internet

My work day today involved a six! hour! meeting! and until I came home, read Metafilter and found TIME FOR SOME STORIES, my day sucked. However, everything has been transformed. I now share it with you. Warning – link is NSFW, not for the usual reasons but because if you start reading it, you will get no work done until there are no stories left to read and you have finished drying your tears of laughter and explained to your co-workers that your silent convulsions are not, in fact, epilepsy.

Oh, and here’s an extra because (a) I love all of you and (b) WordPress is still kicking my ass so I need to continue co-opting other people’s quality content instead of providing any of my own: an old favourite of mine in the same vein, My mother’s incredibly stupid ex-husband.

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.

Ch…ch…chaaaaange

Birthday update and pics of the simultaneously best and worst present ever are forthcoming. But in the meantime, I rather enjoyed this at the Onion and wanted to share. Excerpt:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change:

According to witnesses, a loud black man approached a crowd of some 4,000 strangers in downtown Chicago Tuesday and made repeated demands for change.

“The time for change is now,” said the black guy, yelling at everyone within earshot for 20 straight minutes, practically begging America for change. “The need for change is stronger and more urgent than ever before. And only you – the people standing here today, and indeed all the people of this great nation – only you can deliver this change.”

The black guy is oddly comfortable demanding change from people he’s never even met. It is estimated that, to date, the black man has asked every single person in the United States for change.

There’s also Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?, but unfortunately the article isn’t as great as its title promises it could be.