My Mediocre-ly Bad Day

Posted by me on Wednesday, the 25th day of July, anno domini 2007 at 9:06 PM, local time.

So today I was almost late for my meeting, it was quite hot and uncomfortable out, and one of my test machines at work didn’t seem to quite want to work right. Also, we got beaten rather badly at softball, I had to go back to work after softball, and didn’t get to eat supper until just now, at 9pm. Also, when I did get to go home, MPR decided to not work for the 6 minutes of my trip home, surely just to spite me.

And to top it all off, I forgot my shoes at work.

On the other hand, it was Roscoe’s catered food for lunch in the park, my tests did finally work, there is opera on MPR now that it works again, and my beer fermenter didn’t explode again today like I feared it might. Also, I remembered to blog today, which is good.

However, since I can’t think of an adverb to properly modify “bad” and thus had to fake one with “mediocre-ly”, I think that may tip the scales of the day slightly on the less than perfect side. =-)

I probably should just go to bed and hope for a better tomorrow. Right after I eat supper. At 9pm.

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Cracks in the sidewalk

Posted by me on Tuesday, the 17th day of July, anno domini 2007 at 12:15 AM, local time.

So, just a short note here to apologize for my laziness and mention the fact that I am way too old to be concerned with stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk. And yet, today, I found myself carefully altering my pace and each step to avoid walking on any sidewalk cracks. At work, walking back after Coffee Walk, the cracks were pretty regular, and I had to keep pace with my friends while at the same time avoiding bringing their attention to my strange gait. Later today, the sidewalk cracks were rather irregular, as it was more of a curb extension than a sidewalk, and the cracks were regular in some places but irregular in others, where the curb concrete needed to match other bits of concrete and to match gutter grates and the like. But, as I was by myself, I could be more erratic in my gait correction, as it were.

Seriously, I do probably have a problem here, but I don’t know how to fix it, or who to go to for therapy for such issues. Ah well, I’ll make do. Please don’t judge me. =-)

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Trying to keep up.

Posted by me on Thursday, the 7th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 11:33 PM, local time.

In the interest of keeping momentum, I am trying to write to my blog now every day, at least once. I have a huge backlist of topics I want to write about, but most of them are currently just on my iGoogle homepage quick notes list as a simple phrase or two that I know what I mean to talk about, but would be meaningless to anyone else… some of them go back 6 or 7 months even, when I was still blogging more or less regularly, but didn't want to take the time to expand on those topics yet. So, they may sit there a bit longer as I try to figure out what to say.

Anyway, its getting pretty hot in Rochester this summer. Others may complain that I am complaining too much already about this, but I know that the sudden change in a single day from comfortable and rainy to that hot hot wind of summer that is so unbearable is really just an indication that this summer will surely get even worse. It always seems to. It’s at this point that I really start wishing for the late fall or early winter, when its not yet 30 below, but there is nice fluffy snow every once in a while… sigh.

Well thats probably enough for now. Expect posts soonish about my acquisition of yet another set of hobbies (knitting and crocheting), the wonder and awesomeness that is Opera, ways to keep my books in order (LibraryThing!), ways to keep my music in order, and my patio-container vegetable garden (and associated patio-container fruit orchard).

PS: I've started "tagging" blog posts, since its so darn easy on WriteToMyBlog.com to do so, and it might help with google searching for my page. Maybe.

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Testing WriteToMyBlog

Posted by me on Wednesday, the 6th day of June, anno domini 2007 at 10:25 AM, local time.

This is a test post from WriteToMyBlog.com. A handy web-based editor for blogs of all sorts. Not as simple as my email based one, but that is currently down for system upgrades that I am procrastinating with, so its good to have an alternative. I know I havn’t posted much lately, and Darcy, for one, is clearly losing interest. :) I blame my email thingy being down, and my hatred for WordPress’ own interface.

So, I hope that with this option available to me now, I can post a bit more. It would still be nice if this was a plugin inside iGoogle homepage somehow, but I guess I can’t have everything… yet…

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Poutine, or, Those Crazy Folks from Canadia

Posted by me on Saturday, the 30th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 10:55 PM, local time.

Ok, so I was reading Pam‘s blog post about Her Trip to Ottawa, and What She Found There and decided I had to look up this Poutine substance which is all the rage up Nort’. And, not that anyone cares or would be at all surprised, but the standard mixture of french fries, cheese curds, and gravy does not sound all that appetizing. Gravy does not go on cheese. That’s just the way it is.

However, reading further (on good old wikipedia), I discovered a variation that actually sounds quite good: Italian Poutine. Its just like normal Poutine, but instead of gravy (Gravy does not go on cheese, etc., etc.) you use spaghetti sauce, possibly with meat. That actually sounds quite excellent, and I may have to try it sometime.

One link led to another, of course, and soon I was on the wikipedia page about Bolognese Sauce, a variant (and possibly the original version) of the standard meat sauce they use on spaghetti. In this version, there is far less tomato sauce, and instead they first fry up the meat (not ground beef: minced beef! Seriously! Doesn’t that sound good in general?) in a olive oily / buttery / oniony / garlicy mixture, then add some white wine and reduce that for a while. Then you add a small amount of tomato paste and stock and simmer that for about 2-4 hours to get the meat to fall apart entirely. Right before you are done cooking it, add a bit of cream or milk.

I think it sounds fantastic, and I am thinking of trying to make it sometime soon here to see what it tastes like. I can only imagine that it will be excellent.

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Why is this not snow?

Posted by me on Saturday, the 30th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 6:28 PM, local time.

So, what is going on here? All this rain the past couple of days, and not a bit of snow. It certainly makes me sad. Other places have at least gotten a little bit of snow. We get nothing here in Rochester. Even Houghton has some snow, and it continues to snow there.

Think of the snow storm this would make here! I would have several inches of white fluffy snow to play in! Oh, it would make me so happy…

At any rate, moving is going much slower with all this rain, since I have to keep the truck’s cover on, and can only fit smaller items in it right now. This morning, when the rain let up for a bit, I, of course, was sleeping and missed my opportunity to get some of the bigger things over there. Ah well.

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A good Holiday Sentiment

Posted by me on Monday, the 25th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 12:39 AM, local time.

So I just thought I would put this quote from my sister, Alaina, up here, since when she said it, I was struck by how hilarious it was. It is the sort of thing some people say on purpose to be funny, but I am pretty sure she was just expressing her present thoughts on the matter. She had just finished some desert (some sort of pumpkin cake roll thing that she had just made and wasn’t too impressed with) and had wanted to move on to some of the other lovely desserts that were available, since it is Christmas time, and there are always many deserts available at such times:

“That made me full. How dare it make me full?!!?”

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Sneaky Server Switchover

Posted by me on Saturday, the 16th day of December, anno domini 2006 at 1:22 AM, local time.

So a couple of days ago my old hosting service was about to auto-renew itself and just in the nick of time Adam sent out a note and offered to provide sublet hosting services for a small fee… much much smaller than the fee I was about to automatically pay. I went into action and signed up with Adam and moved all my stuff over to the new servers. After I was sure it all was working*, I updated the DNS servers with the new address and canceled my old hosting services.

* As far as I can tell it’s all working, anyway. That’s the point of this post. If anyone notices that something is not quite working as it should now, please let me know via a comment or an email or something. Thanks!

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Testing initial filter

Posted by me on Monday, the 5th day of June, anno domini 2006 at 10:53 PM, local time.

This will test some initial filtering stuff I added. First bold, then lots of bold. Then italics and more italics. Then underline stuff.

Link type 1: Wikipedia
Link type 2: Google
Link type 3: http://maps.google.com

Can I bold
across lines?

End of blog.

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Blogging from Emacs

Posted by me on Monday, the 5th day of June, anno domini 2006 at 10:24 PM, local time.

So, I’m testing a simple method of blogging from emacs by way of my command line blogging script. I think it should work pretty good. I guess we will find out. Now, one thing I was reading about somewhere was making it easier to link things. Essentially, my command line blogging script can be made to preprocess the body of the post to make it easier to do italics, bold, etc., as well as linking to arbitrary websites, or wikipedia, or other random websites based on keywords. I should also fix up some keywords to map to category numbers so I don’t have to figure out what the category number is for the category I wish to blog in!

Plan for preprocessing then is:
*bold*
<b>bold</b>
_underline_
<u>underline</u>
/italics/
<i>italics</i>
{sitekeyword:siteargs linktext mouseovertext}
<a href=link(sitekeyword,siteargs) title=mouseovertext>linktext</a>

Some initial keyword/arg sets will be:
wp:topic
for a given topic at wikipedia (no topic links to wikipedia itself).
google:search
for a google search of the given search terms (no search links to google itself)
map:place
for a google maps search of the given place terms (no place linkes to google maps itself)
bible:book:chapter:verse
for a link to a given book chapter:verse in the bible at some bible site. Likely the KJV with good Strong number concordance that I have somewhere.
compare:versions:book:chapter:verse
for a link to comparison versions of a bible verse or chapter at unbound bible. (Still need to figure out its interface)
guten:book
for a link to a gutenberg project text of a given book.

And we’ll see how that all works. Maybe something will suggest itself for further enhancement.

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