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I’ve been using Blogger for like 3 decades now, and I’ve been mostly happy with it (except on the once-frequent occasion in which a network problem caused me to lose an entire, 3000 word post, but that hasn’t happened in a while). Periodically I consider upgrading to Movable Type or Serendipity or something, but since I don’t have a lot of time to go about completely rebuilding my database of posts and columns, I’ve not bothered.
Normally this is the point at which I say, “Until now,” and relate some kind of sob story about how Blogger deleted my entire webpage and then peed on me, but THAT’S NOT SO THIS TIME. Stop trying to predict The Hearn, man, because I am DIFFICULT TO PREDICT. And how.
Blogger was recently purchased by Google, which of course made the Blogger creators a pooppile of money, and Google immediately set about improving Blogger in their own way. Not long ago they released “Blogger Beta,” which basically was a nifty update. This week they released it as a production doodacky or whatever so I signed up like they were giving away free bacon.
I’ll give them this: it’s new and improved. Is it so new and improved that it’s worth making a big deal about being a new release and omigod everybody has to sign up lol wtf!?!??!?!!!1one? No. Here’s a short list of stuff they added:
- Labels. Meaning you can categorize your posts (you’ll see be low where I have tagged this one as “geek,” for example) and group them accordingly. Other sites have called it “filed under.” Kinda nifty.
- Private blogs, in which you can post a bunch of crap and not show it to anybody. Totally new wave.
- An improved Dashboard (it shows all the various blogs I can post to).
Well, actually I guess that’s about it. Here’s the list of things they say they added that I can’t find any evidence of whatsoever:
- Instant publishing: “Say goodbye to the dreaded ‘Publishing…’ spinner. Now, when you make a new post or change any of your settings, your blog is updated and changes go live immediately; you don’t have to remember to republish.” All I know is if I try to republish my entire blog, it takes so long that Blogger actually puts up a little tag saying “It was taking so long to publish your blog that we got tired of showing you the dreaded ‘Publishing…’ spinner. Click here if you’d like to keep watching it, you weirdo.”
- Template customizing with drag and drop, which is simply not there. Maybe I have to create a new blog, or select a new template? Sorry, I’m not going to wipe out my current template settings to try and find out. UPDATE: Apparently this only works with blogs that post to Blogspot, and because of some lame technical deficiency they probably won’t ever change it. Would have been nice if this had been mentioned somewhere in the “OMG SWITCH TO THE NEW BLOGGER!” pitch, although since the upgrade wasn’t exactly challenging I would have done it anyway.
Finally, I have a list of stuff that Blogger should have put in, but didn’t:
- A way for me to view the posts that don’t have any labels so I can label all my old posts. As it is now my post listing screen only shows me the most recent 30 or so, so I have to jump to a different page to label something, and once that’s done it dumps me back on the most recent 30 posts again and I have to figure out where I was. Let me filter out all the labelled posts so it doesn’t take me 300 years to do this, you bastards!
- A way to change it so it doesn’t say “Labels:” at the bottom of every post, but instead says “Filed under:” which is standard everywhere on the web at this point and sounds much less lame-O.
- A way to view my posts as they will actually appear on the page, with all the headers and footers and sidebars and things, so I know BEFORE publishing that the picture of Justin Timberlake from the “D*ck In A Box” video is too wide and is making my page look like it was designed by a muskrat. Blogger used to have this and it was, oddly, taken away in favor of the new preview format, which shows me nothing.
I’m just SAYIN’, Blogger dudes, before you go announcing “monster release lol omg” you might want to fix some of the existing flaws.
I enjoy me some fine pomp and circumstance, with the possible exception of the widely known Pomp and Circumstance March #1 by Edward Elgar, which over the course of my high school career I had to play roughly 483,384 times during graduation ceremonies. (I do like the fast part, which never gets played at graduations, that goes deet deet deedledeedledeedledeedle etc., you know what I mean I’m sure.) Thusly I set my Digital Video Recorder (it’s like Tivo, but not as well branded!) to record President Ford’s funeral proceedings yesterday, and sat down last night to watch them and enjoy me some egg drop soup and beef with broccoli.
Imagine my frustration: they’re showing the National Cathedral, and periodically showing the inside, which is filled to the brim with dignitaries, along with Cathedral officiants, the combined Cathedral choirs, and the Armed Forces Choir, which is singing a Copland anthem; meanwhile, Brian Williams refuses to Shut The F&$# Up. We’ve always been a bit of an NBC family; we usually watch the Today show, and on Thursday nights Sarah is most frequently found glued to the TV watching the usual prime-time fare. (I personally lost all interest in ER a few years ago when it stopped being a great show about an emergency room and became a left-wing political drama, but it does have its fun moments.) I assumed that NBC would do a nice job of delivering the funeral to me with a minimum of stupid discussion. I was wrong.
The various musicians inside played at least 20 minutes of music that I would really have enjoyed hearing, but unfortunately Williams, along with Tim Russert, Campbell Brown, and some other moron refused to Shut The F*#$ Up. They’re babbling about legacies and scandals and strength and blah blah I don’t care I want to hear the beautiful music please SHUT THE F@$# UP.
I nearly threw the remote at the TV. At least they did have the good sense not to inject silly little comments once the casket came out of the hearse, or else there’s a strong chance I would have driven to New York and kicked Brian Williams in his miniature gonads.
The moral, for any NBC executives who might be reading this, is: when televising a funeral, it is always important to Shut The F#$% Up. Thank you.
I hope everybody had a restful batch of holidays and didn’t kill any family members or anything. I myself killed no one, but my time to rest was sparer than a bowling scorecard with nothing but slashes on it.
Was that a stretch? It felt stretchy.
I did all the usual; 847 church services on Christmas Eve, though we found time to take Charles to the pageant at the cathedral, where he sang1 along with the hymns and the sermon. Christmas morning we set up Sarah’s dad’s video camera, which had been lent to us for this purpose, so that we might videotape Charles doing amusing Christmas things, like eating wrapping paper and ribbons.
Then we went to Sarah’s parents’, where we had eggs and no kegs, followed by a sojourn to my parents’ where I think I fell asleep once. (Christmas is stressful.) It was a super successful day; Charles, as is his wont, was BEYOND happy all day. Seriously, I’ve never seen a child so relentlessly mirthful. The only time he gets really angry about anything is when he’s tired, although if he needs to sleep and doesn’t want to, his wrath is fearful. That boy can SCREAM. Most of the time, the only thing we can do is just let him lay there and yell, and eventually he falls asleep, but it’s not exactly easy on a parent to hear your child making those noises. If he had the capacity for language yet he would definitely be yelling “SCREW YOU BASTARDS!” at the top of his lungs over and over.
He is his mother’s son.
The rest of the week I was on call and had to work, which was boring. Nobody was in the office. I got almost nothing done except for when I got paged during off hours and had to reset people’s passwords or some such frivolity. You’d think I would have used that time to maybe post something on here, but no, I was just about wiped out, and conserving my energies for the weekend. We were marrying off a couple friends, so I needed to make sure my liver was well-prepared for the weekend’s onslaught.
Also, I sang the Star Spangled Banner (TEH BANZORZ!) at a Philadelphia Phantoms game on Friday night; I have a wav file of it made on Todd’s cellphone that I hope to edit and upload later, maybe even make it into a ringtone for when Ambassadors to the UN call me and stuff. (They, and other governmental employees, frequently ask my opinion on foreign affairs. That opinion invariably is “Heck yes we should invade!” I am a highly valued member of President Bush’s team.)
The wedding was beautiful and under 30 minutes, which are basically the two things all weddings should be. (Our wedding was of course nearly an hour long, but then we had a full choir and we sang hymns and things and there was a trumpet player AND a violinist.) The reception was DJ’d by notable local celebrity Dana McDonald, who has a nice radio voice. His tones were DULCET, I tell you. Dulcet.
I drank so much I nearly split my pants. Luckily, I have large friends who are not averse to carrying me home, and there was a shuttle back to the hotel so I didn’t have to drive anywhere. AWESOME.
When I say “sing,” I really mean “yelled at the top of his lungs.” It was stellar.
This cold is WEIRD, man. You may remember a few weeks ago when I noted that I was sick; that cold followed its normal course of a day of scratchy throat pain, followed by a day of complete sinus blockage, followed by a couple days of drippiness and general malaise. With the help of Zicam (remind me to tell you a story later about how apparently my father-in-law’s friends discovered that zinc cures colds), I got over it quickly and sang the Messiah concert the following weekend with great ease.
On Sunday, the cold came back, but it appears to be working in reverse. The past few days I’ve been clogged up and drippy, and then this morning I awoke with agonizing throat pain, but my sinuses are clear. It’s a mixed-up, mashed-up, cuhRAZY world, kids.
More annoying is the fact that Charles seems to be going through the same symptoms; he spent the last few days sniffly, and I think the throat pain hit late last night because he awoke screaming and we had a hard time calming him down. (He’s a jolly fellow, but like any baby, once he gets revved up the crying is more for the sake of continuity than actual pain or anguish.) He seems fine this morning, which was good because I was in no mood to deal with his anguish, because apparently Sarah spent the night pouring Comet into my mouth.
Anyway, the interesting story involving my father-in-law’s friends: apparently he worked with a couple of guys who were interested in what might kill regular rhinovirus, aka the cause of the common head-cold. Back in the 70s, Their lab had a storage closet where they kept leftover chemicals, so these guys would score some rhinovirus germs (I’m assuming they knew a guy on 32nd street) pour various chemicals on ’em, and watch.
Finally they hit upon something; they had a dirty jar of some kind of acid, I forget exactly what it was because it was a big word, poured it on the germs, and noted that they died in screaming agony. This was a good sign. So they organized a serious study, and one of the guys decided it would be best if they cleaned up the chemical to get the dirty gunk out of the jar, so they ran it through a filter. They ran their test, and nothing happened. The acid wasn’t killing anything.
They went back and grabbed the filter they’d used, scraped off some of the mung, put it in the germs, and watched with great glee. Unfortunately, they weren’t sure what the mung WAS. They ran a bunch of tests on it and discovered that it was mostly zinc, so they organized a study involving human subjects.
It was a bit of a failure; the sick folks would take a chewy zinc thing, and nothing would happen. The only person that seemed to consistently get better was a little girl who insisted that the tablet tasted really bad and refused to swallow it. She just kept chewing on it. (Personally, if something tastes bad, I want to get it AWAY from my tongue, but miniature females are even more stubborn and immune to logic than the full-size versions.) The scientists realized that folks had to keep the zinc in their mouths so that it would somehow get breathed up into their sinuses and kill the germs in there.
In the end, the company decided that since zinc was widely available (most vitamins contain it, for example), it wasn’t something they could patent, so they didn’t bother to market it. Still, it’s interesting to note that Science knew about the magical healing powers of zinc almost 30 years before Zicam started making their chewables/tablets/sprays/etc.
I have acquired an organ.
Seriously, you have to click the image to see the full glory of it. Particularly the missing leg on the right. It sounds kinda sickly (I’ve been trying to create an mp3 of myself playing it, but I can’t find the drivers for my little recording doodacky), and just feels, uh, dusty.
I love it.
If I can figure out how to make my recording doodacky work, I’ll post a sound file of the joy later.
Man, weird weather up in this mix. The temps are going to hit 60 today, and we’ve had this disturbing fog hovering over us, now in its third day. I can’t say I’m thrilled about it, since I keep having to drive all over creation. It’s like God farted, dude, and it’s just LINGERING.
We had our office holiday party the other day; there was much merriment. I baked a shoo-fly pie and some cinnamon rolls and brought them in. I had baked so many cinnamon rolls (in an effort to get rid of frozen bread dough) that I left two trays for the party and brought two trays up for “UNIX Team holdbacks,” as it were, of which my teammates ate maybe 5 rolls. Since there are 12 rolls in a tray, this mean I ate, by myself, over the course of 2 workdays, 19 cinnamon rolls. And yet I wonder why I don’t fit into any of my winter pants.
Our well-traveled high school pal Stefan is in town for a few weeks, over from South Korea, where he’s been living for a few years, teaching English to small children. This may seem rather innocuous information, but if you knew Stefan, you’d be as terrified as I am. Rest assured: these children will be well versed in good ol’ American profanity. We met him for dinner last night at a nice Mexican place in North Wilmington, where I had fajitas with shrimp (pronunciation: skrmzpz) in ’em. He gave me a small bottle of Korean liquor, which he described as sort of being like vodka. Apparently over there they do shots of it until they suddenly find they are speaking Mongolian.
For those of you with Sephardic or Ashkenazic ancestry: Happy Chaka Khan! Or however it’s spelt. My grasp of the English language is more tenuous than you might assume.
On Sunday, I was scheduled to sing a Messiah concert at my parents’ church, splitting the bass solos with another nice fellow named Tom. And then Tom got sick. So I sang most of his stuff, with the entire men’s sections singing “The Trumpet Shall Sound” because it’s flat-out too high for me to get all the way through without one of my testicles exploding.
So there. Bet you didn’t know that.
Now that that’s done, I’m basically done with my various extra-curricular musical endeavours for the year. I still have church services to do, but no more concerts. My wife is pleased by this, although since her class is done her life is a lot less stressful, particularly when it comes to my absences.
Sarah’s about 4 classes away from completing her master’s degree, which is pretty amazing to me. Her GPA right now is a solid 4.0, which is flat-out ridiculous. My GPA in college was Very Bad, mostly because, for me, going to college at 18 was like giving an eleven-year-old the keys to a motorcycle. The first year was a waste of time, the second year was life-threateningly unhealthy on a dozen levels, and the remaining three years were just numb. I ended up with a degree in a subject I’m not terribly fond of but am good at and which pays well, and now I have 35-40 years of life-sucking grind to look forward to.
How thrilling.
On the other hand, since Sarah will soon be done her degree (and has no interest in immediately continuing on into a doctorate, although that would be kinda cool), the free education that comes with her job will be unused unless one of us goes back to school, so I’ve been considering the possibility of doing so. Now, if I’m smart, I’ll go back and get a degree in computer engineering. This degree has a great deal of upside: I’d be more marketable, and probably be eligible for a payraise at work. The problems are that I have zero interest in actually studying computer engineering, and my GPA in college was so detestable that getting into the program would require convincing the-powers-that-be that I’m a worthy risk, despite my history. Begging professors to let me into a program that I’m uninterested in doesn’t seem like a winner to me.
The other option is to go back and get a music degree, possibly one in conducting. This has almost no upside; it has no bearing on my 9-5 career, and basically makes me eligible to make a few extra grand a year as a church choir director (and not even one in the Episcopal church, where I’d be expected to be able to play the organ, which I cannot, at the moment, do). Also, I run into an even worse problem getting accepted into the degree because I don’t actually have a music degree at all, let alone one with a nice tidy GPA.
On the other hand, if I were accepted (which isn’t a long shot as the previous paragraph would make it seem, if I can basically do some sucking up and get every musician I know to intervene on my behalf), I could get a master’s degree in music for free, and I’m rather interested in conducting as an avocation. Getting a music degree to help advance one’s hobbies would be a poor idea if I had to pay for it, but free? Not taking advantage of it is like giving away money. Plus, theoretically if I got the degree and my GPA was pimp, I could then contact the computer engineering department and say, “Hey look, I learned how to study!” and get the master’s in that later.
Just mulling this over. Your thoughts?
Picture day!
Also the 65th anniversary of the infamous attack on Pearl Harbor. Japan isn’t the military power it once was, but still, let’s not be forgetting the other threats that face us:
Enough serious stuff! Pete likes to air out what’s left of his junk occasionally:
Guess whose lips these are!
Look at my pole!
Guess whose junk this is!
Took Charles to the doctor this morning for a checkup. I always enjoy those, when I have occasion to go, as it’s fun to find out what records he may be breaking as far as weight and height. As of this morning he weighs 21 pounds, 13 ounces, which is very large, and is 30.75 inches long, which is just ridiculous. That’s the height of a 14-month-old. He also, for a brief moment, held his own bottle while sucking on it.
Unfortunately, the great mirth was broken up by the fact that he had to get shots. The nurses came in (they work in teams, one on each leg, to make things go quickly, since he needed four shots today) and started getting set up while I distracted him. Then they started wiping his legs with alcohol, and he got a look on his face that seemed to say, “Hey, wait a minute…deja vu.” Then I held his arms so he wouldn’t flail around and impale a finger in a needle, and I swear he realized what was about to happen, and looked up at me as if to say, “Et tu, jerk?”
The nurses jabbed away, which took all of 15 seconds, during which he screamed, and then once he’d been suitably band-aided up, I picked him up to console him, and he looked at the nurses and giggled. What a faker. I think he was more angry I held his arms down so he couldn’t lift his head up and watch the needles go in.
The doctor’s name (our usual guy was caught in traffic because some idiot clipped a school bus and flipped his Explorer on 95), incidentally, was Hearn. Charles seemed to be fond of her, but then, he’s a lady’s man. Daddy is jealous.
Picture this scene: you’ve just purchased a donut and a cup of coffee. You just hit the ATM, so you hand the clerk a twenty, pick up your joe and take a sip. The clerk presses the magic buttons on her register, and the till pops open; she puts your twenty in there and pulls out a ten, a five, three ones, a quarter, and a dime, totaling $18.35. You hold out your hand, and she puts the bills in it and sits the coins on top. You try to put the coins and cash in your pocket, but because she put the coins ATOP the cash, the quarter falls off and rolls under the table of a group of rowdy teenagers who laugh at you and say things like “Loser!” and “Vagrant!”
All of this could have been avoided. And not just by avoiding Dunkin’ Donuts, because that would be ridiculous; as we can all agree, donuts are delicious, and a hot cuppa ain’t bad neither. No, it could have been avoided if the clerk had simply put the coins in your hand FIRST, and then place the bills on top. The coins, being smaller, are easier to grasp with your palm flesh while you fold the bills up into your pocket. But no clerk does this. Seriously. NONE. EVER.
Why is this? I don’t know. I know when I worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, I did the same damn thing. Nobody told me to; it just seemed natural. It was as if God had designed my brain to do a thing that trebled the likelihood that the customer would be taunted by delinquents. Why, God, WHY?
Here is what I propose: let’s have an International Give Me The Coins First Please Day. We’ll print up shirts and bumper stickers! It’ll be great! And we’ll make the world a much better place for people who have a pathological fear of teenagers.
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