turns out they're not just at the tram stops

 administrivia, ficlets, journal  4 Responses »
Oct 052009
 

First up, a brief announcement for the livejournal crowd: I've changed the settings in the crossposter, so now you should be able to leave a comment on the livejournal site, should you so desire. Previously I had it set so you could only comment on my website, mostly because that made my life a touch easier, having all the comments, and therefore the entire conversation, in the one spot. But it occurs to me impermanence and fragmented conversations are the foundations of the internet, and who am I to argue with that?

(Wasn't really all that brief, was it?)

And for those of you thinking the loonies were only out on the streets, think again. There's one in my apartment block.

This morning, after a wacky and hilarious misplacing of my keys, I decided to drive to work rather than run for (and still miss) the tram. So I headed for the back of the apartment block, where the poor filthy beast otherwise known as my car was parked, when all of a sudden —

"GOOD MORNING!"

It is a bright and cheery greeting, but it is also a very loud one. I manage not to stumble in surprise, but it's a close thing.

One of my neighbours is hanging over the balcony, earbuds in his ears, with this look on his face like he hasn't slept in days and he's never appreciated the beauty of the sun before now. His hair is unkempt, his eyes are wide, his grin is brighter than the breaking day.

"DID YOU SEE THE BALLOONS?"

I've reached the car by now, but I pause, because I'm polite like that. Although I pause with the car door open, because I'm late, after all.

"No," I say — mostly because I've not seen any balloons lately (I've been far too busy getting ready for work, which is not a task that normally requires my eyes to be open) and partly because from his manner "the balloons" apparently encompasses something remarkable and I've definitely not seen anything of that nature today.

Exuberant as a puppy who's just spotted his favourite human, he points and cries, "LOOK! THERE!"

There are a couple of hot air balloons hanging low in the sky.

As indeed there are… pretty much every morning.

Somehow I suspect he's never been up before 7am before.

 Posted by at 4:00 pm

i promise to check more often in future

 administrivia, journal  Comments Off
May 222009
 

I just discovered a few questions had been sitting in my FAQ queue for who knows how long. Perhaps foolishly, I expected my FAQ plugin to send me an alert, either by email or through the dashboard, when it needed my attention. So if you've been checking the FAQ, wondering why I was ignoring you, my apologies. It was not deliberate; I'm simply a touch inattentive and forgetful at the best of times. And clearly I put far too much trust in "lite"1 software programs.

By way of apology, I offer up a link to goodies:

Katerina Down Photography

My cousin has been learning everything she can about photography in recent years, and has just set up a site to sell some of her prints. My favourite of those she's offering for sale (at least so far) is Playtimes Past.

  1. Incidentally, am I the only one driven to grinding my teeth by this word? [↩]
 Posted by at 6:54 pm  Tagged with:

wrangling code

 administrivia  4 Responses »
Feb 092009
 

Apologies for the silence. I swear, every time I think I'll take a day off from blogging, life intervenes and makes it impossible to blog for the next five days. Inertia, it doesn't just apply to trains.

To cut the onerous story short: my webhost shut my site down, due to high server load. This didn't actually bother me so much: it was spelled out clearly in the terms of service, and consideration of server load is the price I pay for shared web hosting. What did bother me was my webhost's neglecting to inform me they'd shut the site down and, when they restored access to it, telling me I could not install any plugins on my WordPress install, ever again, on pain of further shutdowns or termination of my account.

So I've spent today moving to a new webhost, which is a tedious and time-consuming affair. I took the opportunity to give the site a spring-clean, although all you all out in the big wide web shouldn't notice too many differences.

» I've scrapped the old News page, and created a News category. This means I don't have to remember to update two sections of the site, and as a !bonus it means the news feed is now much more likely to be more chatty than previously. If you were previously subscribed to the news-only feed, and don't want to trawl through the blog's inanities, fear not: the News Feed is what you want.

» I have (finally!) gotten around to rescuing all the blog posts that were lost in the upgrade what made me crash my database. Because there was a change in permalink structure and blog structure after that upgrade, the internal links in any post labelled as pre-crash are not to be trusted. I will one day look into fixing them, but it will be in fits and spurts.

If you're reading this post, either directly at the site or through a reader, then congratulations! You've find the brand new webhost and all silences should now be my fault, not that of the DNS propagation.

More soon, when I'm less sick of the web.

 Posted by at 7:24 pm

and we're back

 administrivia, journal  9 Responses »
Oct 282008
 

If you were thinking I'd been awfully quiet over the past couple of days, that would be because my webhost was experiencing technical difficulties, otherwise known as HOLY CRAP WE DESTROYED THE INTERNET. (Or at least the bit where your website lives. Give us a sec…)

They did not use those exact words, but I think we can all agree they probably should have.

Of course I had lots of brilliant ideas for blog posts while I couldn't blog them, and now I have forgotten them all. This does seem a tragedy. Since the webhost had to do some serious restoring from backup, it is also possible some parts of the website have been borked. Please to be letting me know if you find any.

I definitely remembering finding the Stuck In Customs blog via StumbleUpon,1 and have been oohing over the pretty pictures ever since. Technically I stumbled upon the Iceland tag, which immediately started me thinking about whether I should move to Iceland, but the whole thing is brilliant.

  1. if you're curious, you can gander through scribblefly's stumbleupon for more whimsy that took my fancy [↩]

i can has internet?

 administrivia, journal  Comments Off
Aug 012008
 

The internet woes continue, but hopefully not for much longer. There has been the purchasing of a wireless broadband package, and the installation of a new local wireless network (a process I started, but which my brother ended after shaking his head, smiling, and saying, "Nice start, Deb, you've got the basics of networking mastered, now move aside and let me fix this for you…" and then he seemed to sigh and mutter and sneeze and, as quickly as that, the network did something miraculous: it started, you know, working. Properly and all.)

In the meantime, I've discovered the dubious joys of Twitter. For those of you who are interested, you can follow my currently-sparse Twitter stream at scribblefly. For those of you who aren't interested, move along, there is nothing to see in this paragraph.

 Posted by at 8:58 pm

i think it's called murphy's law?

 administrivia, journal, shadow queen, writing life  1 Response »
Jul 192008
 

I'm having a bit of a troubled run at the moment, with malware or possibly worse invading the computers and frazzling my concentration, not to mention making internet access patchy at best.

I think I have the problem stamped out on the laptop at least (fingers crossed), which means I've been able to resume progress on the copyedit, although knowing there's malicious code lurking unhunted and unpunished on the desktop is gnawing at me.

If I'm quiet in the next couple of days, it's because I'm copyediting and stalking down binary bugs. Back soon. (If I'm not, it's because I've fallen before the onslaught. Run. Save yourselves.)

 Posted by at 10:03 pm

little things i should have said and done

 administrivia, journal  Comments Off
May 282008
 

After much dragging of my heels, and much cursing at my substandard internet connection, I have uploaded some of my photos from the Bhutan trip.

You can find them over on the new (and imaginatively named) Gallery page. They're not captioned yet, because, well, I haven't quite gotten around to that.

I'm testing out a new plugin for displaying these, so if you find any bugs or slowness or nefarious problems, please do let me know.

somewhere in the darkness, the gambler, he broke even…

 administrivia, journal  5 Responses »
Oct 162007
 

8O
In an attempt to avoid the multiple procrastination born of multi-tasking, I followed Leigh's advice and focussed on one task to the exclusion of all others.

A touch over 18 hours of coding later, 1 I have a new theme for the website.

I'd forgotten how much work goes into making a new theme. This is probably why I was putting it off. Still, it's pretty and much happy-making to have that task knocked on the head. Now all I have to do is look into importing the old posts and fixing up the splash page, and it will be done, done, done.

(Until I decide to do it all over again.)

In the meantime, if you find any bugs or pages not loading, please do let me know. Themes are tricky beasts, and I'm sure I've forgotten something.

  1. 6 hours last night, 12 hours straight today. I know. I'm insane. [↩]
 Posted by at 6:17 pm
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