I’ve spent a whole week a-taking of my dolce far niente. Be proud of me—I accomplished nothing at all beyond practicing doing what I felt like. I lived on ice cream for two days, and watched all of Freaks & Geeks and Blue Planet. Came down to Kelby & Lonan’s in Scottsville last night following Nessa and Rona’s smash hit at the Lovettsville Elementary talent show (with two friends, they dressed as the cutest pirates you’ve ever seen and sang Bully in the Alley).
Dinner tonight includes 3 pies (the new piecrust technique coming in handy again), and mashed potatoes with extra skin ’cause we made ’em from the cored-out casings of spud gun ammo. Most people (3 kids, 10 adults, 3 dogs) are currently engaged in an all-out humans vs. zombies battle. Nessa just yelled “Mom, Mom! I need the chainsaw!!” Alas, Tara has bitten me on the ankle, so I oughta go get some cherry pie before all I want to eat is brains…
Author: Simone
404’d!
What kind of oddness is this?? How I can post to our blog, when I can’t even see it?
Wackier yet: I can edit posts from the dashboard, but I can’t view them.
grumblecakes.
Geek Badges
These are the virtual merit badges I have earned during my hard-fought transition from “I’m a writer with some tech skills” to “Don’t touch my code!”
Scoffs at the WYSIWYG: Here’s where I crossed the Rubicon. We had a new content management system on our website. Given the choice between a buggy and annoying WYSIWYG interface and a “just put your HTML here” option, I chose the code interface.
Invokes Linus Torvalds: Classical radio announcers get accent-affected-expressive when saying Italian names like “Cecilia Bartolli”. There’s r-rolling and i-lengthening and saying “ch” instead of “ss”, all carefully con brio. This is a peeve, because no-one gets all concerned about pronouncing “Linus Torvalds” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger” in their native idioms. (It’s a badge because the first non-Anglo/non-Italian famous person who came to mind was Linus Torvalds.)
“Man, SourceForge is really slow today”: That’s it, really. Just the utterance.
The Great Punctuation Shift: I’m a grammar/usage/punctuation stickler. Commas and periods go inside quotation marks[1] (unless the quotation is followed with a parenthetical expression). Semicolons and colons go outside quotation marks. You’ll note that I no longer apply the comma/period rule. True, we’re in informal-writing-land, but at one time my fingers would have strangled me before willingly typing a comma outside a quotation mark.
Hat Trick—Geek, Nerd, Wonk: Another utterance badge, this one for exclaiming aloud, “Hey, you can get a Creative Commons license in Magyar!” to which Ehren replied, after a pause, “Okay: that wasn’t English.” (It was Will who pointed out that it was a three-in-one winner.)
Crafts badge—Flash Drive Earrings: Do I need to explain this?
Giggles While Scripting: While cleaning my desk I came across printouts of the last batch of navigation scripts I wrote in FileMaker, and I laughed, in an “Oh goody!” kind of way. (That was today.)
Those are the only ones I remember, which means they might be the only ones I have properly earned.
[1] Of course, strictly (and pedantically) speaking, I haven’t been using actual quotation marks (“ ”). I’ve been using dumb (or “ambidextrous”) quotation marks, because I’m lazy. But I’m also twitchy enough that I have half a mind to go back through the blog and fix all the punctuation. I guess it’s time to go home…
Super-duper
According to CNN, California and as many as 15 othjer [sic] states may soon be joining the seven states who already hold their primaries on February 5. This apparently gives CNN license to dub February 5, 2008 “Super-duper Tuesday.” WTF?! What is the average age of CNN.com’s readership? 6?
This led me to look up actual viewership/readership demographics. Very interesting stuff. Check it out.
No, we love Macromedia!
Rick commented yesterday that our blog name makes it sound like we hate Macromedia. Far from it. We are fans. Whee, Authorware. It’s not their fault that people use Flash badly. Marketing Sherpa[1] says that 80% of consumers hate Flash intros.
[1] Can’t link to the MarketingSherpa article without registering.
You too can be posterized! Or a cartoon! Or, um, all blurry!!
The folks at Social Edge are having a bit too much fun with graphic processing filters. (I like the idea but I think they’ve taken it slightly overboard…)
Troops
Can’t believe you haven’t seen Troops! It’s coming up on its 10th anniversary. Maybe they’ll show it at the Uptown, and people will camp out[1]. (It’s a 30MB file, way too big to email, sorry.)
[1] I am not mocking the camping people. I was a proud camping person. A community leader among the camping people, in fact. Long may they camp. (Those whose faith was strong enough to survive the Phantom Menace, anyway.)
Pi Day!!
It’s 3/14, which is Albert Einstein’s birthday…which means I get to use my fabulous Christmas gift from the E-K’s (Haig, Jill, Aislinn, and Nora). Unfortunately I don’t have an Albert Einstein action figure, or I could improve on this genius idea.
What I Learned Today
Answer: Dentate Gyrus
According to a CNN article, every one of us has a dentate gyrus within our hippocampi and it is related to our ability to remember things. The article describes a new study that shows that when mice work out they build new brain cells in their dentate gyri thereby combating the loss of memory associated with getting older.
Peeve: Jewel cases and non-standardization
I got a bunch of CDs for Christmas. Many of them came packaged as pairs—two CDs in one jewel case. I keep breaking fingernails and worrying about shattering (or at least putting dings in) my Telemann quartets because I cannot figure out how to get CD#2 out of the case.
There’s no standardization. They all open differently. I’m going to need a cheat sheet, or maybe I’ll put clues on post-it notes (sort of like the stickers I put on the copier doors to show which order to open them in when clearing a paper jam). It’s idiotic.