Things might look a bit weird today as I'm switching domain hosts. Hopefully I'll be done with all this geeky bollocks soon!
Hold The Line
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Category Archives: Links, News, Assorted Drivel
The Plastic Menace
Cheers to my colleague Simon for passing on this BBC News article: Washing up bowls 'a health hazard'
"Many commonly used kitchen implements are a threat to health and should be thrown away, scientists have warned.
Washing up bowls and re-usable dish clothes are thought to be a particularly good breeding ground for bugs."
The article is from December 2000. If I'd seen it at the time it may have killed my longing to move to the UK, especially with this quote from Professor Hugh Pennington of the University of Aberdeen, one of Britain's leading infection experts:
"I would like to get rid of washing-up bowls altogether. They are an absolute menace."
In other news, blogging veteran Matt Haughey wrote an interesting post last week about blog comments and how he feels they've become a bit shit over the years:
"I have a feeling that if you've only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+% of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It's not an intimate conversation, it's just another content management feature available to you on the web.This has a de-humanizing effect that I'm seeing play out more and more often in the weirdest places. People will post about their idle curiosities on their personal blog ("Why does x happen when I do y?") and instead of seeing friendly answers I would expect many years ago, I'll often see someone early on read into the question and assume all sorts of accusations ("well, maybe it's because you are a, b, and c, and everyone knows it!") and watch most followup comments start from there and go into darker directions."
Well, you do see more moronic semi-literate bawbags popping up these days, but it seems to be mostly on really mega personal blogs of Dooceian proportions. I have more issues with shameless pimpsters that skim one entry and write, Great Post, Shauna! This reminds me of my stupid diet pills / miracle face cream/ revolutionary health website which is 10,000 times more infuriating than the olden days of automated comment spam, because at least that was done by a machine!
At least with the blogs I stalk… there is plenty o' cosy chit chat goodness to be found. And here – 105 comments debating the merits of washing dishes in a plastic bowl? That's the sort of thing that makes you want to hump the internet with ecstasy.
False Arm
ARRGHHHH! This weekend, for sure.
Three Oh
Thirty rhymes with dirty, flirty and shirty and that's my official age now. Woohoo!
Last night we reluctantly boarded the flight back to Edinburgh at 7.40PM New York time, which happened to be 10.40AM on November 1st back in beloved Australia — spookily, the precise time I disembarked The Mothership back in 1977.
If I had enough energy I'd write a proper post prattling on about this magnificient milestone, and how everyone keeps reassuring me that their thirties have been their dazzling prime. Instead I've been frowning at this wee tube of anti-aging creme that the kind folks at Liz Earle Skincare chucked in for free with my latest order.
I also looked back at each of my birthday blog entries for the past seven years and felt all warm and schmoogly remembering all you lovely Commenters Throughout The Ages. And I reckon I'm in a much better frame of mind than when I started writing here aged 22.5. The blog is not so much a thinly disguised distress call now. I think we're all going to be juuuuust fine!
You Give Lard A Bad Name
According to some new statistics, Scotland is now the second fattest nation in the world behind the USA.
All I can say to our friends across the pond is… watch out. We have the deep-fried pizzas and Mars Bars and we're not afraid to use them. The coveted Number One spot shall be ours some day.
In other news, after six weeks of swearing and tinkering I've managed to convert this stinking blog to the MT4 templates. And for all that effort all I give you is… exactly the same bloody template you've been staring at since 2002. At least now there's no tables!
There are bugs here and there that I need to iron out but THE COMMENTS ARE WORKING NOW hurrah hurrah hurrah. Proper entry soon but for now I'm away to my bed.
The Stinky Stench of Defeat
I have been using Movable Type since 2001. My good friend Daniel installed it on my server waaay back in the beta beginning when there was Ben and Mena in their living room and a handful of other testers. And I have remained faithful and devoted ever since, through thick and thin and Trackback spam.
But now with MT4 I just want to curl up and howl and wave the white flag. My host upgraded me a few weeks ago and everything seemed fine; I was loving the sexy new interface. Now I've got all these Server 500 errors with the comments and I have no idea why. It was working fine after the upgrade and then suddenly it wasn't.
(On that topic – if you leave a comment, you'll get the Error page, but your comment will be received by the database. It's just not publishing it or sending me the notification email. I can manually publish your comments later on though, so by all means, please say hello!)
I've been looking at new default templates and after years of bumbling and bluffing my way through the Land of MT I think I've finally reached the limit of my technical abilities. I just cannot wrap my head around these new templates; all the includes and widgets and nested whatnots. I thought I could swap my blog to the default templates and just tweak it to look like my current template – chuck in a banner image, throw in my sidebar info, fiddle with the fonts and colours. But I just cannae figure it out at all.
I created a dummy blog and imported my archives and then I got stuck. Everything seems so much more complicated now with a bazillion more files to edit. Where is the default stylesheet hiding? Which file do I need for the sidebar? How do I get this category pagination thing to work? And why have my old entries lost their SmartyPants formatting, curly quotes, etc?
I've looked online for some sort of template guidance to no avail – I remember when MT3 came out some lovely person did a great guide to disecting all the new templates for idiots. I'm crossing my fingers that an equally kind and brainy soul feels compelled to do this for MT4. Or… maybe everyone else has found the transition a walk in the park and the simple diagnosis is: I'M A MORON.
For now my options are stay stuck with broken comments or whack up the boring default templates without any of my customisations, unless I miraculously become clever and/or blessed with ten gallons of spare time overnight. I couldn't be arsed switching to WordPress; it took me six years to feign a basic level of competence with MT. I just want to write stupid entries and chitty chat with the commenters and not think about the geeky stuff. Blah.
Screwed
Hello folks. My lovely webhosts upgraded me to Movable Type v4 last week and I've only just noticed that everything is cactus now. Something is up with the comment templates and I have no idea how to fix it. And I was feeling pouty because noone was commenting, but turns out comments have been received, just not published. ARRRGH. Help. Bollocks. I'll try and sort it today.
Reboot
This blog has been a stinking pit of neglect this year and my humble apologies to anyone still out there. I was completely burn out by other projects but now I'm almost recharged and determined to flex the typing fingers again. Thanks for sticking around, sticky people.
In other news, I bagged my first munro last week, hurrah!
Slackarse Rides Again
Once again I seem to have half a dozen half-finished entries that are all rubbish. At least I have a good excuse today – I'm dog sitting! It was a dog sitting emergency. They belong to the parents of a friend of Gareth's and they arrived at 6AM this morning. I don't even know their names! They just sit on the couch shivering and staring at me with saucer eyes. They didn't even try to steal my lunch. Strange hounds. But cute.
UPDATE: Turns out the wee dugs are called Toby and Tibby. They're brother and sister and a crusty twelve years old. As the day wore on they got a lot more animated and friendly, even after we dragged them up a hill for a two-hour walk in the pouring bloody rain. They've gone home now but have their memory lingers thanks to the 10,000,000 white hairs now coating every surface of our flat and car.
Lucky For Some
This blog turns the ripe old age of SEVEN today! Hurrah! It's crazy thinking of all the things that have happened over the last seven years and how this old girl kept rattling on throughout, sporadic and oft neglected. And it's now been five years since the last redesign. Here's a random list of Seven Things That Are In My Life Now That Weren't There Seven Years Ago.
- Green & Blacks
- Test Match Special
- MotoGP
- Mogwai
- Regular exercise
- Doctor G
- "Doctor" Gillian McKeith (and how I miss those innocent times)
How's about you?