Even our dull corporate buildings look almost pretty this time of year. The crabapples and redbuds are in bloom all along the parkways, and the air smells sweet (even for this area, which often smells faintly of jet fuel owing to our location right under the approach/takeoff path for O’Hare. The whole area is greening up, and the landscape companies are out in force. You can tell that spring has arrived when the yard waste bags burst into bloom in all their brown-paper glory along the curbs on Garbage Day. I have next week off – I threw the week…
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There’s smoke in the air; it looks almost white-ish; Papal expectations, everybody’s watching for you The populi in St Peter’s Square, they all seem to know you The cardinals act like you’re all infallible now Bennie the Sixteenth, the new Pope in Rome Everybody venerates you, ma illegitimi non carborundum You look in the cameras; the choir begins to sing Hopeful Roman antics, and you’re the guy in charge But after awhile, you’re fidgetin’ in your cassock It’s not the damn tailor’s fault you’re a medium-large Bennie the Sixteenth, the new Pope in Rome They all venerate you, ma illegitimi…
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David, the sneaky sneakster, upgraded the beta blog to MT3.16, and I'm at the "tweaking templates to look right with the new stylesheet" stage. Still some archive templates to be fixed so they display the new banner image and colors. I will be going through all the templates looking for inconsistencies that may be lurking there from my old installation, but I'm pleased that the latest version is a new commitment to quality (and bugfixes). Via About Six Apart – Mena's Corner UPDATE: as previously stated, I've got some template tweaks to do. And the cool crap is getting cut…
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Niall Kennedy’s Weblog: Movable Type 3.16 coming Monday Okay, not as bad as I first thought. I think we continue getting my MT3.15 installation working properly before we worry about MT3.16. That is all. As you were.
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Your Linguistic Profile: 70% General American English 15% Yankee 10% Upper Midwestern 5% Dixie 0% Midwestern What Kind of American English Do You Speak? Kind of reminds me of some of the stuff in How To Talk American except… not as funny as in that book. I’m kind of intrigued by the fact that I speak 10% Upper Midwestern – that’s probably due to the fact that I now say “soda” instead of “pop” as I once did. Via AKMA
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Chicago Tribune | Iraq bomb takes `angel’ of mercy There was also an NPR story on Marla – she was interviewed a few years ago and you can hear her talk about her work. She was a relative unknown, but I feel her loss – I admire people who can really put their money where their mouth is, and she ran her charity on her own meagre savings until she managed to bully and embarass our government and military to take notice, step up, and “do the right thing.” She basically got Congress to fund aid and medical care for…
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It’s a process. David has installed MT3.15 and with his help I’ve got a beta site working, more or less. I haven’t decided if I’ll go to a radical style re-design or not. He also installed BookqueueToo and that seems to be working, finally. The stumbling block with that was not only did I need to request a new web services subscription ID from Amazon, I also had to go in and change the Amazon associates ID, both of which are configured via different screens. And cleverly, the BookQueueToo developer had substituted his own associates ID as the default. But…
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Stole this idea from the Observer Blog, because I got it wrong. The book I was thinking of starts out “Space is big. Really big.” This is one of the other ones. Which one? The story so far: In the beginning the Universe was created. This had made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move. I read via ***Dave a review of the new “h2g2” movie that… makes it sound like it just might suck, and that all the good jokes and lines are gone. If so, I think I’m going to be…
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SciFi Wire announces its slate of original SF/Fantasy/Alternate Reality series. “Original” is such a relative term, isn’t it? An untitled project executive-produced by Academy Award-winning actor/producer Michael Douglas, based on the work of the late author Shirley Jackson (The Haunting of Hill House). Storylines and themes from Jackson’s catalog of supernatural short stories will be woven into her real life experiences transitioning from urban mom to small-town matriarch. Michael Douglas isn’t exactly known for genre movies or shows. A production credit for Starman (movie, series) doesn’t exactly establish his SF cred. Why this? Why now? Imagine if “Eerie, Indiana” or…
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And congratulations also to Susanna Clarke, whose excellent book on English practical magic has won the American Booksellers Association Book Sense award. Via Sci Fi Wire — The News Service of the Sci Fi Channel