Monthly Archives: January 2009

They Shoot Toilets, Don’t They?

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If you live in Centerville, Utah, why yes. Yes, they do:

exploded toilet

Police say a man’s gun fell out of its holster while he pulled up his pants after using the bathroom at a Carl’s Jr. restaurant Tuesday. The gun fired when it hit the floor and shattered the commode.

Sure, hilarious. Man takes dump, holster in dropped trou has a fail, gun shoots crapper, and then you have water and poo and broken porcelain throne all over the floor.

This photo, by the way, is a great perspective shot, and I hope the photographer washed his hands and clothes after he got down on that floor to get it.

Meanwhile, gun sales all over the country are way, way up. So we can expect more dumbasses shooting themselves in the leg or shooting innocent bathroom fixtures because they haven’t quite figured out how to properly pack heat.

Via Man Shoots Toilet – Yahoo! News Photos

My Peekchures, Let Me Show You Them

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The image in the header is randomly displayed from my Flickr sets. Go ahead, refresh! Hey, it’s from our trip to Hawaii! No, it’s Rocky Mountain National Park! Wait, now it’s family members! Yay! Click on any page, gawaaaan. I just hope there aren’t too many clinkers in there that turn out to be resized and don’t fit the frame.

No Photoshoppery needed, I just selected the best of my full size, uncropped images with a special tag, modified a Flickr “photo badge,” and the images are then re-sized to fit the background frame with CSS. Thanks, Theme Hack and Frontender, for the point in the right direction! This will help motivate me to get my backlog uploaded to Flickr.

On The Verge

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Doyce, whose blog posts I read most often at one remove via the miracle of quotes and feeds, starts it off:

I’m actively communicating online all day, every day, but my main blog languishes. Why is that?

Simplicity. Twitter tweets, facebook updates, Flickr photo posting, and sharing news articles with commentary… all of those things are easier and faster BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE than posting via Movable Type.

Via What it boils down to is this… – doycetesterman

And ***Dave carries it forward:

Now, I don’t do Facebook, and have never had a justification (see below) for using Twitter. But my own blogging has suffered, net, because of my love affair with Google Reader, and the “Share” and “Share with Note” functionality in same. Where, once, if I wanted to post about something cool I’m reading, I had to be at my machine, open up a blog client, write something out, do some cut-and-paste excerpting and copy over the link … now I just click on a button to Share with other GReader users — or on another one and write out a quick note.

It’s that easy. That quick, painless, seductively easy. And the result is the flood of stuff that appears in the sidebar of this blog each day under “Unblogged Bits.”

Yes, it’s that easy to use a quick and dirty method to share a link, or comment briefly about some transient insight. But it’s not sitting down, thinking, and putting words out there for all to read. It’s not blogging. It’s not writing. It’s not taking the time and effort to craft something worth doing, whether it’s for one’s own enjoyment or the (possibly imaginary) edification of others. And sure, it may be because it’s incredibly easy to just jot something quickly on Twitter, or click a Google Reader “share” link on a mobile device. It’s convenient, it’s fast, and it works.

But I, too have been blogging a lot less in the last year or so – even with all the election stuff. Oh, sure, I was copying and pasting quotes and links and posting them in the blog, but that’s not what I consider to be real, deep, personal blogging. This blog is supposed to be my Pensieve, and I just have not been pulling whispy memories out of my head with an alder wand and storing them away where they’re safe; they’ve been left to fade away into nothing. Stuff happens in my not-terribly-interesting life; funny things are said, interesting insights are had, books are read and music is heard. But you’d never know it from the never-ending cascade of regurgitated newsblather I’ve been in the habit of posting lately.

The problem is time, or specifically the lack of it, and constraints on my use of it.

The speed of posting/sharing GReader items is important, but the ease and portability of that sharing is just as important. The fact is, my life has, for reasons I’m not altogether pleased about, gotten a lot busier in the last year. As a result, I don’t do much posting from the office, and evenings are often a choice between a dozen different urgent activities, only one of which is blogging. ***Dave, ibid

Like ***Dave, I can blog on the fly, but my tool of choice is the iPhone which is never far from my hand. Using the iPhone, I can even blog with my CMS of choice, WordPress, with pictures either emailed to Flickr and bounced to the blog via an email link from there, or direct to the blog itself using one of several plugins. But the limitations of the interface are that you must tap letters, numbers and symbols out with one or two fingers or thumbs, so you can never type as quickly as you could on a full-size keyboard. Certainly, much faster than someone on a cell phone could text, but not as fast as I’m typing now. And it’s not currently possible to copy text to quote, or a url to cite in a blog post, although within some applications there are work-arounds. It’s great for posting quick photos, though. And I could set up an email-to-blog interface if I really wanted, but it would be a security problem for the main blog.

I’ve chosen to do that instead with a Blogger blog that I consider an extension called ginny’s links galore. I send links there from within Google Reader, but it’s not possible to edit them first; the email link sends the whole post. I’d have to fire up Blogger on a full-size desktop or laptop computer to get anything useful done as to editing there. It’s just a stopgap.

The real problem, as stated, is time. There’s not enough of it after work, and I don’t even have kids or hobbies. When I get home, I tend to veg out for a while before dinner, whether David cooks or I do. And then there’s TV. Might play a few hands of solitaire, catch up on Reader either on a full-bore computer or the ubiquitous iPhone, and then bed.

During work? Not bloody likely. A couple of years ago, I used to update constantly through the day – I had work tasks that left me with a lot of pending time while waiting for processes to complete, so I’d blog a lot about stuff I was reading online. But that changed with a recent “NO INTERNET DURING WORK TIME” edict, which is pretty strictly enforced (with some exceptions if you are on a “sanctioned” site for work purposes, such as looking for hotels using Google Maps or catching up on travel or weather news. Part of the policy specifically states “no updating personal websites or commenting on websites,” too.

Yeah, it’s that detailed.

So for a couple of years, no netsurfing and no blogging from work. As Wonkette is wont to say, the end.

Early last year, enter the iPhone: a handy little appliance that allows me to netsurf, catch up on email, or play games while waiting for an incoming call (so long as I’m otherwise caught up on my tasks). Google Reader, my RSS feed reader of choice, turned out to have a really slick, clean iPhone interface (complete with Share Note button, nyah! and email button). I get a kick out of reading stuff my husband David, or ***Dave shares. I need to find more people who share, too. And I sometimes think it’s a shame that the great little shared-comments scroll off so quickly, but life moves pretty fast.

More recently – the week of Blago’s arrest, actually, when I was home sick – I got into Twitter. It seemed kind of dumb, but then I started seeing hints of why some people rave about it so.

For one thing, Wil Wheaton and Levar Burton are on there, talking about interesting stuff in their real lives and not making like they’re stuck up famous actor-types. They’re people with concerns and problems and triumphs and questions. Just like, yes this is a platitude, everybody else. But because they’re famous, they’re more interesting than most and get more attention. However, I’m also just as interested in Sockington the Tweeting Cat, who is hi-larious.

And I’m on Facebook, too. It’s only recently started to get fun again; it had become a drag because there were too many goofy applications and games requests.

For a while, I had it set up that all of my “tweets” from Twitter would go to Facebook, and I’ve got both services patched into the sidebar of Blogula along with my Google Reader items, which are called “RED57’s Googlies.” But I had doubled up too much: I had Twitter set up to automatically post a tweet whenever I blogged something, and I also had Facebook set up to post a status update when I “imported notes” from my blog automatically. It’s much cleaner and more sane now that my Twitter stuff stays put, and the Facebook stuff doesn’t get all snarled up.

And then there’s Flickr. Well, there’s a ton – like MANY MANY MANY hundreds of pictures from a few recent trips that haven’t been uploaded. In some cases, the pictures are still sitting on flash cards. There’s so much volume that I can’t seem to sit down and take the time to sort through the cards, pick out the best images, and deal with them in coherent, workable batches. YET, I seem to have time for endless games of Spider Solitaire, or Gawd help me, Space Cadet. I’ve been coasting along using my cameraphone to send photos to Flickr, but frankly, some of them haven’t been that good. I’m feeling the need to pay more attention to photography again.

Really, all this tweeting and status updating and Flickring ought to be the supporting cast to the star of the show, my main blog. And the lack of original content here has been bugging me enough lately that I’ve tried to make more of an effort. Recent updates and theme changes certainly help; the new WordPress interface makes it easier than ever to do great stuff, and it looks good once posted (especially when compared to the semi-automated posts at the Blogger version). One of my sidebar gadgets is a live visitor update dealio, and it tickles me no end to see how many people are trying to figure out how old their washer/dryers are and how to do drop shadows on images with CSS.

Reading these posts of Doyce’s and ***Dave’s make me want to get off my figurative and literal ass and blog in a more writerly fashion. Sure, I will continue to use Google Reader/Twitter/Facebook/Flickr and put content from those sources on the sidebars of Blogula Rasa, especially during the work day. And it is at least possible and not difficult to do a blog post using the iPhone only (but it’s not very efficient or comfortable for posts of more than a paragraph in length). But all the new beginnings this year are working in me like yeast in a batch of bread (or better yet, in a pail of homebrew).

I want to do better. I need to make time for real blogging. I feel like I’m on the verge.

Week In Review

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It was the first full week of work after the Christmas/New Year’s holidays, it was the first full week as a true member of my new work team (gradually, all the little hold-overs and pending stuff have dropped away), and it was my first full week of relatively good health after getting through a nasty, brutish, but mercifully short bout of sinus infection-with-cough.

It was a good week, all told. I like my new team, and I’m having a lot of fun with my new neighbors. I feel like the last… five years or so on my original team has been one long slog, and I was never really accepted as a buddy by the clicques, although I was well liked by anybody hired recently. Not that I can blame my former teammates: about 6 years ago, I was the Quality Enforcer and was keeping track of agent error rates for the team leaders to use in counseling agents that put me at the top of some people’s Shit Lists (these were simple format errors, not true customer service issues).

Well, it was kind of mutual; the people who made the most errors were the ones who left messes for others to clean up, quite often me or one of the other agents for whom “quality” really was Job One. Because of my “in-between” position (especially when I wasn’t on the phones, just hassling coaching people about using correct formats) I became the de facto troubleshooter; some teammates appreciated the help and some, not so much. The younger ones tended hand off with a big sigh of relief; it was partly gratifying, partly annoying. Especially when I was no longer an official troubleshooter… but because I used to be one, people tended to assume I knew how to fix stuff. And they were (mostly) right.

I left that baggage behind, it’s in a metaphorical Lost Luggage office now. Fresh start, and all that. It’s all good.

Amazing Grace Theme

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New year, new-ish version of WordPress (2.7) and I thought it was time to check out a new theme.

This one is called “Amazing Grace” by Vladimir Prelovac and seems to work pretty nicely out of the box. Instead of a long banner image rotated across the top on various pages, it has a smaller snapshot (which will be easier to deal with, editing wise). Those are not currently my pictures, but they’re similar to some I’ve taken on various trips, so I’ll be able to figure out how to substitute my own for the default ones. I’m not sure why it has links to 3 categories across the top, but they’re good ones to highlight, being the “uncategorized” one, the one for mini-posts or asides only, and the travel one. I may tweak font size a bit for readability so would appreciate any feedback. It looks good on Firefox/Windows but of course will also check it on Explorer and will need to hear from any users of other browsers or operating systems.

Will also add my beloved drop-shadow CSS, of course. That goes without saying.

UPDATE: Followed the instructions for adding social networking buttons to the entries. Not liking the pulsing, almost BLINKtag effect. More research is needed to turn that bit off but it’s not a deal-killer. I really like the color palette and probably won’t mess with it much, as it’s similar to another theme I had called “Talian.”

UPDATE II: Oh, HO!

It turns out that Flickr makes it pretty simple to add photos from your Flickr stream to your website, but they aren’t entirely obvious about how to do it. Flickr calls this method of displaying photos on your site a “badge”, and doesn’t display the link to the configuration page very clearly. I can’t even recall the last time I found the page anywhere on the main Flickr navigation, but instead had to track it down myself using Google.

So, save yourself time and just run over to www.flickr.com/badge.gne.

This sounds very familiar and do-able. I used a simpler version of this when I was using a template called Tiga on my own site and on the old Holy Moly blog and website. Basically, I specified 4 or 5 square thumbnails in the center column, which were random images from specific sets, in a horizontal array. The one for the church website utilized a lot of face shots of different parishioners and closeups of interesting things inside the church. It was designed to make it a friendlier and familiar place to visit. Worked pretty well, too: I got a lot of compliments from visitors and from the Diocese. I had edited the Flickr-generated mishmosh of code to take out the text link and some other unwanted stuff, similar to how Ryan describes, but without his attention to clean coding. I’ll see if I can get this working for sure; there’s something about the background image and there’s also something about the size of the images specified in Vlad’s theme instructions that I may have to tinker with.

UPDATE III: Further hint on how it’s done and a slightly different method using a modified background image is at Theme Hack.

UPDATE IV: Eureka!! Theme Hack’s method works like a charm. Here are the full instructions [with one minor modification-ed.]:

Modify header.php and place the following in the style tags near the top.

#portraitbg {
  background:url(/images/bg-portraitB.jpg);
}

#flickr_badge_image1
{
  position:absolute;
  left:14px;
  top:28px;
}
#flickr_badge_image1 img {
  border: none;
  width:283px;
  height:174px;
}

Create a badge with Flickr for the tagged photos you want in the header and in the final screen with the code to paste into your site look for the javascript call. Place this between the div with the id portrait-bg in header.php

Example

Once this is done, place the following image in the Amazing Grace theme directory under images and name it bgportraitB.jpg.

bgportraitb

NOTE: I arbitrarily renamed the image “bgportraitB.jpg” when I originally saved it because that was what it was actually named, so I adjusted the name of the image in the instructions above. The original instructions reference “bg-portraitB.jpg.” The theme’s original background portrait is called “bg-portrait” and that is how it is still referenced in the CSS. If I need to I can revert to the standard theme by commenting out the Theme Hack code. I think this is why the style statements above go into the header.php file, not the main CSS file. I think the style statement is actually calling out Flickr’s “image 1” and so it’s more precise than the general “uber-wrapper” statements that Frontender was using. Either method should work, with a little tweaking. Ignore that stray “P” tag in the text area box, it’s an artifact that I can’t seem to delete due to the weird way WordPress shows page returns in the editor.

UPDATE V: The Ultimate guide to Amazing Grace theme goodness and trickery is here. Vladimir’s WordPress forum, where an Amazing Grace theme board lives, is here. I’m thinking I need to figure out how to add more bookmarking links, specifically Google’s. I’ve seen mini-icons for a bunch of different sites at Pam’s House Blend. Oh, goodie, I get to edit the functions.php file again.

UPDATE VI: Merry Christmas 2009! I couldn’t remember how I’d set this theme up; basically any picture in my stream can be used as long as it’s in landscape mode, with the proper tag. So theoretically I could use my iPhone to add images to the pool “on the fly.” Just have to remember to add the tag.

One More Bag of Presidential Peanuts, Please

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Bush The Lesser took one more sentimental journey on Air Force One, probably to savor the in-flight amenities one last time. Incidentally, they could have just taken Marine One, the chopper, all the way… or driven. it’s about a 3 hour drive.

President George W. Bush made his last expected journey aboard Air Force One as president today, traveling to Norfolk, Va., for the christening of an aircraft carrier named for his father, the 41st president – the nuclear-powered USS George H.W. Bush

The president and First Lady Laura Bush were joined by their son-in-law, Henry Hager, on the South Lawn of the White House, and Secretary of State Condi Rice and brother Marvin Bush flew with them aboard Marine One to Andrews Air Force Base. Air Force One went wheels up from Andrews at 9:12 am EST and landed at Norfolk Naval Station at 9:41 am. It was chilly at Chambers Field.

After meeting up with the rest of the christening party, Marine One made another run, to the flight deck of the carrier George HW Bush. (CVN 77). The white-top presidential helicopter touched down at 11:03 am, and the president stepped off with his father, his mother and his wife. Both “41” and “43” saluted stepping off the chopper.

The wording indicates that the same helicopter flew the Presidential party from Norfolk to the ship, but any helicopter flying the CIC gets the Marine One designation, and they may have used a different aircraft and crew as a part of this farewell tour. But the primary craft has plenty of range for a flight of about 190 miles, and with a cruising speed of 150 MPH would have taken just over an hour to get there. It could have beaten Air Force One from Andrews to Norfolk if they jammed it and if it took a while to get everyone settled aboard the fixed-wing aircraft before taking off.

But of course, it’s much quieter and more comfortable for a VIP contingent aboard Air Force One… and there are those tempting salty snacks, plus a full kitchen.

Via Bush’s final presidential flight: For father: The Swamp