Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogging. Show all posts

Thursday, July 05, 2007

The wide world of Walaka

My Blogger connection is still slow and I still can't figure out why..

What a Fourth! Breakfast in Fremont, a picnic in the park, a heartland vegetarian dinner, a movie, and the company of cats: who could ask for more on a sunshiney Independence Day? It was good to see the Putnams before they headed off to Hawaii, and the gang at Volunteer park was huuuuge - and seemed to keep growing as the afternoon passed. We split fairly early to come home for a quiet evening. The cats weathered the fireworks without any major trauma.

We watched Deja Vu with Denzel Washington after dinner. Otis thought it was a straight crime drama until the time-travel elements started creeping in. Overall, I thought it was pretty well done. We may have to do a series on these time-a-kilter films - The Lake House was interesting, too, and there's that other Sandra Bullock thing, Premonition, coming out soon - and some Nick Cage movie, too, no?

In the meantime: links!



Clark Kent


Superman



Since people liked the butterfly palettes so much:



... here are some masterpieces.


This is a great little movie that a pal sent me. The sound is important, so have the volume set right.



Free Online Dating
Mingle2


Wednesday, June 20, 2007

It's finally hot

What a day! The weather-box says 76, but it sure feels warmer than that. Summer stuff, for sure!


So, my blogger interface is still running slow, and now my Sitemeter widget has disappeared. And a little ad just appeared on my third-party recent comments widget. What is up with all this?


In addition to playing a lot, I actually got the last of my quarter work finished yesterday, so I am well and truly free. Well, tomorrow, I'll have to make sure my ducks are in a row for my Monday morning class, but that's about it. Piece o' cake.


Otis had an appointment up north today, so I rode my bike up to LFP to meet her when she was done, and we came back down together. It felt good to get back on the Burke-Gilman trail, and I moved my mileage up from horrifically miserable to infinitesimally-less horrifically miserable. No, really: 11.5 weeks into the season, I have completed 11 rides averaging 5.4 miles each. At this rate, I will complete an embarrassing 137 miles this season; if I get back on pace, I can manage 1181 miles. Look on it:



The blue line is what I should do to make 2K miles; the pink line is what I did last year to make 1500 miles; the yellow line is the best case for this year. Sheesh. Wotta revoltin' development this is!


Before taking my ride, I tried out my geek-fu on Dingo's old iMac Blueberry this morning, before she passes it on to New York Alex. I was not strong enough: I could not accomplish any of the neat things I was planning to do. Granted, it was because I didn't have the stuff rather than not having The Stuff, but it was still disappointing.


On the other hand, my geekishness ran high this afternoon, as I prepared for my Vegas trip by downloading and printing mass transit maps and schedules. Boy howdy, we're having some fun now! The weather forecast for Vegas has moderated a bit: they are no longer predicting 110 degrees on Friday - just a balmy 108. Heh. Maybe today was my practice day.

Sunday, June 17, 2007

Weekend Collage

First of all, is anyone else having Blogger issues? I’m getting a delay between my typing and the letters showing up on the screen, and it’s so annoying that I am composing in Word instead and pasting over when I’m done. Is this happening to anyone else?


I had bought these totally geeky-cool sunglasses at the start of biking season – ones that fit over my regular glasses, so I don't have to swap glasses when getting on the bike or the scooter. They really streamline getting on and off the bike. I wore them home from the Crest on Wednesday evening, and when I went to put them on Thursday, one lens was missing. I have no idea where it went, and can't find it in the house. I think polterguys took it, and it’s a bummer, man.


After a quick but delicious chana masala dinner at home, Otis and I transported carless Johnbai up to the Oak Tree so we could meet Stella and all experience the banality that was Fantastic Four 2. Dingo was right (and let us know about it when she met us for afters): the movie was awful. But we had expected it, so the shock was not as great. Jessica Alba had transformed into some hideous Barbie-monster, but the rest of the flick was stunning in its mediocrity: acting, effects, everything. As a matter of fact, even writing about it is boring.


Here's a deliberately messy flash game. It's poetry. It's art. Try it.


Kudos to A-Wo and Kay-Kay: they were not as optimistic as I was about sidewalk space on the Solstice Parade route and showed up early; it was only through their offices that we got a good spot staked out. Stella and Sairey carpooled with us, and the group grew to include Sachet & her buddy, Dingo and New York Alex, Sylvio and his bro, and Kris-10 and Rye-N, so we needed the space, too. The parade seemed a little low-energy compared to last year: it was fine, but there was less music and political street drama than last year’s parade. There was no dearth of naked bikers and bared boobies, but some élan or brio was missing, and the delays seemed especially long. Maybe we were just tired.

Some of us walked after the parade to Wallingford for lunch and happened to meet up with JagGirl and Dvd lunching at Ma’s with a pal. There's always time for some tasty Thai.

The parade was exhausting. How can sitting and watching other people walk make you tired? Afternoon naps were the order of the day.


Last evening, we went over to Cal and Merry’s to join them and their pal Canuck for the premiere Big Time Screening ™. We saw Duma, a sweet movie about a boy and his cheetah cub. It was full of good will and struggle and triumph and all that (as well as a motorcycle with a sidecar!), and we had a great time watching from the big seats in the little theater, and having some great conversation afterwards as well.


We rode the scooter home in the rain last night. Chilly!


I think this is my favorite political cartoon evar:

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Missed a day

I almost made it through the first month of the year with a post every day, but last night stopped my streak. The gap was caused by the most delightful of reasons: J-Force stopped by after a long day at the library and spent a good portion of the evening with Otis and me in front of the fireplace, drinking tea, catching up, checking chakras, and suchlike. It certainly made for a warm night, in several ways.

Besides that, life has been pretty much work around here. Otis is still plowing through a stack of papers as tall as she is, and the workload from my classes hasn't quite started to let up. I'm still trying to get all my job app ducks in a row; I sent a resume in to the county for a community communications positions (writing and editing); it would be working for The Man but he'd pay very well. I'll need to make a big push on the teaching apps this weekend. I'm getting my letters of reference in order and I think there's now nine positions to apply for (if I include Bellevue). When it rains, it pours!

We've been pausing a lot in our work to think about spring break and hope we can work out going somewhere sunny and warm for a bit. We'll see.

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

"Work?!?"



The bete noire of Maynard G. Krebs has been dogging me this week. By all rights, I should be working now, but I need a little time to chill. I'm still catching up from snow delays, and several students handed in papers late as well, which throws my schedule off. Having two never-taught-before sections has added to the workload, too. Ah, well. I guess pouring concrete is hard work; this is just annoying.

Monday, December 18, 2006

Scrapple

Sunday Funday: After a relaxing morning yesterday, while Otis was busy with Dingo, I went up to Caffe Vita on Cap Hill and finished off the grading for NSCC. Two schools down, one to go! It was nice to work in a different environment, and it reminded me of those heady days of GeekQuest Alpha (the cafe was our HQ for the event). So, just the AUS stuff to wrap up, and I can actually call it a break.

After a VV visit, Otis and I headed over to Ballard to visit TonyToniTone and Skippy at their party/art show. We picked up some nice prints of their photography, munched munchies, and had a chance to visit more with Invisible Adam and J-Force & Keeper.

Blogging Blues: Aargh, as Charlie Brown used to say. As I mentioned, I migrated this blog over to Blogger-space from an external server when I upgraded it to Beta. The Farrago "recent comments" hack wasn't compatible, so I got the same one Wheylona found. It still didn't work, and I found there was another related issue: when you're on an archived page, clicking the blog title should take you to the main blog page, but now it takes you to a "blog not found" page.

I have identified why this is, but not how to fix it. It's related to the recent comments problem that Otis had on her art blog. When you use an external server, some of the scripts apparently expect or insert (or don't expect or read) a slashie or subfolder for the blog location. I can't figure out exactly how or why this works; the Farrago hack worked fine on my external blog but not on Otis's. But now that I have migrated here, the hyperlink from the title is still looking for the folder that used to be on the external drive, even though there isn't one on Blogger. I can't see why it would do this, since it as a dynamic link, but there you have it.

Bottom line: my recent comments widget is wonky and my archive pages are frakked up and I don't know how to fix 'em yet.

Arrgh.

Wednesday, December 13, 2006

Post #500: so now what?

In a little bit of serendipity that shines some sunshine on theis blogo-mess, this is my 500th post on the blog. How about that?

One of the themes that I have returned to frequently since this experiment began is that of intention: why blog, anyway? I don't know that I have figured that answer out yet. I haven't even figured out what to do with the labels feature on Blogger Beta here. But I do know that I enjoy doing it, and I hope some others get some enjoyment out of my doing it, too. If you're out there, and if you have found me after the address-change screw-up, drop a line and let me know, okay?

The score so far:

Grading and assessing: 21 down out of 33
Next quarter prep: 1 down out of 13

I'm such an idiot

I have just been royally screwing up my blogopolis. Not only did I merge my accounts accidentally, but I just moved this site onto Blogger's server AND updated my template at the same time, thereby managing to mess up everyone's bookmarks and feeds AND my sitemeter and stuff, all at the same time!

Sometimes the technology makes stuff too easy, dunnit?

Anyhoo, today was for the last final, and some grading, and some errands, and getting the house ready for the art show tomorrow, and screwing up the blogs. The wind has been something terrific, though, hasn't it?

I think I'll go grade some more.

Thursday, December 07, 2006

The film that wasn't

Blogging note: I upgraded this blog to Beta tonight, but I accidentally combined accounts with my comix account, so the profile and stuff will look different until I get it sorted out. I think this might mean that there will be some changes made in the near future - a redesign, which I had been thinking of anyway, might be my project for the break.

So, the last time we saw Ms. Matcha and Surfer-T, they gave us a free pass to see a preview of The Holiday tonight. After class today, I got all my grading and assessing organized, set a work schedule for the next two weeks, and actually got some evaluations done. Then, after dinner, we headed down to Pacific Place.

Traffic sucked.
There was no street parking.
We went into the PP lot.
It was full, and we had to circle around until a space came free.
After we made our way to the top of the galleria, the line was huge.
We didn't get in to see the movie.
It cost us $3 for 30 minutes of parking.

So, we came home, made our own popcorn, and watched the Battlestar Galactica DVD Yojimbo gave us. So there.