rock on, blue monster.
you won me back.

i was just writing a post about blood diamond, which i saw this evening, and recommend, when a wayward slip of my finger on the trackpad led me to instruct the browser to go “back”, thereby erasing my work. the first time, i cursed a bit about trackpads that are too smart for their own good, and about how wordpress should autosave the way gmail does. i’m borrowing a computer, so i hadn’t thought about the stupid “smart corners” feature in windows because i have a mac now and when i was running windows on my previous laptop, i turned the damn things off.

then it happened again, when i was nearly done, and even though i had smartly saved the post at an earlier juncture, i still lost a lot, and i don’t have the stomach to rewrite it all right now, so i’ll have to risk it for later.

i will take the chance to vent my frustration at this feature, however, and to point out that another smart trackpad feature – the two-fingered scrolling that comes with os X laptops – is COMPLETELY different, and has now become a part of the way i expect all trackpads to work, which is one way that i measure brilliance.

the difference is that it is not at all likely that i will absentmindedly place two of my fingers on the trackpad and move them in concert while i am thinking about other things, and yet, when i want to take advantage of the feature, it takes very little brainpower to do so. once i have learned it, i can use it as easily as breathing; until i learn it, i am not likely to engage it on accident with disastrous results that seem to occur as a prank from god.

so don’t make it easy to do frustrating things by accident, folks. it’s no fun. it makes you have to read babble like this instead of hearing me talk about feeling older and coming to respect leonardo dicaprio. sucks, eh?

anyway, autosave in wordpress would be a good thing either way. i should see if it exists.

so this morning kevin tagged me.
it’s this game someone started to give bloggers something to talk about while also potentially drawing in new readers in a chain letter type fashion.

interesting idea.

anyway, here are the rules:

1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book and author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page.
5. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
6. Tag three more folks.

the first thing that’s funny about this is that, when kevin first tagged me, in a comment on my last post about french toast, i followed the link he left to the post he had written to explain the game and it wasn’t there. BlogSchmog loaded properly and talked to me about fantasy sports, and when i clicked on the specific post it said it was post 674. kevin’s link referred to post 675, but when i tried to go there, it just didn’t exist.

so that was weird.

for better or worse, though, i couldn’t think about it much because my internet was dying (common story lately), so i forgot about it for a while, and then when i came back here and checked planet info, the post was there safe and sound.

shrug

maybe america wants a head start to keep up with the time zone difference, so it doesn’t let britain see its posts until later in the day and i’ve just never noticed before…

or maybe not.

anyway the other funny thing is that i dutifully went in search of the nearest book, promising myself that i really would pick whichever one was closest because that seems to make the game more fun, and because otherwise i would spend way too long deciding because it just so happens that yesterday i bought four used books to occupy myself and i am quite excited about them.

so, my resolve steeled, i entered my room, and this is what greeted me:

i think the book on the left wins the race by a nose, but since it’s so close, and i happen to be reading both of them at the moment anyway, i’m going to play the game with them both, so here you go:

Speak for England
by James Hawes

— I told you, I don’t know anything. I’m very sorry.
— Well then, what ruddy regiment are you?

Maps for Lost Lovers
by Nadeem Aslam

But the diagrams were the only sketching he could do without furtiveness and guilt at home.
Everyone at home was, of course, aware of his talent. Kaukab sometimes brought him a bar of perfumed soap so he could sketch the vignette indented at its centre for her to embroider it in rows on her own or Mah-Jabin’s kameezes.

the differences in length and tone between the two books’ sentences is rather telling. they are quite different, and it’s really rather interesting to read them alongside one another. i’m doing it because i couldn’t decide whether i was in the mood for funny or serious, so i started them both, and have just been skipping back and forth because it is actually kind of fun.

i have found, over the years, that it is good for me to read more than one book at a time because that way i have something to read no matter what mood i’m in, and i am less likely to get into a funk wherein i stop reading altogether just because my momentum on one specific book gets stalled for whatever reason. i think this developed when i started reading more nonfiction for fun, because even very dense subject matter is made more accessible by interspersing harry potter between the chapters, but it really carries over into all genres once you get going.

this time both the books are about England, but in very different ways, so it’s actually kind of thought-provoking to intersperse them.

Speak for England is a comedy about a disenchanted desperate middle-aged Englishman who enlists in a crazy reality show to go try and live in the jungle for six weeks, almost dies, and accidentally stumbles upon a hidden colony of survivors from a 50’s plane crash who all live very chipper English lives under the leadership of a headmaster who thinks the new arrival is lying when he tells them that there was no WWIII, and what’s more now there is a Labour prime minister who doesn’t like unions and is capping taxes.

Maps for Lost Lovers is, well, i guess it’s a drama, but it’s really just a novel that’s not specifically comic, about Pakistani immigrants who are struggling to keep hold of their heritage in their new country. It tells the story of a year in the lives of the people connected to a pair of lovers who are missing and presumed killed because they brought dishonor on the woman’s family by living together outside of marriage.

flipping back and forth between them is jarring, but the sarcastic yet still proud points about the honor and idealism of the English spirit stand out in sharp relief against the nuanced and often tragic stories of people struggling to find a home and come to terms with their evolving heritage in a land that generally shuns them, and i think it’s good food for thought on both sides for someone taking some time to get to know the uk.

but then again, i might just be nostalgic for a book i read while tania and i were on our road trip that was easily one of the best books i have read in a long time, and which was all about juxtaposing seemingly unrelated stories in pursuit of a higher theme. that book is called cloud atlas, and i would quote you from page 123 just for fun except i don’t have it anymore because i left it in a hostel somewhere for someone else to find, since that is what you do when you travel.

so there you go, kevin.
you got me to babble about what i’m reading, which is actually quite an accomplishment, as the empty posts on my reading list show.
so good work.
:)

i tag david, lucy, and josh (of the family snyder).

i’m betting that lucy will tag back to the planet from her exploratory post on the informatics moon, and that she will have something interesting to share with us on the rebound. :)

if i’m wrong, though, then i’m agonna cheat and tag either matt eisenstadt or will, because half representation from team meeteetse is just not satisfactory, my friends. you both said you would blog more, and instead you’re just sitting back and letting erik and i talk about food all the time and i think we need you to come in and shake us up with some video games or lawyer jokes or perhaps a dash of foucault. ;)

so i guess i’m really playing two games, and if you don’t find safety in a post by the time i count to 100, then i’ll come find you and give chase until ollie ollie oxen free.

over the past few days, the amount of spam that gets through the akismet filter that comes with wordpress 2.0 has been on the increase. this includes spam that primarily consists of nearly 100 repetitions of certain libido enhancing drugs, so i don’t know what the crap akismet is doing. i have been vaguely frustrated with it in the past, largely because, for a while at least, it was catching kevin, but letting lots of other stuff through. it seemed to have learned that lesson, though, and i was about to make peace with it, but now i’m thinkin…. nah. time for something else.

so if you’re reading from planet info or using a feed reader, hop on over and give me a holla to say what you think.

erik took the picture that i’m using for the header, during the post-capstone jaunt that he, tif, josh, and i took to st. louis to play at the city museum.

i had been saying that we should go to the city museum for months and months, and only now do we understand that it was all an elaborate ploy to get imagery for my blog.

bwah ha ha ha…

anyway, thanks erik. :)

i will credit you properly before the redesign is through, and i’ll check in with the queen when i’m in london in a couple months and see if any duchys or countships are available.

(because then you could have royalties…)

bad joke police say it’s time to get some sleep now.

i should put more pictures in my posts.

first i need to get that new battery charger, though, because i didn’t have the neverending battery after all.

:(

i’m sorting through the stuff i wrote when i didn’t have internet for a few days, because i want to be done with it, but i keep thinking that i’ll add to it, or synthesize it, or something…

sigh

i never learn, do i?

JUST POST IT, KYNTHIA!!

it is interesting for me to read, even two weeks later, because i feel much more settled in now.  making friends, doing some work that feels familiar, and finding a good pub or two will all do wonders for making a place feel more like home.

—–

it took me a while to get up this morning, but i don’t think it’s jetlag. the time difference isn’t all that huge, and i slept a little on the plane, so it was kind of like a weird time warp where we flew all night and i floated in and out of sleep and didn’t really have a sense of how much time passed. i Thought it was only 8 hours, but hey, if they say it was 13? shrug. that happens.

so i was not all that confused when we arrived, and it was 9 in the morning, so i didn’t have much trouble just accepting that it was morning and wandering around the city for a while. it was nice to take a nap in the afternoon, however, and i ended up just staying in my room and reading and sorting through my things for the rest of the night. i had been feeling stressed out and tired by traveling and last minute errands, so i had been telling myself that all i really wanted was a chance to lie somewhere safe and soft and sleep for a while. i have learned over the years that i really rely on having periods of time to myself where i don’t really have to talk to anyone and i can think about whatever i want, and that sort of time is alarmingly difficult to come by when traveling alone, especially if you are trying to save money by not staying in hotels. if you stay with people, you have to interact with them, which is usually a blessing, but it is draining after a while. and if you stay in a campsite or a hostel, it’s hard to fully relax because there is constant activity, and not much personal space, so you have to be a bit more vigilant about your stuff.

because of all this, i am realizing that i may have to get better at being by myself when other people are around, but i haven’t quite figured it out yet, so i was a little worried on the plane because i felt tired, and the reality of my trip was starting to sink in and scare me a little, and i wasn’t sure how long it would be before i could just sit in a quiet place by myself and get my bearings.

this uncertainty made me cranky.
but i had forgotten something remarkable about my accomodations in glasgow – i have my own room. i am staying in a hostel that is converted student housing, so i basically have a very small single dorm room, and then the bathrooms are shared. it is clean, secure, and not that far from the city center, all for £12 a night (pounds are worth right about $2 each right now, so that’s around $24). it is perfect for me right now, for while i look forward to the social aspects of hosteling, i enjoy having this small dose of time where i am truly on my own. i took this very seriously yesterday afternoon, and stayed in my room for the rest of the night. this morning, part of me was tempted to remain cloistered away, but i needed water, and breakfast, and i wanted to explore the city a little bit more and make sure i know how to get to the train station for tomorrow.

so out i went.

i visited the lighthouse, thought about the difference between design and Design, and figured out the train schedule for tomorrow so i wouldn’t have to wander around too much with my bags in tow. i thought about going to the people’s palace, but couldn’t really decide if i could walk there or not, so i decided not to risk it and just wandered around. i went back to the internet coffee shop and wrote most of this post, but decided not to pay for wireless access because they told us we would have it in edinburgh, so it seemed a waste.

last night i dreamed that the summer school was over and i had decided just to go home. it was hard to find work or something, and it seemed like the thing to do. when i woke up, a little of this was still in my head, so it was doubly surprising to remember that i was still in glasgow, that the summer school hadn’t started yet, and that i still didn’t know when i would be going home. i like glasgow a lot, and i feel safe and prepared, but it is very strange to recognize that i am in another country for an unknown amount of time. it is more disconcerting than just being in another state or something, because then it is easy to call my parents and friends, and i can always get in a bus or a car and go somewhere familiar if i need to. now the phone is farther from my reach – i don’t have a phone card yet, and i’m contemplating get a pay as you go cell phone if i stay, but i can’t decide that yet, and since i haven’t had my computer online yet, i haven’t had access to skype. i know i could fly home if i needed to, but it could be really expensive, and there is just something harder about thinking about how to go about it. there are taxis and buses and trains, just as in any city, but that slightly foreign veil is over them, so they take a bit longer to understand, and my instincts about what to do in an emergency are not very strong. i don’t know anyone within miles (or kilometers), and there are both benefits and drawbacks to being that alone.

the internet definitely changes things from how it must have been even a few years ago. i have already chatted with my mom, and i know that i have ways to contact people via email and my blog, so i am far from completely cut off. and being in the UK is definitely helpful as well, since there is no language barrier. i know that i feel somewhat uncomfortable being the typical tourist in countries where i don’t speak the language, but it is relatively easy to figure out how to get by for a few weeks. this process of adjustment would certainly be harder in a more foreign country, however. that half-awake time in the morning when i wonder about what i’m doing would be scarier, and the hurdle to get myself out the door and going would be higher.

but that’s the thing to do – just walk out the door and start learning; give myself things to do and do them.
so away i go.

man, that title looks kind of inflammatory to the average eye, eh?

anyway, i’m just here to say that i updated my masthead again (just in time to leave for a new place!), and that i did so with the help of gimpshop, which is a hack of the gimp, which is an open source image manipulation program, which means that i didn’t have to steal from adobe or sell my car in order to do things like play with gradients and drop shadows.

that’s a nice feeling.

here i am at my new domain, with all of my blog posts intact, and things behaving pretty much as i want them to, for the time being at least.

yay!

it took a bit of work, though.

on saturday night, i started trying to import the posts from my old database into the new one. i backed up the tables that i wanted from my hoosiernet database and set about introducing myself to phpmyadmin, which is how bluehost wants me to interact with the database. that went just fine as such things go, and i was even prepared when the import feature didn’t work, because i had found this support thread in the wordpress forum that said that some people had to paste the query directly into the sql field to get it to work.

o… k…
so i tried that, and it still didn’t work.
it was timing out before it could get through the whole thing, and i couldn’t change that setting, so i was annoyed.

at this point, i started wondering about a question i had been pushing from my mind, which was: “why is this backup file so freaking big?!” david and i had backed up the whole database back in january to teach me how to do it (hoosiernet’s all shell access, so it’s fun with unix and friends), and it had been 4 MB. last month, when i started refreshing my memory and backing it up to prepare for upgrading and/or switching hosts, it was like 9, which i found a bit startling, but brushed aside because i have been blogging a lot more this year than i did last year, so it seemed possible…

when i backed it up a few days ago, however, it was 12 MB, and that was just silly. i didn’t understand how it could have possibly grown that much in a month, but i kept coming up with all these vague excuses, like “well, maybe david did something to compress it that you didn’t remember” or “maybe you put a… picture in the database… or a small… woodland… animal…”

wild, flailing shrug to distract attention from that suggestion

i was more worried about other aspects of the process, but then when it kept timing out because the file was too big i was forced to reconsider. so i started poking around in the file to see what it said, and it said:

“POKER! BLACKJACK! VIAGRA! PSEUDOETHOTHROMORITANIUMITE!”

for like a bajillion and a half lines

which made me go: “ok, hold up. i’m spending time futzing with figuring out how to import this file so that i can put megabytes upon megabytes of spam into my new clean database?!”

like hell you say

so i went into the admin menu for that nice spam plugin that i had installed a while back. you know, the one that was messing with you when you tried to leave comments? but was also catching up to 400 spam a day and keeping me from having to moderate them all? so i kept it anyway? yeah, that one.

and i clicked on the button to erase the old spam, and it said “there seems to be an error in your sql syntax near…”

and i smacketh myself on the forehead

fortunately, i remembered talk of a spam annihilation plugin from when i was first looking into the problem, and so i went and snagged it rather than try to puzzle out what was amiss with spam karma’s inner joins, because i don’t Like inner joins, and i was not interested in changing my position on the matter at this juncture.

so i installed the plugin, and a few short minutes later, i was greeted with:

heehee…

the computer said rowr…

which is another way of saying that the guy who made this plugin? he cracks my shit up. he also seems to be on the ball, and i am installing his notepad plugin as a part of my upgrade, so i’ll let you know how that goes.

anyway, then i backed things up again, and it was much much smaller. losing 5 MB of spam in a single click really does make those pants seem a whole lot baggier.

so i promptly started trying to import data again.

and it started timing out again.

and i went to bed.

yesterday i did other stuff, because my new idea was that it might have something to do with the slowness and patchiness of my wireless at home, so i decided to bring my computer somewhere where i could plug it in the old-fashioned way (my router is next door in my neighbor’s apartment, remember? so no walls for me.), which meant that i would take it to work today, which meant that i got to rejoice at how small and light it is, which meant that i was happy.

but it still didn’t work, so i was bothered. i poked around some more and confirmed a suspicion that i didn’t like, which was that i might have to just cut and paste the query in piece by stomachable piece until it was all done.

blah.

i tried it out with the category data, because that was short, and sure enough it did not time out. instead it gave me a new error about rows not matching values, and that was worrisome…

i used the wordpress codex (which is astonishing, btw. i have never had a question go unanswered after just a few minutes of searching, and people are adding to it all the freaking time. it’s a beautiful thing.) to find out what the fields were, and sure enough, there is a new field in the 2.0 category table (category count! get yours today!), so all my categories were missing a value.

sigh

this is annoying because i am going to get rid of categories soon in a grand tagging experiment, but i don’t want to lose the old data, and i only have like 30 categories, so (to david’s horror, i predict :), i went through and added the new values BY HAND.

that worked just fine, but then when i started submitting post data and it gave a similar error, i was like no way, no how am i even going to pretend to consider doing that by hand. i have other things to do in the next week and a half. like pack. and leave town.
so i had to figure out the right way to solve the problem, and the answer was: upgrade the old site to 2.0!

this is somewhat humorous, because i have been holding off upgrading for a few weeks now because i figured that there was no sense in it if i was going to be moving everything soon, but… oh well. the upgrade process includes a nifty script that modifies the database for me so that the backup would be updated automagically, and that is worth quite a bit of humor.

it went rather smoothly, apart from not working at all at first because it couldn’t access the configuration file. fortunately, i vaguely remembered something having to do with file permissions that we had to modify last time, and after briefly locking myself out of the wordpress directory entirely because i misremembered what safephp does, i fixed it, and found a geeky dashboard widget to boot.

w00t

then it was just a matter of some patient cutting and pasting, and it really wasn’t that bad after all, because it could handle quite a bit at once.

my fears that the upgrade would break my subpages was well-founded, it turns out, but in the meantime someone came up with a super-duper category visibility plugin that is way better than the workaround i had been using, so the problem was solved before it really even emerged. can’t complain about that outcome.

my theme doesn’t work with 2.0, though, and rather than download the new version and hack it to pieces again, i’m going to build my own.

but not today.

today i am too much for this blog world, as this insanely long post clearly shows.

so when i went to make the leta reference in the last post, i also, of course, caught up on the last few days of dooce, and this post struck me.
apart from the fact that it must be kind of weird to find yourself dreaming about blogging panels, it struck me as a really interesting example of a kind of personal expression that really has no clear parallel at any other point in history – the ability to share experiences of the type: “embarrassing but still emotionally intense experience that i don’t really want to make a big deal about but it still involved person x and now i think about it when i see them so it feels funny for them to not know about it” in a semi-public forum, where person x doesn’t have to directly respond.

this is something that really fascinates me about blogs, because they open up this space of private stuff that everyone goes through, and that we can all really resonate with, but that we don’t really talk about much because it’s kind of awkward to actually talk about such things, because a lot of what they trigger is hard to put into words. i mean, a lot of us have probably had dreams involving other people that are kind of weird and we want to tell them, but then when you go to tell them, and they’re absorbing the weirdness of it while looking you in the face as you sit there, expectant and kind of embarassed despite your efforts to the contrary, there’s often this air of “ok… that’s sweet, but… what else am i supposed to say?” on one side, and an impulse to dismiss the whole thing and move on to safer territory on the other.
so neither person really gets to enjoy the story much, which is a shame.

now though, i imagine cases where one person writes a blog entry about something they thought or felt or dreamed or sang to themselves in the shower, and the person they thought or felt or dreamed or sang about trips over it while drinking coffee at work, or checking ticket prices, or looking up the name of that guy in that one movie with that other chick from that music video. and then there is this glorious moment where the person can just sit there, with no need to wonder whether a funny expression crosses their face or a funny noise escapes their lips, and give a few seconds of full attention to the reality of this person in their life, and all of the craziness and gorgeousness and scariness and excitement that goes with the package.
and those kinds of moments are awesome gifts.

i imagine the unsolicited hugs, the knowing smiles, and the jokes at the end of the day.
and also all the days where nothing is said and life just trods along as usual, but the air is richer between all of us than it has ever been before.
and it makes me happy, and excited.

but maybe it’s just springtime and i’m a sappy ball of hormone juice.

you can decide on your own time.