so it’s the craptastic battery charger that is broken after all, which means i need to send away yet again before i am able to be a self-sustaining photographer here in the UK, and the bill for my absentmindedness in the orlando airport climbs.

the battery that has allowed me to take pictures for the last few days ran out of charge, and, with flagrant disregard for my chants of “please work! please work!”, the charger did nothing after several hours other than attempt to claim the battery as a hostage for its crappy manufacturing overlords (it seriously took me 5 minutes to extract the battery from its grip).

hopefully it did not fry the victim completely, but i don’t know yet, and i won’t know anything more until i am able to locate another charger that can be shipped to the UK (they don’t makey my camera over here, so it’s a bit of a hassle).

let’s hope this story ends after that, shall we?

i don’t believe that everyone has a right to justice, or freedom, or equality. i just think we should give it to them anyway. because we can. and doing things because we can see that they are better, not just because we have to, is what fulfilling our human potential is about.

yesterday i looked at my bank account balance and had quite a scare. it’s running right on the edge, so it’s good that i’m working now and can just sit tight and enjoy the room and board here at the hotel. the only problem is that my work wages are going to be deposited into a local bank account, so i need to make sure that anything that debits automatically is covered.

in theory, this should be fine because i am getting one more small paycheck from the math department on friday, and there are two backpack refunds still pending, once we figure out how to get the checks deposited. so i told myself not to worry because nothing substantial should happen before friday, right?

right…

i look today anyway, just to make sure, and lo and behold – the department store where i bought my work clothes on monday is trying to charge me twice. crap!

i called them up, but it’s a hassle to deal with a refund over the phone, and i can’t get there to do it in person because there aren’t any buses this afternoon. so they’re going to get back to me, and hopefully soon…

sigh

in other annoying news, my camera battery charger arrived yesterday, and it’s not going to work. i was afraid it wouldn’t, because the generic battery that i bought in glasgow is a little bit different than the official canon battery, but i couldn’t find a charger specifically for it, and so i just hoped that it would be ok seeing as it powers the camera and all, so it has to be the right size and shape. but i think the contacts are in slightly different places, and the charger doesn’t seem to do any good.

double sigh

i suppose there’s not a super rush for pictures, since i will be here for a while, and “here” is the kind of place that doesn’t change much for decades.  so i’ll just buy the ‘official’ battery/charger once the money stuff is sorted out. it’s just annoying to have to pay for all this crap when the camera was at the upper end of my budget to begin with. i guess i’ll just hope that i sit on it or something as soon as i get back to the states, so then i can cash in on the uber warranty, and feel like i got my money’s worth. :)

in the meantime i will just sit back, work, hang out, and let money start coming In for a while.

that will be 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.

i hate it when i type a lot of stuff into a web form and then click submit and then it says that my password has expired and then i enter the password and then everything is lost.

it SUCKS

and it just happened to me, while i was filling out profile stuff at http://www.couchsurfing.com, which is a brilliant idea for a website, and i might just have more to say about it as a travel planning tool before too long, if i ever forgive it for eating my story about snow on red square and my summary of the importance of IT and my reading list and my desire to learn to sail better and my link to the new best way to fold a t-shirt (thanks to erik for that particular addition to my corpus of knowledge).

we just need some time apart first.
i’m sure we will be able to work it out if it’s really meant to be.

in the meantime, though, what are people’s thoughts on the best ways to deal with the form-clearing problem, both from the developer side and the user side?

i always feel relieved when i hit back and then the text is all still there, but from the security standpoint, this seems less than optimal.
it would be nice if it checked to see if you were logged in when you hit submit and then warned you before it left the page forever.
or, of course, it could just do a good job of saving the data and redirecting you to the right page.
but in the meantime, while the world is still imperfect, what should we do?
a browser extension that temporarily saves the data for you?
does that already exist? like that time i invented the thermos?

i guess i could just do a better job of keeping all of the things i could ever want anyone to know updated here, and then give links.
because entering that shiznit in a bajillion times is what i Really hate.
this is why all of my profiles everywhere are boring as sin.
but that’s another problem.
it will have to wait until after dinner.

this is what my yahoo!/konfabulator weather widget had to tell me this morning, and so far, it’s been right.
i like the misty cloud picture best of perhaps all of the little weather pictures that it has in it’s library, because it’s subtle and makes me feel like i’m just looking at the widget through a fog machine, or like i was suddenly transported into an elementary school haunted house and there’s a bowl of dry ice in the room.
it’s nice that it provides me that little bit of graphical enjoyment, because the weather itself is not so much fun, particularly when one has to walk to eigenmann in the misty morning and stay there for a meeting and then not know how to get oneself home once it starts to rain harder.

sigh

luckily, tiffanie is nice enough to come pick me up for the dance, so i had best not keep her waiting

i had a final exam in infovis this morning, and it reminded me of why i used to feel quite comfortable being anti-school. i remember the day in highschool when i put the mark twain quote “i never let my schooling interfere with my education” into the little notepad that i wore around my neck for a while, and how true it felt, at 15, as i sat in english class and stared at SAT prep words.

i remember how excited i was, for a while, working at harmony and learning about all the stuff that nsrf and other folks like them are doing around the country to try to make schools better. i read some great books by folks like jonathan kozol and john holt and visited progressive schools around the east and midwest with a group of high school kids who were pumped to do something different. i thought about going back to school to study how to make school better, which struck me as a little odd, but odd doesn’t usually stop me for long. and then as i set out looking for the right school i decided that the thing that really interests me is the transfer of information. how something in my head gets into your head and what we might do with that something along the way to make the odds of understanding better. questions like that underlie good teaching, but it’s more accurate to say that they underlie good learning, and learning happens in more places than just school. as i had known since i was 15. so i widened my gaze to look for ways to learn about how we deal with information, and that is how i found hci.
good story, eh?

now, whether it has to be this way or not, school tends to get better as you go further up the ladder. the hoops that you have to jump through tend to feel a little less arbitrary, or at the very least, the arbitrary hoops are balanced out by some genuine chances to explore stuff that you are really interested in, and to do so on your own terms. i appreciate this, and i even see the benefits that some of the arbitrary hoops from my younger years now bring to bear on the skills that i need to get by on my own. so the question of how i feel about our educational system is a little murkier than it used to be, and honestly, it probably won’t get much clearer until i have kids to bring the consequences home with them. that’s the way it is.

but (and all of this was actually just a tangent that grew from my original point) i still feel comfortable saying that the test that i took this morning was stupid. it was open book, open note, no computer, and we had sample questions to indicate that it was going to be persnickety. as a result, several people were clustered around the printers in the library this morning spewing out hundreds of pages of notes and slides on the off chance that one or two of them would help answer one of the questions. i am not exaggerating about the hundreds of pages, and due to the nature of the test, each person had to print out their own notes.
i cried for the trees.
and the insanity of it all.

as for the test itself, there were 6 questions, and one hour, which means about 10 minutes each, and the questions ranged from things like “describe additive and subtractive color mixing” (optimal time to answer: 2-5 minutes) to “design an interactive visualization that allows users to navigate a multi-dimensional tree”(optimal time to answer: 2-5 weeks).
everyone flipped through their notes, scribbled like mad, looked at each other in stunned silence after handing in the blue books (yes! blue books!), and, let me reassure you, forgot every last bit of it as they walked out the door.
it was ridiculous.

and to top it off, i’m feeling sick today.
a little throat/congestion bug started making the rounds in montreal, hitting richie, then josh, and now me, it seems.
so i was kind of achy and tired and fuzzy for the test, and now all day i’ve been trying to drink juice and rest And work on my capstone paper, which is kind of a hassle.
it’s ok, really, since i don’t feel all that bad; i just don’t want to move much.
i can type without moving much.
so score one for kynthia.

another plus of sitting around the house was i managed to talk to josh (highschool josh, not bloomington josh) for a while on the phone, and he listened to me babble about my capstone, which was nice.
as long as i succeed in capturing some of that babble in a more solid external form this week, things will be looking up.

happy may day, everyone.

i hate keys.

this afternoon, in what seemed a moment of true inspiration, i realized that i should move my office keys over to the little “removable” section of my keychain, where my bike key and my front door key live. this was because i had stopped using the “removable” section of my keychain because one day, after being happy with myself for removing it and reducing the number of keys i had to carry around, i found myself locked out of my office. this proved to me that the “removable” keychain was a bad idea.
today, however, as i left the office for fencing and tried to carry as few things as possible, i thought: “kynthia, the office keys are the Only other keys that you might need in a situation like that. just move them. it still makes for a lot smaller keychain.”
sweet!
i am such a genius.

all afternoon this plan works well.

(more…)

aka
an assurance that i will never abandon fluff entirely

allow me to publicly voice my frustration at the dearth of high-quality, airtight canisters for anything near a reasonable price.
because of this frustration, i currently try and pack too many kinds of grain products into too few crappy plastic jars that don’t really seal all that well.
because of that situation, i sometimes end up keeping new bags of said grain products out of said crappy plastic jars for too long, as i consider the possible permutations of their various constituents, or as i wait to use up the old because no new batch ever fits perfectly into the old container.
because of this, i have currently attracted a generation of mealy moths that aim to live off the fat of my flour spillage.
because of this, i have currently attracted a hopeful spider in the top reaches of my pantry.
because of this, i found my finger brushing against web when i just reached in to extricate a box of mac and cheese.
because of this, i flipped out and dropped the box, also managing to sweep a container of quaker quick grits to the floor, where they burst open and poured forth with abandon.
because of this, i had to sweep 2/3 of a container of quaker quick grits into the trash, but i almost surely did not get them all.
because of this, the mealy moths rejoice in the provision of sustenance for another generation.
because of this, i write a grumbly blog entry while the water boils for my mac and cheese.

blah.

i’m going through my moleskine and adding notes and ideas that have yet to be graced with digital identity. i’ve been retrodating them to represent their rightful place in the flow of my thoughts, but they’re not all dated, so i just guess.
this one relates to the “shut up and get in gear” kinds of thoughts that i’m presently having, so i figured i ’bout as well just post it anew.
i think we were talking about guy kawasaki’s presentation guidelines in the art of the start

——

i hate cookbooks for creativity, but sure, there are key points that can be made and learned from, and in some sense, each of us has to distill our own set of guidelines that we believe in.
but it’s really the culling of them that makes it work for us; it’s the trial and error that leads to the decisions.
does that mean that we can’t pull an eliza dolittle and give someone a formula that makes them lightyears better?
no.
but we shouldn’t be looking for henry higgins to bring us to the next level.
we should be diving in, making mistakes, keeping our eyes open, taking ownership of our own development.