Today they examined the brain of the cow that they thought had mad cow disease. It turns out it didn’t have it. Sven wondered if they returned the brain to the cow. I told him that probably not. Sven was sad. I think the cow was a dumbass for acting crazy when someone was looking.
It’s weird going through my old blog entries and thinking of titles for them. The thoughts from weeks ago are often gone, I’m not really sure of the mood I was in.
I am already missing some features of my old software. WordPress features includes “Instant publishing with no rebuilding,” I’m a little worried if the Pentium II this server is can take regenerating a page ever visit!
I also liked that that my entry systems was not web based, I could easily use spell checkers. Now I’m stuck in this low feature box. My spelling is bad enough as it is.
The thing that really bugs me in the timezone. The goal of my blog software was to make in so you could set the timezone differently for each post. So if I was in San Francisco when I posted I would put PST. Here everything is stuck in eastern time. I never finished that feature, but it still bugs me.
We’ve joined Elana and my blogs together (what no honeymoon?), and Sven’s will soon follow. If you’re getting this via an RSS feed, check the URL. It should now point to
http://www.zen.org/rss.xml
If your aggregator cannot deal with redirects, the “real” URL is
http://www.zen.org/wp-rss2.php
but I like the rss.xml version better, since it makes it easier for us to change our blog software in the future should we choose to.
B
I called our local supermarket to ask about transferring points from an old (lost) card onto one we just got as a replacement. Since the card is in E’s name, she has to do it. The fellow on the phone kept talking about the Data Protection Act, explaining that the rules don’t allow anyone but the registered person to have access to the information in the account. In order to let us both have permission, I have to get a card in my own name and then they can join the two together for mutual access. With both of us physically there. (I’ll recognize that there are reasons this requirement could be a real pain.)
Then I call a US bank to ask a question, and they ask for my mother’s maiden name. That detail happens to be on the public record if you know how to find it (or have read any of 50 books on the topic). A little work would get it for anyone with bad intentions. Luckily we can make the US bank accept anything in response to that question, not the actual maiden name, so we’ve got some level of protection. But our choice is far from common.
Why are companies in the US so much less concerned about the privacy of your information? They claim it’s the cost in maintaining the information. I suspect it’s more a change in standard procedure and the belief that it’s purely inconvenience, for which the customers share as much of the blame as the banks.
I’ve nearly got a perl script done using DBI to copy all of my posts and E’s from our respective WordPress databases into the new common zen one. Just need to spend a little more time figuring out how to make the comments end up attached to the correct post.
UPDATE: Woo hoo! It looks like it worked pulling all of my posts in, with their comments, and adjusting categories. Now to try for E’s …
UPDATE 2: I’ve got both of us in place now. If I try to use wp-rss2.php it even shows the RSS enclosure properly. However, when you point iPodder-X at it, you get “zen.org Communal Weblog” for the title of the feed, not “The Accidental Cook” as we’d like. This seems to be from wp-rss2.php using the bloginfo() function with 'name' as the argument. Hmm. Wonder how you can make the title of the blog change if you choose a different category (in this case, cat=10)?
Hmm, and when you get the RSS feed from the site, it doesn’t identify the author of each post.
UPDATE 3: Aha, adding a link category “Authors” made it possible to add a list on the right of each person posting. That means you can click on that to use the (not obvious) URL to see posts only by that person. TODO: make the calendar properly reflect the dates that have posts by the person chosen.
Last Friday I upgraded my work desktop system, Debian Sarge, to Firefox 1.0 via the Debian packages. Today I come into work and I can’t launch it. Some web searching indicates that if I run Firefox as root first all will be well, no such luck. I can run it once after a reboot, so if I quit out of it it’s reboot city for me. I wonder if plain Mozilla works any better. At home, where I run Debian Sid, all seem well.
As I type, Zoë is trying to extract milk from my thumb.
There’s this funny show on SkyOne called Brainiac. It’s geek science. Soooo silly. Right now they’re doing something on mobile phones and gas stations. But the piece before this was, get this, filling a swimming pool with custard (from a powder, not homemade), and seeing if someone can walk on it. Seriously. Custard, apparently, is a non-Newtonian liquid, and as long as it’s not being impacted, it is a liquid. But when you impact it, it goes hard, and you can actually walk on it. Freaking great.
They call the show Brainiac: Science Abuse. Yep. It is. But I can’t stop watching it. And they keep blowing things up, which is fun to watch.
We’re going to try out doing a communal group weblog, where all of us can post in a stream-of-consciousness theme. Seems like a lot more fun than three people each standing alone in a corner scribbling quietly, and running across the room to see what someone else wrote.
My RSI is back. Right arm. Trackpad arm. So I don’t know when we’ll be able to do much online, since I just need to rest the damn arm. I have my wrist support on (I shouldn’t even be typing right now, with it on), and I found my old kick ass left handed ergonomic mouse. No, not one of those wussy “ergo” mouses. This one was prescribed by my doc 6 years ago. It’s sooooo nice. Fits hand properly. Perfit mouse, made by Contour Designs. If you have arm pain, get one. And use it right. and stop typing and go for a walk.
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