Tue, 23 Oct 2012
Dick? Head!
A few people have been scandalized by my little caracal logo up there at the top of the page ... this thing:
They assert that it looks like a, um, penis. Now, this being the Internet, I'm not going to suggest that such folks have their mind in the gutter. Here on the net, home to the goatse guy and two girls, one lemon party, you sorta expect that just about everything is sexual, filthy, offensive, or in some way trying to sell you something. Often all those things at once. And I can see what they're talking about, I guess, though when I first drew it, nothing of the sort ever entered my mind.
No, what it is intended to be is a stylized caracal's face. Supposed to suggest this guy, more or less:
So I apologize to anyone who was offended, or thought I was trying to portray anything sexual at all. I'd like to think that if and when I set about drawing dongs on my blog, there will be no question about what you're seeing.
Also, as an aside, I recently noticed that comments were disabled on this new machine, turns out through my own stupidity. I believe they're enabled now, so comment away! Not that I expect many: I went through the couple hundred I've gotten so far, before they got broken, and out of those, exactly one looked like a legitimate comment and only that one was approved. If you've tried to post a comment and haven't seen it show up, I apologize both for having them disabled and for PyBlosxom's brain-dead behavior of silently dumping them into the crapper with nary a peep. When I write my own blog software you can rest assured it certainly will not do that!
If you posted something offensive (to me), or an advertisement of some sort, or a picture of a dong, don't hold your breath.
Posted at: 00:04 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Wed, 17 Oct 2012
Going Wide
Late at night last Saturday, the 13th of October, or possible early in the morning of Sunday the 14th, hard to tell, a friend of mine posted a link to one of my blog entries on Reddit. His intent was to generate more stories about how people came to use the Ada programming language.
Within about an hour, my website went offline.
But it had nothing to do with his Reddit post. My outage was directly related to an ancient Western Digital Caviar hard drive deciding its life was over and that it was time to move to the great disk graveyard in the sky, or in my back room, whatever. This is not to disparage the Caviar, which was a fine drive and which lasted ten years or more before the first hint of trouble. After a bit of scuffling and screw-twisting, I managed to revive my website, though on another machine entirely. And it will get another revamp shortly, so don't get used to it.
But it has come to my attention that now people I don't even know are reading my half-assed blog, so as my friend noted, I maybe ought to write something new. It has also come to my attention that Pyblosxom, the blog software I'm currently using, supports RSS without any additional setup. So now I have people subscribing to my blog, the poor devils. I never even looked at those sections of the docs, so I have some fiddling to do over the next few days to try to make it not suck; please bear with me. And I will try to ramp up my output, unless and until there is public outcry to the contrary. I should clarify: I'm going to try to improve the formatting and delivery; the content will remain at the same level of quality.
Incidentally, the sudden and coincidentally-timed disappearance of my web presence freaked my friend out quite a bit, leading him to think he had invited folks to slashdot my site into oblivion. Bless him, his intentions were pure and no harm came from his actions. He may have overestimated the level of interest the general public has in Ada, I dunno. Maybe the few hours of distress he felt before I got back online will teach him to warn people before posting links to their sites on places like Reddit! Nah, probably not.
Posted at: 16:28 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Tue, 20 Oct 2009
Top Dead Center
As in, getting off it. Priming the pump, greasing the skids, shocking the monkey, lighting the fire—in other words, getting unstuck. Since last March I've been gripped by an almost insurmountable inertia, which comes and goes, but lately mostly comes. I haven't written anything here for over three months now, so it's time for that to change.
Except, as you might imagine, I'm kinda rusty. I remember that some time ago, one thing my wife suggested I write were reviews of television shows and movies. Not sure why she would have asked for that, because she barely ever read anything I wrote, and even when she did, she had nothing to say about it. I think maybe she brought it up in hopes that it was something I actually could (or at least would) write, and so now I'm giving that theory a try; in the next few entries, I'll offer my totally biased completely idiosyncratic impressions of what's on TV, at least what's on my TV, right now.
Posted at: 00:00 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Sat, 07 Mar 2009
Sad News
I haven't written anything here in the past month, because my wife died a month ago today, and I've been somewhat distracted.
More when I am able.
Posted at: 00:00 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Tue, 13 Jan 2009
Blue Tuesday
I've done some diddling with the borrowed stylesheet to make it more pleasing to my eye. I guess I don't have to personalize it down to the last one and zero right now—that can come once I've switched over to my own software.
I've got comments working, though I think I've spotted a buglet or two, plus I've added some other PyBlosxom niceties to make the front page a little more visitor-friendly. Coming together nicely, now all I have to do is create some actual content besides all this "meta" crap I've been cranking out.
Posted at: 00:00 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Mon, 12 Jan 2009
Waiter, there's a blog in my soup
A lot of ink, and electrons, have been expended complaining about the neologism "blog". People gripe about what an ugly-sounding word it is, how unimaginitive it is, how common and pedestrian, with an undercurrent of sour grapes because they didn't think of it first.
I'm inclined to go with the flow. I could have wished for a more euphonious word, a more poetic one, a more evocative sound, but "blog" has clearly won. Show this page to 95% of web denizens, and they'd say, "Why, that there's a blog!" Or something to that effect. When I started this sort of writing on paper back in the 1970s, I used the Latinate word "journal", because "diary" sounded too sissified to me. And I still keep a journal, and write things in it I wouldn't dream of putting online, or even showing to another person. But for this public short-form venue, "blog" is just fine with me.
Posted at: 01:00 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
Blogtivation
My wife made a comment the other day; when asking me to write something, she said "... and, perhaps, put it on your blog?" And that got me to thinking. Yes, I have a "blog" of sorts, though I've never called it that. It's just a bunch of essays, or more accurately rambles, that I put on the web with great infrequency. I started writing them in 2000, and have created pitifully few in the ensuing nine years.
But these days, blogs are all the rage. I've never been one to do something because it was trendy, but I have been "blogging" for a while now, and have grown accustomed to the semi-standard format in which most blogs are presented, so I figured eh, why not, might as well start using that format.
And after downloading PyBlosxom, borrowing a page style from Andy Todd, and twiddling a bit with my Apache configuration, voila, here's a blog-style blog. My old entries are still available, and maybe someday I'll integrate them into this setup, but for now I can toss off random things and put them online for all to scoff at.
Posted at: 01:00 | category: /Meta | Comments (0)
