On my way to the office this morning I was sitting in the car thinking about nothing in particular, and in my pre-caffeinated state my thoughts wandered in the direction of why blogging engines like Pivot and Wordpress make me uneasy in weird, peripheral ways, and why I find them so difficult to use, insofar as writing text is concerned. The reason is that they imply a sense of immediacy upon the user writing where sometimes there shouldn't be one.
Let me start off by saying that I'm not trying to bash blogging in general or any one blogging engine …
Well, let me see... it's been interesting times the past couple of days, which has left me precious little time to write about what's actually been going on with my day to day life lately.
First off, early last week Alphonse Elric, Lyssa's primary machine and workstation at home packed it in. One moment he was cunching merrily away, the next utterly locked up. No amount of rebooting or jiggling was able to bring him back online, though we did notice that the components inside of his silver chassis (as well as the exhaust fans and chassis itself) were horribly …
In an earlier entry I pontificated about a number of things, among them not feeling very comfortable using a web browser for some weird-reason to write posts, as I much prefer a dedicated application of some kind.
Sure, it feels weird, but I'm one of those folks who uses the right tool for the right job - I don't use a screwdriver as a can opener, nor do I use a hammer to perform brain surgery (because I don't work helpdesk anymore). So, I've decided to try out a couple of dedicated applications to see if it makes a difference.
Easter weekend is always a busy one. Either we're getting ready to head back to Pennsylvania to spend the day with one or both families, cleaning, cooking, or getting ready to have people over for dinner. As it turned out, we accomplished most of the tasks on that list, as well as a couple that weren't, all in preparation for Grant and his girlfriend to come over on Sunday afternoon for dinner.
The task began on Friday night with a couple of loads of laundry and cleaning up around the apartment, followed by driving over most of creation on Saturday …
Looking over my entries for the past couple of days, I haven't been writing nearly as well as I would have liked, nor about the things that I've been concerned about the most lately. Frankly, I've just been trying to get through the day in one piece, with enough energy left over after I get home to throw a couple of loads of laundry in and relax a bit. You could say that I've had a lot on my mind this week. It's 0831 EST5EDT as I write this; twenty-five hours and counting until I go under the drill at …
I had originally titled a post about last weekend "''I'm tryin' ta think, but nuttin' happens!'' --Curly, The Three Stooges", but a bit of poking around inside the index file generated by my weblogging application revealed that putting a pair of dashes into the title of a post does something that HTML4 doesn't expect - it thinks that they either start or end a comment in a block of HTML. Carefully looking at the frontpage, I could see where the string of posts was broken because there was a post, then part of a post without the headers, then another part …
Parts of the CSS file aren't being read in, which is why the frontpage looks broken. The individual entries' pages seem intact, and everything looks operational from their side of things.
The First Circuit Court of the USA has upheld an important dictate of the Communications Decency Act, which sets a helpful precedent for bloggers and people who run web BBSes. Section 230 of the CDA states that the administrators of public forums which allow people to post are not, in fact, responsible for what their readers or users post. The court case this comes from is Universal Communication Systems v. Lycos, in which people unknown were talking smack on UCS' stock prices. UCS decided to sue Lycos for running the board and not the users of the board (which they …
I'm going to write more in here than in my old memory logs to ease the transition between formats. I figure that I'll cut over to this system on Monday as the grand opening, because last night I uploaded the last images from my photo album and turned them into galleries using a utility from the Gentoo portage collection called mkgallery. At some point I'll get around to turning the commentary from the old index.html files into comments for the galleries. For now, this will suffice.
Anyway, where was I....? On Friday night, Lyssa and I stuck as close …
