in which I write about stuff
(this comes with a four-shelf bookcase)
in Oly or the Puget Sound? make me an offer. (why do I want to get rid of this stuff? hand-me-downs that don’t quite fit our style; they’re in darn good condition. except for the desk/bookcase, which were a gift, but don’t quite work with my computer setup; they’re still in decent condition, though.)
so this is what happened – my web host was moving stuff from one set of servers to another, and I got a notice a couple of weeks back that this was going to happen. however, I procrastinated, and then forgot, and then one day my site was just, well, gone. had to change the DNS entry, which meant finding my domain host account info, and then discovering that – oh crap – my domain name had actually expired, and I hadn’t known because they had an email address that I’d since thrown to the wolves. so, renewed, changed DNS, now looking through my backups such as they are to see what I’ll be able to do.
– design is no big deal; yay for PHP and templates.
– this blog also no problem; oddly, yay for centralized services
– static pages I change so rarely, and had updated when I last changed my template, so again, nothing to worry about
– Movable Type blogs (Snapping Links and Media Diet), on the other hand….I don’t remember if I actually exported when I last backed up, or just saved the files. I’m also not too sure about when I last did that, or if you can reimport the HTML, etc. eventually they’ll return, probably with a few items missing. most irritating to me is being absolutely certain that Ralph’s really neat comment about Robert Wright is gone. 🙁 That, and a huge linkfest that I never actually published.
what I should do, this time, is create a good 404 page, because after the last couple of years of moving hosts, redesigning, trashing, etc., I’m sure there are lots of past URLs that are no more.
– Moore’s Law and Communications
– Chinese Learn True Scope of SARS from the Internet
– Local Weblogs… (stupid title.)
– David Brinkley Dead at 82 (the voice of Sunday morning.)
The green leaves spread over the windows, until all the light that came into the room had itself a greenish tint, bathing the desk and the woman in the office chair in dim but luminous light, like the light in a primeval jungle.
She hadn’t left the chair, except to hobble to the bathroom, in days and days. Well, she had taken a few naps on the green vinyl lounge in the corner, when she couldn’t keep her eyes open any more, but somehow that didn’t count.
Plates of food appeared on top of the scanner and were taken away, picked over. Mugs of tea and tall glasses of lemonade sat at her left hand until they were empty, that same quiet figure picking them up to be washed. Even the plants were tended in her virtual absence as they grew more massive and abundant, fern fronds curling around the corners of the monitor.
She didn’t see any of it, her eyes dilating unnoticed in the dimming light around the poisonous flickering glow of the screen. Bursts of typing flew out of her long gnarled fingers, until she paused to snap crackle grind the bones and tendons back into place. The text editor grew long lines of words that weren’t words, Courier New typeface unfolding even more lushly than the pothos and philodendron.
The program was writing itself through her, or so she would’ve said if anyone had asked – so she said in one of her breaks from coding, typing just as furiously into the textarea of the blog editor window. The little breaks for weblog reading, dashing hither and yon in her long list of links, only fed the code. Everything reminded her of something she’d wanted to include, or something that absolutely needed to go in which she’d never thought of before.
Halfway through, she’d realized it was written all wrong, and taken two days to untangle the long strands of misshapen functions with their illogical assumptions, rewriting what she had into a clean masterpierce of modular code, like an idealized apartment of the mid-20th-century, all sleek white plastic and aluminum tubing. But now even that mini-masterpiece (as she’d seen it at the time) was redisintegrating into a gothic mess.
She cracked her neck and closed her eyes, the color-coded text and white background reversed on the inside of her eyelids.
(spurred by David W’s trip to Europe)
(according to my old notes, taken in Badgastein, wherever that is.)
(my DIY haircut. possibly the height of my dorkiness.)
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