Month: December 2004

last night I had an email from an old friend from college who I hadn’t heard from in a while…in so long that he had my old phone number that got changed nearly 2 years ago, and that I didn’t know that he’d moved to a different state.

not the longest chat ever, but long enough to fill each other in on lots of stuff, a surprising amount of it cat-related. and maybe this time we’ll actually stay in touch. 🙂

(G: this is a not-too-bad way to see what I’m up to of late, though I’m plenty sporadic here, too.)

I’m sitting in a donut shop a few blocks away from Kat’s building, waiting for her to get off of “work”:http://frantikgirl.blogspot.com/2004/11/new-job-top-secret.html …and they have free wifi. trip on that. 🙂 now I just need to keep my fingers crossed that battery life will outstrip time hanging out.

today I’ve had the most walking since the bail: to the store to pick up a few things for treats I made for C’s parents (pound cake for mom, tom ka gai for dad), and then from the downtown bus stop to here. my knee aches like crazy, but I’m ecstatic to be moving again…next, back on the bike!

only problem with all this: their chai is atrocious. I mean really, really bad, and foamy, too. 😛

but it makes a good break from my current reading: “Krakatoa”:http://www.simonwinchester.com/books/k_description.asp — we were at the library a couple of days ago, and it just kinda popped off the shelf at me. fascinating, excellent book, which is a meandering tour of lots of things related to the 1883 volcanic explosion, and then the explosion itself and its aftermath…but it’s also deeply disturbing. 35,000+ people killed, mostly by…tsunami.

yeah, I know, I’m kinda morbid. I was curious, though, and geologic catastrophe holds a special place in my intellectual interests. but I could stand to pull back into today, and my usual reading, for a bit.

while C is playing video games (I think it’s Far Cry now), I’m fussing about with my site, and taking a good hard look at my media diet section….

I’m using a mildly hacked version of oddbook, which I like because it just has the bits that I need for reviewing books and movies, but on the other hand, it’s obviously nowhere near as polished as WordPress, or even LucidCMS (which I’m really enjoying), and some of the ways it works irk me.

which means I have 4 possible solutions:

# keep using it as is and grumble a lot
# hack it to make it bend to my will
# start over, using the same database, but written the way I program/think
# use something different

I’ve been going with (1) for a while, maybe it’s time to try (2)…although if anybody knows of a PHP-driven bit ‘o software for reviewing books/movies, I’d sure appreciate hearing about it. 🙂

(I’m having the same issue with Feed on Feeds, too.)

several things occur to me as I work with photos to post here…

# I love having a card with lots of capacity.
# I need to go back to using “photos”:http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/photos/content.php because I don’t have a good way to review the last 2+ years of digital pix.
# I don’t like my camera anymore: too big & bulky, so I don’t use it as much as I’d like.
# on the other hand, when I am in a picture-taking mood, I take so many that I don’t really absorb them, or even get around to sharing them.
# I felt sort of sad looking at pictures of daisies from last July, for lots of reasons.

The tree:

Piko, in a rare contemplative mood:

and two from my last week of vacation….

My re-worked garden bed:

Piko tried to get in on the action when we were putting fenders on my bike:

I have today and tomorrow as holidays, which is really nice, not least because my office chair was making my knee worse.

we did some cleaning up, laundry, and C did a bit of shopping. (last minute groceries and stocking stuffers) brought the tree in, too…we’ve had the same tree since our first Christmas here, although this may be its last year coming in for the holiday. it looks so pretty with the moss in the base: I had to weed it when it brought it in, but I kept the moss.

I think I’ll wait until tomorrow to put the ornaments on, though; something happily traditional about that for me.

tomorrow I’m going to buy C’s stocking stuffers (I don’t yet know what!!!), bake pumpkin pies, and finish cleaning. probably do a little yardwork, too, if I have the energy and my knee has the stamina.

last night, an old friend of ours, the one who introduced C & I, came into town and over to our house; the three of us and one of our D&D buddies spent the evening playing Axis and Allies. lots of fun…although I was a little weary with the soreness in my knee…we ended at 11 pm with a stalemate. I did get in one excellent attack as the UK, taking Karelia back from the Germans. 🙂

the holidays have often been a time of intense anxiety, but this year I’m feeling…better, even with the stupid annoying injury, even with an unfinished kitchen; I have the holiday spirit, or something.

I finally had a chance to look at my browser stats:

38% unknown (bots, feedreaders, etc.)
30% IE
17% Firefox
5 1/2% Mozilla

which means that there is no majority browser in my world. IE counts for enough that I shouldn’t screw its users over, but the animal-based browsers are definitely a significant minority. also, that the feedreaders are an important audience; the .rdf file for snapping links is the most popular file on my whole damn site. which makes me wonder, because I’ve only ever used summaries (for my own nefarious purposes), whether that’s a problem somehow….

also, I can’t spell factoids.

I’m trying to find my very best friend from junior high & high school. Last I heard, around the time we moved to Olympia, she was going back to southern Cal to live with her mom while she did her residency, IIRC at UCLA Medical. Only when I sent a holiday card to her mom’s old address, it bounced. I did a little research, and the house was sold in September 2003….

Googling doesn’t help, because her name is as anonymous in Vietnamese as my mother’s is in English.

So, if anybody out there knows the whereabouts of a Thao Tran who went to college at Pomona and med school at Johns Hopkins, I’d really like to know. I miss her.

my knee just freaking aches.

looks like I’m in the new zone, and I didn’t need those database backups after all. (the new host was able to get into my old cPanel and do a direct transfer.)