Month: December 2011

RSS-Digest could not be re-enabled because it triggered a fatal error. Well then.

I went to Portland for a week for a conference & training; I got sick on my vacation immediately after that; C got sick on our vacation; I almost got sick again when I came back; I had back spasms, and then I was in a car wreck.

About that:

• Two days before Thanksgiving.
• I was not on my bike, I was driving my truck.
• No broken bones or missing limbs. “Okay” is a relative term.
• My truck, on the other hand, was totaled.
• I was turning left with the arrow light. The other guy ran a red coming straight towards me.
• It was pretty much the most terrifying thing I’ve ever experienced.
• I hadn’t been on my bike much before that, and I haven’t biked to work since. Yes, it’s kinda driving me nuts.

So I’m definitely glad to see the Fall come to an inglorious end.

On the plus side, my truck was worth more than I owed on it; both Geico and Group Health have been lovely; the week in Portland was fun and educational; I got a cool new thing to replace the deceased Macbook, and I learned how to knit. Oh, and I’m in a new game group. (I have saved blog posts about those last two things that I really need to post soonish.)

testing from WP app on the transformer. realizing that I have two fairly old posts stored up in here. plus I have not actually written about thecar crash almost a month ago.

I’ve been trying to write here from either my phone or my tablet in the WordPress Android app for several weeks now and keep getting “XMLRPC Fault: parse error. not well formed [code -32700]” in return. So today I turned off all the plugins* (except Akismet & auto-closing comments), which didn’t help right away, but I might give it another try later. If that doesn’t work, I don’t know what’s next. Maybe an error in one of the automatically generated posts? So I’ll write some more from the web interface? Maybe something gone horribly wrong in the theme? (I have updated WordPress to the latest version, FWIW.)

Searching has been of almost no help, so if I do figure out what happened, I’ll post it here.

* Ones I’m suspicious of: Twitter Tools, RSS-Digest, FeedWordPress, Flickr Digest. Basically, anything that posts content for me.

I suppose I should wait until 2012 to post this, but I don’t think the book I’m in this middle of now will be a 5-star (though it is fascinating so far), so I’m going ahead anyway.

Here’s the books I’ve rated as 5-star in Goodreads, in the order I read them, with links to my reviews:

• Half the Sky – this, by the way, was my first library ebook.
• Bird of the River – Kage Baker’s last book, and it totally crushes me that there won’t be any more set in this world. (Which reminds me I need to track down the previous two.)
• The Checklist Manifesto – checklists are awesome!
• The Master Switch – the history of communications technologies from the late 1800s to the present, and the ongoing tension between control and openness. Among other things points out the non-inevitability of openness.
• Nothing to Envy – given the death of Kim Jong Il, totally worth reading. As someone else on Goodreads put it, it reads like post-apocalyptic fiction.
• Stuff – this one hit me very personally, but it’s also very good writing.
• 59 Seconds – kind of self-help-ish, yes, but always with specific recommendations and lots of references.
• Responsive Web Design – very quick read, great graphics, and for a web designer, totally inspiring.

Honorable Mentions:

• The Entire & The Rose series (4 books), which didn’t quite make it to 5-star level, but was very creative and engrossing.
• Bloodlands, which was a bit long/huge, and I got a bit lost in it, but it’s stuck with me all year.
• And some pretty good books about the financial crisis of 2008ish: 13 Bankers, All the Devils Are Here, Aftershock, and Crisis Economics. None quite rose to 5-star for me, but all together they paint a fascinating picture of how our financial system got to catastrophe.

Update, Dec 27: I spoke too soon; I ended up reading one more 5-star book. The Destiny of the Republic is the story of the assassination of President Garfield in 1881. Fascinating characters and great writing, although with some nauseating details. (The book I was reading at the time I originally posted, FWIW, was Inferno: good but not awesome.)