Month: March 2009

Friday 5 for March 27: Turning

The Friday 5 site is back, so here are my answers for this week:

  1. To whom do you normally turn when you need to complain about something?
    Hmm… it probably depends on what it is!  My Mum and my LJ friends-list are the most likely, I think.  Doing a friends-locked post on LJ is really good for getting something that’s bothering me off my chest… I can have a good rant and nobody has to read it / listen to me unless they feel like it!  I do find that just writing something out often makes me feel better about it.  I’ve also got a couple of good friends that I can ring up or chat to online and pretty much go “Arrrrrgh!!!”, and of course they can do the same with me.
  2. Which annual season-turning do you enjoy the most?
    I do like winter to spring because of the lengthening days and mostly nicer weather, but I think my favourite is probably summer into autumn because (a) I love the colours of autumn, and (b) the clocks go back!  Extra hour, yay!!
  3. Where can you get a really good turnover?
    I don’t know, I don’t eat them… although before looking at that Wiki article, I didn’t realise you could get savoury ones.  Or maybe they don’t ever call savoury ones ‘turnovers’ here?   Anyway, I spose if I was going to buy a turnover, I’d either go to the supermarket, or to Wilson’s, a local bakery – they probably have nicer ones.   I’d have to get someone else to judge!
  4. What’s employee turnover like where you work?
    Well, I’m not working at the mo, so… there is none!
  5. One of the Wonder Twins could turn into any form of water, while the other could turn into any animal. Which of these powers would be more useful to you?
    I think I’d turn into any kind of animal, because then I’d be able to turn into birds and fly.  Whee!  (This would completely help with my fear of falling off things, because then if I did I’d be safe!)

PS – Note to self: remember to click the “Publish” button.  Also, go to bed earlier.  The clocks changed, remember?  (D’oh!)

Project 365, attempt no.2!

Well, I was going to do the Friday 5, but I’m getting a 500 error from the site, so I’ll have to try again later. And in the mean time, I’ll post something else I’ve been meaning to get to – my Project 365 photos. This is my second attempt at this – stuff got in the way so I tailed off last year and didn’t finish it properly. So, here I go again. [Click through to see the rest of this]

Well, I was going to do the Friday 5, but I’m getting a 500 error from the site, so I’ll have to try again later.  And in the mean time, I’ll post something else I’ve been meaning to get to – my Project 365 photos.  This is my second attempt at this – stuff got in the way so I tailed off last year and didn’t finish it properly.  So, here I go again.  These are the first two week’s worth, but they’re also up at Flickr in my Project 365 ’09-10 set and in the Project 365 album for this year in the photo album here (you can see the great-big full size versions there).  The next few days of photos are up in those places, too.  I’ll do another post of them on the blog when I have a full week’s worth, then keep posting weekly thereafter.  I hope!!

Anyway, because I’m posting two week’s of pics, I’m doing these as thumbnails.  I’m not sure whether to keep on going like that, or to post the medium size and have the pic titles and some exposition below them, like I did last year.  Thoughts, anyone?

[group:c:s=1][thumb:1093:l][thumb:1094:l][thumb:1096:l][thumb:1095:l][thumb:1097:l][thumb:1098:l][thumb:1103:l][thumb:1099:l][thumb:1100:l][thumb:1107:l][thumb:1101:l][thumb:1102:l][thumb:1105:l][thumb:1104:l][/group]

PS – I think I’m going to give up on using Live+Press for crossposting to LJ for now… there are two main problems with it for me.  The first is an actual bug which should be fixed with the next release (though I don’t know when that is) – if I save a draft post in the WP posting interface, it posts it to LJ, which means I keep accidentally posting half-done entries.  And also, I’m not sure if this is related, but I have to re-select the “No Synch” option (the only way to get round the early posting) every time I open the draft: it’s not saving that option, and it won’t default to it either.  That wasn’t the second issue though – that is an actual feature of the plugin.  I have no way to stop it from crossposting tags into LJ.  Which I do in LJXP, even though it has far fewer features otherwise.  Oh well, no being able to choose my userpics and moods from here, then.  I may change back later, we’ll see how it goes.

Two weeks of Friday 5

Since the site was down for the revamp last week, I’m going to catch up on the last two weeks’ worth of Friday 5 questions:

Friday 5 for March 13: It’s Cold!

  1. What’s your favorite frozen heat-and-eat food?
    Hmmm… that’s actually really hard. There’s this place that does some really nice frozen ready-meals… I like most of theirs, but particularly the duck in orange sauce. Nom!
  2. How sensitive are you to cool temperatures?
    I do feel the cold pretty easily, especially if I’m sitting still at the computer all day!
  3. How many ice-cube trays are there in your freezer?
    None. I have one ice-cube tray, but it’s in a kitchen drawer. I do have a couple of ice-cube bags in the freezer, though. And some frozen blue plastic penguins.
  4. What aspect of your life seems to be frozen in place?
    Hah. My mental health. :-/
  5. What’s your favorite blanket like?
    I spose this means ‘favourite blanket for snuggling under on the sofa when it’s cold’… in which case I’ll say one of my fleece blankets because they’re light but warm and good for keeping me cosy. But really the blanket of mine that I love best is the wool tartan one that I got in Edinburgh and kept in my car when I still had that. I don’t use it so much now cos I don’t want it to get covered in cat hair!

Friday 5 for March 20: Quarterly Progress Check

  1. Would you say 2009 so far is meeting expectation, exceeding expectations, or failing to meet expectations?
    So far, 2009 has been fairly not-happening for me. Which is the fault of how I’ve been rather than the year itself. When I’ve been well enough to engage with life, there have been good things going on, so I’d say it’s technically exceeding expectations, since mine are so low right now anyway!
  2. What letter grade would you give yourself for your performance at work or school?
    Not that I’ve been to either, but for my performance in life so far this year: a big, fat F for FAIL.
  3. On a scale from 1 to 10, how happy have you been with the weather so far in 2009?
    Other than a couple of periods of wtf (giant! hail! the other night!!), I think it’s been OK. My brain is like a sieve though, so I might be forgetting. It is still the winter (or has it edged into spring now?) so of course it’s not all sunshine and roses, but that’s as it should be. I’ll give it an 8.
  4. Which of the Motion Picture Association of America’s film ratings would you give your social life so far in 2009?
    Almost entirely a “G” – family time, knitting and spinning groups, hanging out with Ally and baby H, and perhaps a “PG” during that weekend that Char came to visit and we discovered that Robert Downey Jnr in Ironman is the best thing evah, etc. It’s been quiet.
  5. 2009’s parents are on the phone and want to know how 2009 can improve its performance. What have been 2009’s areas of strength and what are its areas for growth in the second quarter?
    Uh, Um. Business speak, send help, cannot cope! (Off to Mordor) Alright, not really. Areas of strength have been opportunities for learning new skills (spinning). I guess areas for growth will be getting my brain back in gear? That’s definitely something that needs doing.

Tadaa: it’s version 4

Version 4 of the site is done at last: all moved over to wordpress, and with a nice springlike design – Sheep in a Field by Nikki Jeske. It feels a little bit like cheating, using a theme by someone else, but I couldn’t resist because look: SHEEEEEEEEP! I have done some tweaking to make it work exactly how I wanted it to, especially since I’m using WP pretty much as a CMS for the whole site.

Anyway, I hope everything is working – please do let me know if you come across something that’s broken!

See you on the other side…

And now, the end is here, And so I face the final curtain, My friend, I’ll say it clear, I’ll state my case, of which I’m certain

Yup, the time has come. Not the end of the blog, of course, just the end of this chapter of it! After this post I shall be importing all the entries from my Movable Type blog installation into the new WordPress one. Once I’ve done that, I think I’ll still have to manually edit in the tags, and set up some page redirections, but everything else should come on over.

(I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway)

What that means from an ‘outside’ POV will be a period of radio-silence (so nothing new there, then!!) during which time the MT installation will still be up and running. Then the whole site will go down for a short time while I make the final changeover, and then ta-daaaaa: new site version! It’s taken me longer than I thought, but the new site will be omg so much easier to run and update, so it’s worth it. Hooray!

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew, When I bit off more than I could chew, But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out, I faced it all and I stood tall and did it myyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy way!

TTFN :-)

Friday 5 for March 6: On This Date

I know I said the bloggy resolutions were for the ‘new’ version of the site, but there’s no time like the present and all that. I need to try and start getting into good habits asap… and also, there might be a bit of radio silence soon when I get to the point where I need to move the blog entries over.

So here we go – even though it’s a few days late, the Friday 5 for March 6th:

1. On March 6, 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev presented the first Periodic Table of the Elements to the Russian Chemical Society. What memories do you have of your high-school chemistry course?
My most vivid memory would be of Mr G injuring himself during a demo, yelping “Shit!”, then changing it to “Er, ship! I saw a ship sailing past. The window. In the air….” It ended up as a bit of a running joke that year, if I remember right. I also remember moles. Mooooooooole!

2. On March 6, 1899, the Bayer company registered aspirin as a trademark. When did you last take medication for pain?
Last week. I think it was the weather – I had a headache that just wouldn’t leave, so I was taking some ‘Extra Power Pain Reliever’ tablets, which are the same as Anadin Extra, only the generic version from Sainsbury’s.

3. On March 6, 1853, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata premiered in Venice. How do you feel about opera?
As a general rule, I love opera. Of course there are some that I like more that others, and some that I’m not really keen on. Like any other music, it varies. But generally, I love listening to it, I love attending performances where possible, and I love singing it. La Traviata is actually one of my favourites, and I was lucky enough to see the production at the Royal Opera House when I was at uni, with Sir Georg Solti conducting, and Angela Gheorghiu debuting as Violetta. Completely fabulous.

4. On March 6, 1947, American film director Rob Reiner (Meathead!) was born. Which of these Reiner-directed films have you seen, and what do you think of them?
To make it quick, I shall cross out the ones I haven’t seen, and make brief comments by the ones I have:

  • The Bucket List (2007)
  • Rumor Has It… (2005)
  • Alex & Emma (2003)
  • The Story of Us (1999) – ummm… I’m sure I’ve seen this, but I can’t remember what I thought of it!
  • Ghosts of Mississippi (1996)
  • The American President (1995) – liked this one, though it’s been a while since I’ve seen it.
  • North (1994)
  • A Few Good Men (1992) – eh.
  • Misery (1990) – good… but not half as creepy-scary as the book.
  • When Harry Met Sally… (1989) – I remember I wasn’t sure about this for the first half of the film, but it grew on me and I really liked it by the end.
  • The Princess Bride (1987) – ♥♥♥♥♥!!!!!
  • Stand by Me (1986) – kind of makes me go “awwww”.
  • The Sure Thing (1985)
  • This Is Spinal Tap (1984) – is made of awesome!

5. On March 6, 1972, American basketball-player Shaquille O’Neal was born. How do you feel about basketball?
I have no feelings about it, particularly. I spose I enjoy it as a tv spectator sport more than some others, but I’m not really into sports in general. I did quite enjoy netball at school and I think we played a bit of basketball in senior school too, but that’s as near as I’ve really got. I have more of a grasp of the rules that I do of baseball, American football, or even proper football, mind you!

Bloggy Resolutions

This is a bit of a strange time to be doing this, since I’m about to import the whole blog to a new system, and who knows what will happen… but I’ve decided to make those blog resolutions that I was thinking about back when I tried the BloPoMo thingy. Assuming all goes well (and right now, it looks like it should!), a NewNew Blog should be the perfect time to start a NewNew blogging habit to go with it. Especially since the new setup makes things like importing from my photo album, and crossposting to LJ, all the easier.
So, this is what I resolve. I will:

  • Re-start / resume Project 365, which faltered in about August last year… then picked up again for a bit, but ultimately didn’t make it the whole year. I’ve started taking the photos as of yesterday. Like I said above, the new blog (WP with the Coppermine Integration plugin) will make inserting photos from the gallery quicker and easier, so I should be able to keep up with the whole thing without a whole load of fiddly copy-pasting and so on.
  • Be more structured in my posting in general – start doing the Friday Five again, for example, so that I know that I have specific things to be posting about, rather than a big blank space to fill with randomness. Not that randomness is bad… I just want more of a mixture of, er, stuff.
  • Therefore, try to be posting 2 – 3 times a week:
    1. A weekly Project 365 update.
    2. The Friday Five, or some other meme or similar that makes me think a bit.
    3. And most importantly, knitting / spinning / other stuff content. All the stuff I usually post, but more regularly, and with photos more often, and … things. Hopefully some things about the course I’m starting soon on Bipolar. We’ll see how it goes.

I think all that’s do-able and should be fun. I have to get the new website version up and running first, of course, but I pretty much have all the background stuff for that done now. It’s just a matter of importing the content from the old site version and making any edits that I want… and there are bound to be lots of those since I haven’t done any actual updates on this site in forever. The thing that will probably take the longest will be importing the several hundred entries from this blog – I’ve actually already done the old-old one (“So Far So Good”) and that went well enough. I’m trying to decide what to do about redirecting the old pages to the new ones… it’s going to be fiddly so I think I might not bother on the most part. This is hardly a big-name website, after all. My own internal links can be done gradually and I can set up some redirections for pages I know have outside links, like my Knitting Patterns category. If I find I get a lot of hits looking for anything in particular, I can sort it out then. I think that’s the most stress-free way of going about it.

Fibrey goodness

Recently, I’ve been spinning as much as knitting. Jo has lent me her spare spinning wheel which is an Ashford Kiwi and I’ve been having lots of fun with it. I still need lots of practice, and so far I’m using some of the fibre that came with my drop spindle. There’s no fear of me running out of stuff to spin, though: even before Jo lent me her wheel, I had some of the yummy fibre from her Etsy shop. I now have six 100g-ish braids of hers, and I’ll post some pics here soon. Not right now though, because I’m about to upgrade my photo gallery as a prelude to the whole site upgrade – which should be quite soon now! I’ve got some really gorgeous colours in BFL and Merino, and the Merino/Tencel is even more delicious, but you’ll just have to take my word for it until the upgrade is all done and dusted.

In other Etsy news, my friend Rae has opened her Etsy shop, Angel Rae Arts. She’s selling some very cool (and cute) fridge magnets. I love the buried treasure one (which is from a photo taken when she was visiting me a few years ago!), and also the caffeinated cat one (painted) which really reminds me of the Xandermog. *g* The original one’s been sold already, but she’s done some more that aren’t identical, but very similar. Yay!