Coding Fun

I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before – probably not, considering how infrequently I’ve actually been blogging!

But anyway.  Coding for fun!  Some time last summer (I think) I discovered CodeAcademy and I’ve been playing around on there ever since.  At the moment I’m going through their revised / new Javascript course, even though I’ve already done the original one.  Because I’m a geek and it’s fun.  I’m also working through the “Code Year” track, and I’m planning to do the PHP and Ruby ones after that.

Codeacademy profile
A bit of my profile.

It’s good for keeping my brain in gear. :-)

Mind you, I haven’t done much over, again, the last six months due to wonky-brain issues – more on that another time.  I’ve just started up again this week, though.  Unfortunately, where I picked up was right at the end of the original JS track, and I’d done something weird with my code.  Oops!  I haven’t tracked the bug down yet, but I’ll go back to it later on.  Doing the easier exercises on the new track should help me get my head back into the right place for that.

A decade of blogging

I very nearly forgot altogether, but yesterday was my “blogoversary”.  The tenth anniversary of starting this blog, in fact.


It doesn’t feel like ten years, but then there have been some years where I’ve barely blogged at all, or at least times when I’ve been mostly using Livejournal or similar platforms instead.  As I think I’ve said in previous anniversary posts, this blog has gone through a few changes in terms of its back-end platform – Blogger, Movable Type, and now WordPress – over the last decade.  I feel pretty settled now, though.  And at least I’m managing to post more, if not regularly.

Perhaps with this new blogging year, I should make that a mini-resolution: to pick a day and blog regularly once a week.  After all, if I can blog every day for a month, I can do once a week at the least.  In fact, since it’s Friday today, why not have Friday as my must-post day.  If I can’t think of anything else to say, at least I could do a weekly round up.  Preferably it’ll kick start me (again) into posting more frequently than that.  Right then, I’m going to go off and stop talking about posting, and actually make a start on posting something with Real Content.  Good night.

Things and Stuff

Today has been a day of variety, which has been nice!  I started out by going up to the Christmas fair for Mum’s church – I got there quite late on, so I helped clear up and carry the remaining stuff back up to the church.  I got a few nice cards and nick knacks for gifts, so that was a worthwhile trip.  Then I walked with Mum back to her house for a drink and then a lift home.

On the way up to Mum’s place, I stopped off and did a geocache that was en route.  It took me a bit longer than I’d planned due to me being disorganised with my stuff, but it was still a speedy one.  Not a micro one this time, but a still small one.  So not big enough to put the travelling monkey into, yet.  Poor monkey!  I’ll move him on soon, by hook or by crook!

After visiting at Mum’s for a while, we came back here and had dinner – stir fry followed by cupcakes!  Then Mum went home and I’ve been knitting and watching Strictly Come Dancing.  I’m still working on the Travelling Woman, but hopefully I’ll be done soon.  Maybe tonight?  Maybe tomorrow.

And then I’ve been playing with Blip.fm – I’ve put a widget linking to my account there in the sidebar, and I think it’s possible to play some tracks directly from here?  I’m not sure, I’m still figuring it out.  That’s not what I’m using it for, anyway.  Mostly I’m listening to the songs my friends have playlisted.  Is that even a word?  Probably not, but I know what I mean, and I’m sure you do too.  Anyway, I thought I’d put the widget up here because in the first place I can, and also because I’m trying to get all my web stuff better linked together.  Integrate my web presence.  Oh how pretentious. ;-)

Happy Birthday Noxie!

Today is my lovely friend Noxie‘s birthday, so much love and happy returns to her!  We originally met through both being fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and are still friends twelve years on!  Isn’t the internet grand?

As for me, I’ve spent the day plying and knitting again – some progress made, nothing finished as yet!  Hopefully I’ll have more to report tomorrow.

Two things

Two things I’ve come across on the wide old interwebs have positively warmed my heart recently:

Man builds cat-sized village for homeless cats.  There’s a bloke who went from not really being a cat person, to clearly understanding who’s really in charge.  Like him, I welcome our inevitable feline overlords.

and

Knit-bombed Boris Bikes.  As the original poster comments, maybe not much protection against saddle soreness, but with autumn approaching, a saddle cosy might be just the thing to ward off the misery of a chilly posterior early in the morning!

Can I just say that I rather love the Boris Bikes.  At the moment you still have to apply online for a key card thingy, but even though I hardly ever go up to London I’m quite tempted to do so.  However, by the time I’m up next they might have rolled out the ‘casual use’ scheme, which I think will mean you can do it all directly at the bike stations.  Loads of people seemed to be using them when I was up to see the Proms.  Marvellous!

22: Other Bloggers for Bipolar

I’m not the only person to be blogging for and about bipolar during the Blogathon.  There are more people blogging for other mental health issues too.  I’ve already linked to a couple, but I’m going to do so again because you should visit them, and sponsor them if you can:

You can see the full list of bloggers who are participating on the Blog List at Blogathon.org

—————-
Listening to: Bat For Lashes – Sarah
via FoxyTunes

14: A recommendation

While I’m eating my dinner, can I just point you in the direction of an excellent post that Cia made about ‘normality’.  I’ve been asked a question about this by Ptyx, and I’ll give a bit of my own take shortly.  But I think that Cia says it so much better than I can – you should definitley have a read of “Are you normal?

On Giving In Gracefully

So, back in March I made some bloggy resolutions about what I intended to do for weekly posting goals.  Obviously, I haven’t kept those up… and then I started feeling like I was in catch-up mode all the time with myself, and oh noes, panic!!  Which is bad, since this blog isn’t supposed to be a duty!  Therefore, I have Made A Decision: I’m giving myself permission to “give up”.  In actual fact what that means is that I’m going to forget about Project 365 this year, since taking the photos already wasn’t working out – maybe I can go again another year, but I’ll see how it goes.  I’m still going to do the Friday 5 whenever I feel like it, but not necessarily every week.  I am going to try to post more about knitting and spinning and things in general.  This way, it’s more of an adjustment of my goals to something more realistic, rather than really giving up.

Another thing that I’ve decided to let go of is taking strict part of the Sock Knitter’s Pentathlon ’09.  I haven’t been knitting very fast this year, and I’d ended up knitting nothing but those socks and still not finishing them.  It all got a bit too much like hard work!  So even though I love the patterns for the first two socks, and I really like the look of the third one which has recently been released, I’m not going to start #3.  I do intend to finish the first two socks, but not as my most immediate projects.  Instead I’m going to go back to my other knitting works in progress and try to get those finished off.  They’d been pushed back while I was knitting just socks.  That’s meant that I’ve now almost finished the shawl I’ve been making for Emily (I’m casting off at the moment, but that’s deadly boring so I’m just doing a few stitches at a time then putting it down again *g*).  And I’m really looking forward to picking up the projects I’ve been neglecting and making some real progress on them.  Hooray!  I don’t even feel like starting something new, because my old projects are almost like new ones by now.

I’m also thinking about giving in using Coppermine for my photo album software.  Yes, I’ve been using it for years on this site, so it seemed like a more sensible decision to keep using it and integrate it with WP rather than migrate to something else.  But there’s a good photo album plugin for WP, and the integration plugin for Coppermine doesn’t do precisely what I want it to do – it’s a great plugin, and it’s probably perfect for everyone else… but I’m picky!  Also, I do have to do some tweaking of the source code every time it updates because of the way I have my Coppermine set up, and… well, in the long run it might just be easier to change to using something more integrated with WP.  It’ll mean not having to theme Coppermine to match WP, too.  I’m going to ponder it a while more, but I expect I will change over.

Why am I mentioning this, when no-one but me cares?  Because it kind of fits the theme of the rest of this post: I’ve been hanging on to some things that I should have gracefully given in on a while back.  Letting go and making a few small changes will make things easier.  Note to self: change is good, and giving up on something doesn’t necessarily equate to failure.  There we go, that’s my deep personal insight for the day.  Now I shall stop rambling, let go of this post and send it into the big wide world (= hit the publish button)!  TTFN.

Under the wire

Ooops, only just got this entry done. And I can’t even think of much to say. Um. It’s been a pretty average day, really. A normal one, even. I did housework*, the postman delivered the last parcel I need for Christmas (phew!), I knitted, I even wrapped one present, and I went over to Mum’s this evening. I’ve actually had the computer off for most of the day – most unusual!

I haven’t watched any telly either: we had a yummy Chinese takeaway at Mum’s, then played board games. So I’m going to set the Beeb iPlayer to download the Strictly Come Dancing final shows and Casualty for me overnight, and watch those tomorrow. I very nearly got “spoiled” for the Strictly final, I think, by foolishly looking at my LJ friends page: someone was talking about it, but I only got as far as seeing that she’d mentioned Strictly and hurriedly scrolled back up! *g* Of course, now it’s really tempting to go back and read to find out who won. Or look at any number of news sites. Or Twitter. Oh internets, sometimes you tell me too much! It’s all too overwhelming!! ;-) I’m off to bed!

* although there’s still some to do tomorrow because my brother picked me up earlier than I’d anticipated

Testing Blog It crossposting…

So, after much faffing around, lets see if this really works. Can I post to both my blog and LJ (and Twitter, and the FB feed or status, not sure which yet)? And if so, hi LJ! I’m back!! Well, I’ll try to be at any rate. Obviously right now I’m over here on Facebook, and if you want to add me on that you need to know my real name.

Anyhow, I’m off to do some coding for a site that doesn’t explode my head before I go knitting this evening. So, not my personal site then. Which I really have to sort out, but zomg, trying to integrate the blog and the photo album and the links and all their various templating methods…. why did I think that setting the site up like that was ever a good plan? (Because I didn’t do it all at once, then?) Yet I’m reluctant to abandon MT & Coppermine & Linkster and the hand-coded pages for a single CMS that I’d have to import all that data into because eep, what if I lose something on the way? Oh, it’s all too much like hard work for me. I give up!

Shiny newness

There’s something new around here. What could it be? *g* Nothing all that exciting actually, except a little bit to me in a geeky way: I finally got around to upgrading to Movable Type 4.1. Which is nice. You can’t tell much difference from here, except that the Blogroll didn’t upgrade and so now all my links are a horrible blobby mess. There are a couple of ways I could sort that out, but the quickest might be to go back to using Blogrolling for now.

The actual reason I finally did the upgrade is that I’ve been spending a lot of time playing around on Facebook (and I really do mean playing: I’ve installed a load of irritating page-heavy apps so I can play silly games. Sorry, Facebook flist!) recently. One of the things I installed was the ‘Blog It‘ app, which should let me crosspost to various places including here and my LJ, as well as update my Facebook and Twitter statuses. I know, spammity-spam-spam, make me stop. Anyhow, even though it’s a Six Apart developed app, it doesn’t want to work for this MT blog… and still doesn’t even after the upgrade and me trying a billionty different things. Ah well. So much for that. For now. :-)

If you want to friend me on Facebook, by the way, I should be searchable. I’m using my usual email for this site over there as well, and if you can’t find me with that, drop me a line or a comment here and I’ll send you some more details.

What else was I going to say? Oh yes: it’s WWKIP Day tomorrow, and I’m going to the event in Brighton. Hopefully Ms Charlotte is coming down too. Knitting-wise, I’ve reassessed what’s a current project and what’s hibernated, and I’ve cast on for the February Lady Sweater (actually a cardigan). It’s the first time I’ve tried top-down all-in-one-piece construction, and I’m very excited. No, that’s not sarcasm – I really am! There will be no seams! I might actually finish it relatively quickly instead of finishing the knitting part and then stuffing the parts in a bag to languish for years! Poor poor Chunky Jacket and Menace Jumper. I will finish you one day!