Katherine Mankiller

I can has Debian.

Yeah, I realized yesterday that the Ubuntu upgrade had blown away my old xorg.conf, and that the new one didn't appear to know that I had a video driver at all. I considered digging it out of backups, but no, I'm too lazy. Debian. And I restored my old home, so all my bookmarks, etc., are still good. Apparently, I restored flash, too, 'cause I'm celebrating by watching videos on YouTube. ;)

And now, food.

Annoyed.

My newly upgraded Ubuntu 8.04 box continues to boot to a black screen from a cold boot. Sure, I can go into recovery mode and then it works when I reboot, but I don't really want to fix my machine every time I boot it. And I'm still not alone.

My commitment to Ubuntu is pretty weak right now, so unless I fix this soon this machine is going Debian Etch. I'm just sayin'. I'll try the vesa driver in xorg.conf, but of course when I reboot it'll work. It's just the cold boot that's black. *shakes head* It's a kernel driver, it's got to be.

Ubuntu Hardy, the morning after.

I woke up--slept in, 'cause I was up late upgrading--wandered over to the computer, and pressed the power button. It ran through the startup process into a black screen.

Meh.

Luckily, escape at the grub menu, running the recovery mode, and picking xfix solved my problem. It looks like I'm not alone, so, you know. Word to the wise.

Also, Firefox 3 won't take my del.icio.us extension, but I can use the bookmarklet.

*chews fingernails*

One of my other machines is busily upgrading from Ubuntu 6.06 (Dapper) to 8.04 (Hardy). I did both a full backup and a backup of home first, just in case anything ends up hosed. Yikes.

No, I don't live dangerously. ;)

Sadly, Ubuntu has discontinued their PPC support. I may have to install Debian Etch on that system instead. *pets Debian*

Why, yes, I should be writing on my novel instead. This is worse than bungee jumping! Not that I bungee jump, but you know.

Want to be part of an experiment?

Question: Do free ebooks help or hurt paper book sales?

Tor is offering free ebooks if you sign up with their newsletter here. They offer a different one each week--this week is Scalzi's Old Man's War. (If you want it and missed it, ask a friend--the email says "tell a friend" but I don't know if they want me to, you know, post the links here, so I won't.) The first one was only in PDF, but this week's is in PDF, HTML, and Mobi version (yay, my PDA is so happy!).

If you hurry, you might still be able to get Scalzi's book. Next week's won a Hugo (SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson).

Yes, yes. You have to get their newsletter. But they pay you to receive it--in ebooks!

And, you know, if you really like the ebook and want to do something nice for the author, then you can buy a paper copy. If you don't want your paper copy, you can give it to a friend you think would like it, or to a library or bookcrossing. You don't have to, but if you do you can help provide data that contradicts the idea that ebooks are the END OF DAYS FOR AUTHORS ZOMG, and maybe publishers and authors will make more of 'em, and then we'll live in an ebook utopia. It could happen.

Fear my geek-fu.

I found a missing angle bracket in the comment table template that was conflating the "not spam" and "empty" buttons on the spam comment listing on MT 4.1. Line 24 of comment_table.tmpl should read:

title="<__trans phrase="Report Selected Comments as Not Spam and Publish (j)">"

The > near the end was missing.

Web Dorking

I upgraded Movable Type to the latest version. It was a security thing. You shouldn't notice a difference.

It was pretty much painless aside from the part where fastcgi doesn't work with the upgrade script. Once I figured that out all was love.

They're supposed to have a personal license of Movable Type Community Solution, which I find oddly exciting because I like to pretend that someday I'll have comments and shit, and y'all'll want forums. Hey, it could happen! But until then, you know. Eh.

If you find borked stuff, let me know.

Merry Consumermas!

With a couple of caveats, this is a great cellphone. Basically, it's cute and full of Dick Tracy fun, but it's also a cellphone only a geek could love sometimes.

Pros:

• Fun.
• Cute.
• Your phone is always handy on your wrist. No more beeperlepsy!
• It comes with bluetooth, so you don't have to talk into your watch if you don't want to.
• You can talk into your watch if you want to!
• It can also play mp3s and videos.

Cons:

• Weak antenna--I have trouble getting a signal some places, sigh.
• Mine came with W32/RJump pre-installed for my convenience.
• I've managed to crash the WAP browser a couple of times. I hear this is SOP for WAP browsers. *shrug*
• 120 character limit on text field entry, but unless you have good eyes for the tiny onscreen keyboard or patience for the handwriting recognition, that might not be a problem for you.

Things that may be a positive or negative depending on your personal taste:

• The anime graphics that come with the phone are really cute. I didn't expect to like them, because I'm not always the biggest fan of cute, but I do! If you're, to quote Think Geek, "Mr. Super Manly Man who is a afraid of a little cute," well... YMMV.
• The phone works with AT&T and T-Mobile, but you have to set up your own WAP settings or there will be no web surfing for you on the teeny tiny screen. I found setting up WAP fun, so this was a positive for me, but I'm a geek.

The manual reads like someone took the Chinese version and ran it through Babelfish. I find the result amusing but not very informative. A random example: "Do not put battery at machine impactive places, and poke battery with hard things."

As for the W32/RJump, it's a Windows executable, so the cellphone itself wasn't infected, and if you use linux or Mac you can't catch it (but delete autorun.inf, RavMon.exe, and Ghost.pif anyway). If you run Windows, update your antivirus. It's delivered through Generic!atr, and virus definitions have been able to catch that for over a year. (It's a worm that spreads itself through removable media. The cellphone watch acts as removable media to allow you to copy your multimedia files over, so it's possible someone just tested it on an infected machine.)

If you want to see the watch in action, this guy is trying to sell 'em on eBay in English. There's also a Chinese demo that shows the handwriting recognition, and an Italian demo that shows the menus.

Overall? Four paws and a wireless access point up.

Gadget lust!

Check it out! It's a teeny tiny laptop that runs linux. I could even carry it in my purse if I bought a bigger purse. I fondled one at the store today. People kept asking me if I needed help. No! Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script!

I could probably even install subversion on it. I could also upgrade the RAM, but if I did I would need to buy this shirt to go with it.

I have a perfectly good laptop, by the way. This one is just cool.

Things you can learn from a grrl's purse.

You can learn things about a grrl from what's in her purse. Here's some of what's in mine:

1. Two Epi-Pens.
2. Two inhalers.
3. Puppy linux CD
4. Knoppix S-T-D CD
5. Cellphone.
6. PDA.
7. Screwdriver.
8. Thumb drive.
9. Pens.
10. Titanium spork from Think Geek.

What do you carry around with you?

More geeky things.

Fairly random, but:

Geeky cakes. So cool!

Wikipedia entry on unusual software bugs, including Heisenbugs and Schroedinbugs.

I love being a geek.

Nerd stuff.

I was having this problem. Moving the mt-static directory to the top level of my webspace fixed it. If you're getting a funky error on the comment page about whether you're logged in or not, log out and log back in.

In other news, I'm using this site's outline helper to make my outline suck less. Thus far it's helping, even though it didn't want to work on linux, sigh.

In other other news, Amy's Macaroni and Soy Cheeze is yummy. Mmm. Tasty soy goodness!

Site upgrade!

Movable Type 4.0. Better authentication. I've only changed one template to take advantage of that, but I may randomly break stuff while dorking around over the next few days. Don't worry if something's broken; I'll fix it.

Because I hate spam so much, comments are moderated unless you're a trusted authenticated user. Sorry. On the other hand, cleaning spam off my dead pet entries feels like scrubbing spray paint off their tombstones. Special circle in hell. Buried in pet feces for all eternity. If you're not spam, I'll approve you.

Also, there's this new thing spammers do where they post faux emo crap with their links. "I don't think I can go on anymore nothing matters!" with a link to Viagra. This girl is so depressed that her boyfriend can't perform that she's going to end it all? I ask you. Besides, I generally don't get emo comments, so they stand out in the queue.

As you were.

In Nerd News

I've upgraded the site to MT3.34 with FastCGI. You probably won't notice unless you comment, but I can tell and that's what matters! To me, at least!

Seriously, it's cool. Trust me.

I also made my URLs prettier, as they were pretty darned ugly. I've been putting that off, not wanting to break links, but to the best of my knowledge no one links to any individual entries but Brian. If you're a stealth linker, sorry 'bout that.

No, I'm not procrastinating from NaNoEdMo, why do you ask? (I'm not. Upgrading the site is my reward for good behavior!)

Laptop switch from Ubuntu to Debian Etch.

Geek post!

I'd been using Ubuntu on my Acer Aspire 3624WXCi laptop for about a year now. I really enjoyed my Ubuntu experience until I fell victim to this obnoxious bug. It took a while to manifest itself, too; the problem seemed to get worse every time they upgraded the kernel. Finally, I couldn't launch a web browser without pointing a fan at the bottom of the machine.

Um, no. Thanks for playing.

I have good backups, and also store all my writing in subversion, so I wasn't particularly nervous about moving to a new distro. I just couldn't take the overheating bug any more.

I decided that I wanted Debian, because 1. I love APT dearly, and 2. one of the guys on the bug page said his laptop dual booted Debian and Ubuntu, and didn't overheat under Debian. Alas, I tried Debian Sarge on this laptop when I first got it, and it didn't support the video driver (yes, Sarge is too old to have the i810 driver), so I knew I'd need Etch. I also happened to have an Etch install CD, but Debian kind of broke the Etch install CD because their PGP signing key expired. Oops.

I tried using the Sarge CD and running an immediate "apt-get dist-upgrade" to upgrade to Etch, but something was very wrong. Not only did X not work, which the dist-upgrade warned me about, but I had some kind of error message on booting about how some of the modules were newer than the kernel, or something like that. Apparently, they're very close to making Etch Stable rather than Testing, and maybe the upgrade is, ahem, still in progress. Debian suggests you download and burn a daily or weekly CD and use that, but I didn't want to do that. See, the machine with the CD burner was the one that was hosed. So I tried the CD Debian said was busted. Guess what? It's busted. (Surprise! not.) When you get to the downloading from the mirrors, you get a sad red screen and end up with a freshly partitioned hard drive with no software. Alas.

At this point I could have asked my boyfriend to burn me a daily or weekly on his laptop. He was watching Supernatural at the time, though, and it's just not very butch. I mean, really. Asking my boyfriend to burn me a CD? What's next, getting him to open the pickle jar for me?

Ahem. If you're secure in your masculinity, maybe you should download a daily or weekly like Debian suggests. If, like me, you have problems with your masculinity because you're a girl, or just because, read on.

If you use the busted Etch install CD and tell it not to use a mirror, it gives you the hairy eyeball and tells you you will have a very minimal system and are you sure? Say yes. Reboot.

Log in (you weren't expecting a GUI, were you?) as root. Add

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free
deb-src http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ testing main contrib non-free

to /etc/apt/sources.list using vi.

I got around the key expiration thing using this page; I think I had to use apt to install apt-key without a valid signature first ("apt-get install apt-key"). It whined and complained but it did it. At that point, I was able to use gpg to get the key, export it, and import it into apt-key.

Yay! it works. Do an "apt-get update" and an "apt-get -u upgrade" to get all the new stuff.

I then did an "apt-get install xorg" followed by an "apt-get install gnome", but I'm pretty sure you could just install gnome and it should get xorg for you (because apt rocks). You could probably "apt-get install kde" as well, although I didn't try it. I then had a shiny GUI and could use Synaptic to install other software I wanted, like Iceweasel (LOL!). I also did this to get my wireless card working.

Anyway, if you're crazy like me and want to do this, good luck! My laptop is no longer overheating, so it was worth it. I guess we'll see exactly how good my backups are after tonight's NaNoEdMoing.

OpenID--it's ba-ack!

Thanks to Mark Paschal (the author of OpenID Comments for MT), OpenID is back. I'll probably never know why Brian's OpenID stopped working--my guess is that it's just borked--but the LJ account I was using to test was missing a piece in the database.

If you can't log in, let me know.

I'll probably leave things open so people like my sister can comment, unless I decide OMGWTFBBQ!!!! i cant take teh spam any more!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111! At least MT 3.33 has an "empty entire junk folder" button.

Lo, I hath toiled in the codebase of Ahimelech!

The Parable of the Managers. Goest thou, oh managers of IT, and learnest thou the truth of the way of the profit. For I hath toiled in the codebase of Ahimelech, and many times I hath reverse-engineered and finished the undocumented projects of those servants who hath in a huff departed, and the Parable speaketh the truth.

(No more do I serve Ahimelech; verily I hath forsworn the entirety of the private sector to avoid him.)

Geek Envy Redux

Because I had geek envy, I upgraded my version of Movable Type. Thus far it looks like it was completely painless. Of course, I did RTFM first. ;)

Hopefully you won't notice at all.

Geek Envy

Brian migrated his site to Drupal. I have geek envy. If I had any content other than my blog, I'd consider migrating myself. Just for fun, you know. Because I want to play with the geek toy!

But no. I'm sticking with Movable Type for now, because I'd rather bake than fry.

Die, OpenID, die.

Apparently, OpenID mysteriously quit working with LJ. I'll assume that's why I haven't received any comments since September.

Comments are moderated because of spammers. Specifically, it's because there is a special circle in hell for people who spam my dead pet entries with ads for bestiality porn. In fact, I think it's the circle where they're buried in excrement for all eternity. Preferably cat shit.

(Yes, I know they haven't actually read the entries they're spamming. That doesn't make me feel any better.)

Anyway, if you sign up with TypeKey and authenticate and post non-spam comments, I'll know you're not a spammer and will whitelist you. Sorry.

Possibly eccentric decision.

At least, it made Brian give me a weird look. ;)

I'm considering doing all my composing in plain text rather than Open Office or AbiWord. Why?

• More portable--easier to sneak in work on other machines (*coughcough*the office*cough*).
• I won't need to convert the story to text to submit it to Critters or my email-based crit group.
• This way I get the full benefit of all of subversion's features, including diff and conflict resolution. Plain text also takes up less room in subversion's repository.
• Zippier performance--I noticed a significant drag in saving my NaNovel.

It's really the subversion benefits that convince me. I've already had to resolve a conflict with a binary file. Ugh. I'd really rather not do that again, but knowing me, I will.

Dear Critters,

Please come back up soon. I'm jonesin' here! Must... do... this week's... critique!

*mouse hand twitches convulsively over refresh button*

Love,
Me

Version control, don't fail me now!

Somehow, the story I sent Ann Crispin was missing a line I thought was in there. No wonder she didn't notice it. ;) It must be part of the conversion from Open Office format to rich text format. Note to self: Do not maintain too many versions of a story in too many formats. When sending it out, I need rich text and plain text. That's it. More versions means more chances to screw up.

D'oh!

So, gee, Katherine, where've you been?

Getting my gallbladder hacked out. I'd hoped, in my naïevete, to get some writing done in the week off work. But no. I also thought that I'd finish an involved novel critique I'm doing for someone, and that was also Not Meant To Be. I should get crackin' on that, actually.

In nerd news, I upgraded the SO's Movable Type installation.

Coping with novel anxiety.

I actually have... an outline. And the motivational spreadsheet of doom to track my wordcount. And... version control. Yes, version control, like programmers use. Why, yes, I am a geek. But I could have used version control sooner--I realized at one point that I'd been sending out copies of "Corporate Oversight" that had an error I'd corrected about six months previously, only I'd also overwritten the file with an old version. Ouch.

I wrote 500 words on Lizardfic the Novel today--well, some of those were pasted in from Lizardfic the short story, but... close enough. I just felt like it.

I also added some minor script tweaks the SO suggested. One word change and one short scene.

And now, bed.

Yikes.

I may be writing a novel.

I received some crits for lizardfic today, and one of the critiquers agrees with Brian that the story might work better at novel-length. I suspect they may be right.

Of course, I don't have time right now. I need to finish this script. But after, I need to plan this one out. I'm considering doing it during NaNoWriMo, for the support. Which makes me wonder if they're doing NaNoFiMo again this year.

Speaking of the script, it's still going slow. And that's what I should be working on now.

Must. Finish. Script.

The last pages of my script are just grinding out like cement. I don't know if it's laptop death trama and the associated rebuild/migrate/etc., the distraction of the new Precious, being busy at work, all of the above, none of the above...

In short, I'm not writing. There must be writing. There needs to be script.

In other news, the cats ate my Navajo loom. In other, other news, fie on Quicken, for I have migrated to something that runs on linux.

*flail flop spazz flail twitch BOUNCE!*

Final Draft 6 works out of the box under wine with the current version of Ubuntu. Including authorization. *weeps for joy*

Oh, my darling Final Draft! I've missed you so much! *sob, hug, sob!*

Oh, and speaking of Ubuntu? I'm now a True Believer [TM]. Recognized all my hardware out of the box.

Excuse me. I need to go kiss my laptop.

Complications Ensue

Um. Yeah. Laptop died.

I kind of took the opportunity to go linux. Which means I had to import the script into Celtx, which I just don't love as much as Final Draft. I'll probably try to get Final Draft to work under wine as soon as I fix the video card, which is a bit cranky. Cranky video cards are common to my Debian experience. Everything else seems to work (well, I haven't tried the modem, but...), including wireless. Yay, wireless! MadWifi is my friend.

I managed to get the old laptop to boot enough to pull the last bit of data off, but I'd really rather not use that machine as a primary writing machine any more. It just isn't reliable.

I'd lost maybe a page or two of the script, but recovered that file as well. The question is whether or not I want to import that into Celtx as well. My first thought is, "*facepalm!*" so...

Script progress

Twelve pages today, which just about makes up for all the slacking I did this last week. That puts me at sixty pages. Estimating a minimum length of ninety pages, that means I'm 66.7% through.

Getting some good advice helped. I may tweak on that 60 pages later.

I had one of those word meter things here for about two minutes. Not only are they not valid XHTML strict, they come out mangled on the page. Probably because they're not valid XHTML strict. ;)

This is me, working on my script.

No, really! You believe me, don't you?

Yeah, well. Maybe you shouldn't.

I'm tired, and stressed out, and have a headache, and, you know, insert a million more excuses to not write here.

I'm doing better with exercise, but exercise is easier than writing. Programming is easier than writing. I can write fairly difficult programs half-asleep, but I have to be awake and alert to write. Installing linux is easier than writing. It's just so tempting to unwind a bit by doing all these easier things instead of writing. But no, I have a script to write, and as soon as I stop whining I'll go do that. ;)

Okay. Three pages. If I'm really good, maybe I should treat myself after by installing linux on some of the spare hard drive space on my laptop.

I need help.

I was stressed out after work last night, so I decided to unwind by converting my site from XHTML Traditional to XHTML Strict. *facepalm*

The most obnoxious part was going back and finding invalid markup in old entries and changing it. I think I've found it all. I even found a popup window I'd failed to spork--horrors! Die, popups, die!

I'm such a nerd.

And I really should have been working on my script.

Website Tweak

I updated the Bibliography page to make it shinier. Now with scripts and excerpts/loglines!

Of course, making it display all purty and still validate over at W3.org was exciting. I'm still not sure I like the italics, but I want to offset the excerpts from the regular text, and smaller text was just too small. Everything else I think of strikes me as gauche. I'll ponder it further.

Linux Love

I installed linux on one of my home machines. Oh, the love! The fast, the pretty, the thrill of smug accomplishment when I make it recognize my video card. (Um. Yeah. I ♥ solving problems; it's fun for me.)

I've nearly switched to linux several times; the biggest sticking point is Quicken. I'm addicted to Quicken, and I'm not alone. Final Draft apparently doesn't run, either, and that would be sad. And I'm not sure what I'd use instead of the Athlete's Diary. Everything else, I can probably find a replacement.

That's really not much, and it's all my personal software. And I'm deeply, deeply vexed that Dell's factory install of XP fails Genuine Windows Validation on my work machine. (I would have wiped and reinstalled--I usually do--but I had a line of people wanting stuff from me RIGHT THEN OMG!!!!, and now it's this big thing and I don't have time for it). The day M$ cuts me off from windows updates until I reinstall (like they're threatening to do), I'm likely to install linux instead. *shakes fist*

Site updates

I added some stuff to the site, including OpenID authentication, and sporked the popup windows. Let me know if you find any bugs.

What I did:

• Pulled out the only PHP page--the front one--which was only running browser detection to serve up the Netscape 4 stylesheet. My sister no longer uses Netscape 4, and I don't think I should be enabling anyone else who is. (Nasty, tricksy Netscape 4.x CSS implementation! We hates it, we does!) Besides, it's better to bake then fry, as a link I got from Bill says.
• Comments and trackbacks used to launch popup windows. They don't any more. Die, popups, die!
• OpenID. I had to edit the javascript that comes with MT3.2 to refer to OpenID, but that was trivial.
• I used to close comments on entries older than 3 weeks. I turned comments back on for my older entries. I don't know why you'd want to comment on my old entries, but you can if you log in first.

<wistful>Is anyone ever going to send me a trackback other than spammers?</wistful>

Note to self.

Apparently, what one does when one doesn't know what happens next in a story is upgrade Movable Type to version 3.2. (Mmm, yummy new antispam features!)

And, of course, resist the urge to say, "But I don't want that to happen, that's awful!" Sigh. Someday I'll really internalize the enablers that say, "Can you make your story a little more horrific?" It's hard, though. Especially when your father was a psych major. ;)

*gibber*

I'm trying to exercise more, mainly so I feel like less of a slug. Lots of people (Orson Scott Card, etc.) recommend exercise for authors on the grounds that it's hard to force lively prose out of a sluggish, tired body, and it's true. I may have to buy a copy of The Athlete's Diary on the grounds that obsessive record-keeping inspires me to greater effort. (You should see the Motivational Spreadsheet of Doom I wrote for the SO and my friend Milly.) Right now it's a pathetic ten minutes on the exercise bike a day; I hope to gradually bump that up to forty-five minutes, followed by weights.

Um, yeah. I mentioned running here ages ago. That didn't work out; my knee started calling me names. Alas.

I have several ideas from Dragoncon--I mostly went to writer's panels this year. One of them is an odd kind of cyberpunk, and I have no idea if it's going to be a short story or a novel. (Meep! although that would give me an opportunity to use the Motivational Spreadsheet of Doom.) It could get long. Which I suppose is good, either way. I have notes, and will let it percolate. I also contemplated the other novel idea I had lying around my hard drive and made more notes.

I still want to write something for Scalzi's cliché challenge. I started a draft of something, but... eh. I'll go reread in a day or so and see what I think--right now I think I would reread and say "Eh."

I like the Sidekick, but I had to rewrite the php browser detection routine to get this site to work with it. Interestingly, the browser string says it is ProxiWeb/AvantGo. I used to use ProxiWeb on Palm, back before AvantGo bought them. And I haven't seen whether they support J2ME yet; I keep seeing things that suggest that they will next month. I want Azure!

New story in circulation, and badness...

Thanks to the comments of Jen, Margo, and Lisa, the nightmare story is now in circulation under the name "Book of Shadows." W00t!

I went to go record the information on my Treo--yes, yes, I track these things in mysql and php--and lo, my poor Treo gave its life in the recording of my data and died. It was a 180 that I got off ebay 18 months ago, and was old then. Well. It just so happened that my SO had given me a chunk of back rent recently, so I...

...spent part of it on a Sidekick. Oh, baby! It doesn't have internet yet--they said to give it 24-48 hours--but I'm still in nerd heaven! *cue soft violins*

Go ahead. Call me a geek. I can take it. In fact, to record what a dweeb I am, I created a shiny new category to record my amazing feats of dorkosity.

Alas, noble Treo! Your tragic sacrifice was not in vain!

Virii and other disasters

Y'know, after the sixth machine I put my floppy into started screwing up, I might start to think maybe it was me. Or my (virusy) floppy. I'm just sayin'.

No, I'm really not getting much writing done, so you get virii and the pain of utilities. Sucks to be you.

The phone company is evil. Why does it take over a week to get a phone in Atlanta? Dude! I mean, DUDE! It almost made sense when I lived in the Ninth Circle of Hell, population 600 bankrupt people and shrinking fast, but Atlanta? Dude!

Tomorrow. Sigh.

Cable modem is worse. Next Tuesday. I'm Jonesin' here!

Luckily, I have unlimited Internet on my Treo. I'm sure you're glad I was able to share my pain.

Change of address

I just changed my address for F&SF and Asimov's via their nifty forms.

I feel like there's something I'm forgetting to do. I wish I knew what it was.

In other exciting news, my Internet connection at home is the suck. Also, I am weary of cleaning spam off my *@(#&!@% guestbook and have therefore abandoned the NMS guestbook in favor of a Movable Type guestbook a la the girlie matters. I'll probably spend some time trying to make it prettier later. It looks like Brad Choate managed to get his MT guestbook to store location and stuff. I may not want to put that much effort into it.

Damn. I know I'm forgetting something.

Alas, alack, and woe!

Should I be deeply saddened that the people most interested in my writing blog are @#@()* spammers?

Listen, spammers. Give it up. Stop wasting my time. Stop wasting your time. I have comment notification turned on. I'm here to promote my writing career, not \/1@G|R@. Deal with it.

Ooh, shiny MT plugin directory. *quickly averts eyes* I could spend way too much time geeking with that stuff...

Like you care...

I rewrote the datediff function in the submission tracker and thought PHP geeks might enjoy it. I find it very sad that PHP does not have a built-in datediff function like ASP or Cold Fusion.

/*The variable $date1 comes from the database, and is converted to unix timestamp format. This is a mySQL date, not a datetime. */
$date1 = strtotime($col_value." GMT");

/*The variable date2 is today converted to unix timestamp format.*/
$date2 = strtotime(date("m/d/y")." GMT");

/*Subtract database date from today to get number of days story has been out in unix timestamp format.*/
$daysdiff = ($date2 - $date1);

/*Convert number of days story has been out in unix timestamp format to seconds since the beginning of the unix epoch and divide by 86400, or the number of seconds in a day. This should be a round number, since we started with dates, not datetimes. */
$datediff = (date("U", $daysdiff)/86400)

I used to instead convert to dayofyear, but that only worked for time periods that were less than a year.

"Varmints" is up!

Why, no, I haven't been clicking the Alien Skin site all day waiting for my story to be there. Nor did I go there on my Treo to check while we were out. Why do you ask?

Take that, Netscrape!

PHP browser detection. Only Netscrape 4.x gets TeH Ev0L Netscrape stylesheet. Read it and weep, Netscrape!

*evil laugh*

<Gollum>Nasty, tricksy Netscape 4.x CSS implementation! We hates it, we does!</Gollum>

Feh!

The S.O. says that when he goes to the site in Safari, he gets TeH EV0L Netscape stylesheet, which is TeH SuX0rs with any browser except Netscrape. I have therefore gone back to my previous "Screw Netscape 4.x, for it is an aged piece of crap that must die!" state of the site. Also? Feh.

In other news, I'm re-writing my submissions tracking spreadsheet in PHP. No, you can't see. ;) The whole point is to teach myself PHP, not so much that it's going to be more useful in PHP than it is in Excel. Although I'm starting to suspect that yes, it will be more useful in PHP than Excel. Relational database design and all, you know.

As procrastinations go, this one isn't bad. ;)

I'm a nerd...

I am such a nerd. My stylesheet didn't work in Netscrape 4.x, so I wrote one that did and some javascript browser detection. Well, okay, I modified a javascript from Scriptygoddess.

I wouldn't worry so much about Netscape 4.x, on account of it only representing a fraction of my traffic, but alas, my sister uses Netscape 4.x, and the site looked all pretty but none of the navigation links were clickable. The site must work for my sister! I'd rather it be fugly and clickable. Fortunately, I came up with a good compromise Netscape style. Actually, it looks almost identical. Yay!

I should probably be writing. :)

Mine! It's mine!

It's mine, my own, my preciousssss!!!!

Yes, the Treo arrived today. Woohoo! It's currently restoring all my old data. And USB is much faster than the serial connection I kept having to slow down because my Palm III was getting elderly and hard of hearing.

I think I'm in love. :)

Proud new owner of a Treo... I hope...

Last night I stalked a Treo on ebay. I want one very badly to replace the Palm III that died recently, but I don't want to pay $400 for a new one. I didn't bid until the last three minutes, because I hate to announce my presence to the other bidders and give the current high bidder time to come back and bid higher. I was outbid in the last four seconds, dammit.

Well, in my frustration, and because I didn't like the feedback ratings of the next auction coming up, I went ahead and used "Buy it now" to get a Treo from someone with perfect feedback.

Apparently he hasn't checked his mail yet. *flop twitch spazz click click* I wwant /\/\y intsatn gratificat1on!!!!!!!!!!!~~~~~~ giimmE,, gimme, gimme!!!!!!!!!1~~~

Um, anyway. In other news, I raked it in for Valentine's. Helpful hint to other women--always ask for books. Ask for out-of-print used paperbacks at $1 a pop, and you, too, can rake it in. Your honey might even buy a new book to mix in with all those used books. I got:

Joanna Russ, The Female Man
James Tiptree, Up the Walls of the World
James Tiptree, Crown of Stars
James Tiptree, 10,000 Light Years From Home

Looks like I've got some reading to do! :) Thanks, honey! *smooch* Happy V-Day!