Blue Belt Your skills are adequate from managing day-to-day life as a MT-Do, but you still have much to learn. Take the MT-Do test I might have ranked higher if I had installed MT all by myself, or if I had actually made modifications to the program (what, I can’t even figure out how the macro thingy works unless I can see how someone else did it and adapt). But glee! I’m not a white belt. There’s consolation.
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I knew I spoke too soon. The lawn blimps are back. There’s also an illuminated flag-thing hanging in front of the garage that’s red, white and blue Christmas lights in some sort of plastic grid. The sign to the left is permanent and commemorates local firefighters and police, which I was able to read for the first time today. Usually, I’m flying past on my way to work or to church (ooh! my brilliant career, not). I can’t remember if the flag signboard was always there, or went up after 9/11. I think it’s been repainted recently – it used…
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Church today was funny (now there’s an opening line). It’s Pentecost and a lot of the readings were about tongues of fire and the Holy Spirit and the voice of a strong wind and so on. Every time one of these themes would come up, there would be a rumble of thunder. There were several perfectly timed violent thunderclaps during our priest’s talk with the kids from church school, putting a very strong emphasis on everything he said. The church school had some sort of project today, so they had popcorn and watched a video about Noah before they came…
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Well, I’ve put an 8-hour day into screwing around trying to get something to work again. So now, let’s talk about the house again, shall we? The “kitty garden” is growing fairly well, except that the lawn service guys keep cutting the hell out of it with their big string trimmer. I keep forgetting to put some fencing around it; they came earlier than expected this weekend and caught me again with no fence and no little sign in Spanish saying “Favor de no cortar” which I hope is a fairly polite way of saying “please don’t cut (these).” However,…
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Oh my GOD! Amazon links are finally working right. Thank you, Silverberry! I never could get Brad Choate’s version (slightly different, similar effect) working; I ran across a reference that it had to do with smart quotes replacing dumb quotes (guess what I have?) The “complex” macro uses overLIB, process tags, and I suspect there’s something I should do with encode_js in order to deal with apostrophes in the titles of books. <MTMacroDefine name="amazon" ctag="amazon"> <MTIfNotEmpty expr="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']"> <MTAmazon devtoken="XXXXXXXXXXXXXX" associateid="xxxxxxxxxxx" search="[MTMacroAttr name='asin']" method="Asin"> <a href="<MTAmazonLink>" onmouseover="return overlib('<img src=\'<MTAmazonSmallImage>\' align=\'left\' border=\'0\' hspace=\'5\'/><b>Amazon Price:</b><MTAmazonSalePrice><b><br />Released:</b> <MTAmazonReleaseDate format="%B %Y"><br /><a href=\'<MTAmazonLink>\'>Buy me…</a>',…
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Neil Gaiman quotes from a reader’s email in his mailbag: Sorry about your having to clean up after the cat. We have a cat here who doesn’t understand that having all four paws in the litter box is not sufficient, and so we often end up with urine under the litter box rather than in it. Sigh. Well, I know all about a cat being such an enthusiastic and productive pisser that also thought that just the two front paws standing in litter constituted “in the litterbox.” Also there was some confusion in his mind over whether hanging one’s kitty…
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Osmond said he stopped and asked, “Why are you screaming?” One 16-year-old answered, “Because our moms told us to.” I went to school with a girl who claimed to be related to the Osmonds (these things are highly possible in Utah). She was quite a strange person. I wonder what happened to her.
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Two of our travelers had a bad experience last night just as they were about to check in to a hotel – it was in Melrose Park, a suburb of Chicago. They complained to our overnight service desk, and as one of the many hats I wear is following up on the service calls in the morning, I looked at the record to see what needed to be done. This one was documented very carefully – the agent spelled it out so there’d be no misunderstanding. The male traveler was approached by a prostitute as soon as he got out…
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I finally had a chance to get the newest photo gallery started – with a lot of help from David. It covers the epic trip to Colorado and Utah, with the inevitable (and intervening) Nebraska thrown in at the end. There are a LOT of photos in there. Some of them I tinkered with – resized, cropped and so on. Most I didn’t mess with. I haven’t decided which ones I’d like to print out and frame. This photo got Photoshopped a little – it looked good except for one of those &*#!@ roadside reflector wands right in the middle.…
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It can only be a matter of time before the game is over. Rats. Could he really be, as some believe, Owen Wilson, Ben Affleck, Jim Carrey or even George Clooney? Well, I think I know who Rance is. But I’m not saying for now, because 1. he’s supposed to be anonymous, dammit. B. he’s entitled to some privacy, which apparently doesn’t get much of, bruddah and tha-rrrreee. that would be telling. Besides, Xeni thinks it’s so three weeks ago (although it was originally a Boingboing link of hers that got me hooked). Um. Shutting up now. Proxy Error The…