Just over there
So, it’s been Christmas in this part of the world for almost 2 hours now.
And, already, I’ve seen a bunch of “Post Christmas Sale” commercials on TV. And got some Borders coupon spam for a post Christmas sale also.
Gee, in a rush much?
My unstated goal (unless you’ve noticed it in my TtH Profile ) is to have over 500K words of fic on TtH by the end of the year. (Which year? Might actually have been 2008 but let’s pretend I meant 2009 
)
Oddly enough, right now I’m 52nd by word count on the site. 500K words seems to be the mid-point of the top 100 writers on the site. And the ones who’ve hit the million word mark are all in the top 20. Compared to some, I’m not that prolific of a writer (There are a couple writers on TtH with stories over 500K words long. Scary! Especially considering most modern novels are around 100K words long.)
I’ll really close. Less than 2K to go. And it only took me 5 years.
The problem? Although I must have over 20K words worth of fics NOT posted to TtH, they are all in unfinished chapters/parts of fics… and I can’t seem to settle on one to work on. I’ve poked a few of my WiPs but nothing sustained enough to finish something I could post.
And I’ve only got a week to go. Argh!
And, on top of that, I haven’t finished moving my fics from my old blog to here.
I’m not really an advertising connoisseur, so this is all opinion (of course).
My favorite Christmas commercials on tv? (No special order)
[The following is anecdotal.]
Okay, I bought an iPhone at the beginning of August.
As a device, with the exception of battery life, I like it very much though it hasn’t completely replaced my 1st Gen iPod touch as my main MP3 player (I occasionally knock my touch onto the floor at work due to headphone cord length (and it survives). Don’t really want to do that with the iPhone, which cost me twice as much as the touch.)
As for local cell service — I must be one of the lucky ones. I get excellent connectivity locally – both 3G and voice. (Of course, I bought it more for the data plan than voice so I’m a light voice user. I rarely use 1/4 of my allotted minutes a month. And I don’t do SMS.)
Traveling thru New England back in August? There were a few dead spots along the MassPike and driving along I89 in Vermont. It had improved a LOT by Thanksgiving, in the same areas. (I81 in Virginia? Not as many 3G dead spots in November as in August. My mother lives along the edge of AT&T service along the upper edge of the Adirondacks (in NY). In August? EDGE. In November? 3G.
So it’s getting better in the US, no matter what the Anti-Apple/Anti-AT&T internet echo-chamber denizens claim.
Doing business with AT&T? Well, that has been an adventure.
Okay.
My cable modem started flashing the ‘Online’ light last night but everything else was working (basically means the cable company’s access point/device somewhere in my neighborhood was having issues but the modem was still connected to whatever was between my apartment connector and it (there are ‘link’ lights that indicate that.))
Normally, I have a fairly decent cable/broadband connection but once every couple of months things just stop for an hur or so. Not a huge deal – it’s usually very late at night (I’m assuming it’s a maintenance thing. Someone is remotely updating the firmware or something on the local cable/broadband hub. Or just resetting it for fun.)
But last night, I thought I would send a message to support and tell them my connection was out (used my iPhone for that. It still had a connection to the world)
Before I fell asleep, I noticed that the modem was working again and I had a connection.
So, this morning, I replied to the cable internet support message that showed up in my mailbox this morning and told them things are working.
In reply…
I got a message from someone else at the cable company asking for details on my problem and wanting to help. Apparently they didn’t actually read the reply I’d sent earlier saying things were fine. Even though it was attached to the bottom of this message.
So… do I reply to THAT one? And will I get another “how can we help you” message back?
I can see this one going around forever until the world collapses under the weight of “I’m okay. Stop asking me if I’m okay” messages.
What’s with the comment spam?
Suddenly my blog has been discovered by the spammers? More in the past day than in the past 2 months.
I haven’t done an in-depth study on the topic but those automated comment spam pushers are annoying. Don’t they notice that it never makes it to live on my site? The WP spam catcher I’m using grabs it. And on top of that, all comments have to be approved. By me.
Of course, I shouldn’t have to use an anti-spam plugin to catch it. It shouldn’t be possible for a spam-bot to insert spam into my blog’s comments for me to reject.
One of those days…
Wanted to watch a movie… but not really. Wanted something running in the background with lots of action while I web surf.
My “Go To” movie for such things? “The Replacement Killers“. I have it in both DVD and Blu-Ray (which I completely forgot purchasing. Must have been a $10 special.). Last night I watched the DVD.
Tonight I’m watching the BR. (It has a few extra minutes / added scenes that actually help explain some things in the movie that made no sense.)
And yes, I CAN tell the difference, even on my tiny 37″ HDTV at 1080i (I bought it a year before 1080p screens were in my price range -now they’re cheap – could buy 2 now for what I paid for mine.).
(movie spoilers below)
There was a question about themes used here (not sure if that was spam or not since the author provided a link to a WP installation that has an example theme not set up on it). The WP theme I’m using is obvious (check the bottom of the blog pages).
The theme for my stories? It started out as the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme. It dates to 2001 or earlier and its (now defunct) website says it was created by Bryan Bell though his Manila website seems to be inaccessible.
It’s a very old style — mostly using tables and some background images and virtually no CSS. Probably predates all of the fancy css based sites out there.
I’m using it as hand coded, static pages so it isn’t really usable with WP except as such. (There seems to be a mangled version of it floating around that looks like someone rewrote it to work with an ASP based blogging system called dasBlog – though the mangled parts seem to be visible in the screenshot of that theme at the dasBlog website… without attribution.)
Not sure if I’ll keep using it once the fic part of my site is embedded in the CMS (like Radiant or Drupal.) I’ll replace the static pages with. Right now it gives me a nice big white space to put my content on. If I do use it, I’ll convert it into a more modern style of theme not so much with the hard coded background images.
Based on file size ( Old site fics vs. new versions) I’m approximately half done.
Note: I’ve started experimenting with wget as an automated way to download/backup all the fics from the new site. As soon as I have it generating a usable offline copy – to my satisfaction – I’ll put up a zipped copy for those who like such things. Or I can provide instructions for the DIY download crew.
Excluding the images used for backgrounds, the site is currently topping out at 4MB of text/html/zips. The text for the old site (just the content) is 8MB.
I didn’t watch all of the games in the last World Cup but I watched as many as I could.
2010 World Cup (In South Africa) - GROUP C: England, United States, Algeria, Slovenia
Hopefully, none of them will be on one of those PPV or speciality sports channels on cable that I don’t have (There might actually be a soccer channel.)
Note: The next Women’s World Cup is in 2011 in Germany.
A white Pontiac Fiero, probably an ’88?
Weren’t those things a fire hazard? Could have sworn they’d all caught fire years ago.
One of the few non-BMW cars on my ‘want to have’ list from the 80′s.
