Okay, now the search engine isn't picking anything up in the site (including obvious words like "Liam").
What the hell happened to my installation of MT? Or has TCH done a new upgrade of certain modules that set things askew yet again?
Okay, it seems that somehow, my monthly archives were broken. Something about the template tag having an error, which is curious because nothing had changed in my template at all between yesterday morning and the early afternoon when it told me it was broken.
Anywhats: now that my server is responding again I took out the monthly archive tag, which is why the months are no longer listed under the archive heading on the right sidebar, and all's well again. There are still a couple of wonky things happening when I log in to MT, but I can work around them.
Hmm. Things are still wonky, and the owlies are in an uncomfortable holding pattern.
We thank you for your patience.
On Friday, during the writing jam, the power supply in my computer died.
So very not good.
I called Blade. Did I need to use my computer over the next little while, he asked, or could I wait?
Well, yeah, kind of. That deadline thing? And the old laptop not being too reliable these days? Yes, I needed a new power supply. Blade was free that evening, so I picked him up, we bought a new power supply and installed it. Hurrah!
Now, I could probably have bought a new one and installed it on my own by looking at how the old one was connected, but I like having Blade do the requisite computer surgery in front of me because when I ask him questions, he explains everything plainly and clearly, so that next time I can do it all by myself with no problems and full confidence. (Blade and I have learned that my system needs regular maintenance, and rather than having Blade do it every time, I just call him, describe the problem and all the solutions I've tried, and he talks me through it.)
The only drawback? The only unit the shop had which matched our desired specs glows blue, a cold neon blue. Said glow shines through the back of my tower and hits the wall, as well as out from the ventilation holes on the sides of the unit to illuminate the shiny hardwood floor, and it looks silly.
However, the lame-o neon is a small price to pay for a working system.
And he got to meet Liam, which was a nice bonus for him.
Looks like MT, cPanel, and my host TCH have finally all agreed to play together nicely now that the buggy modules of mySQL on my server have been rolled back to the last known good versions. Due to a buggy mySQL update done by cPanel, MT users everywhere were experiencing technical difficulty. I was getting rather ticked off at having to republish my entire existing journal every time I wanted to publish a single entry, and it had been happening for three days straight. I knew what the problem was once I'd checked out the MT, cPanel and TCH support forums; I was just hoping TCH would figure out what to do and apply it across the board without needing to be asked.
While they didn't go ahead and roll the modules back automatically, I'm glad to say that TCH answered my help ticket within minutes when I asked them to make sure it was done on my server. They even let me know that a bug-free update would be integrated into my server in a day or so.
I'm always so surprised when tech support comes through. That's rather sad.
Owls' Court is three years old today!
Mind your head; the owlies are swinging from chandeliers and singing. Personally, I think they started celebrating a wee bit early last night. And there's rumours of marzipan mice and chocolate frogs, but I have a sneaky suspicion that they're the real thing in a candy coating. Do yourself a favour and poitely refuse if they offer you a snack.
The margaritas should be okay, though...
Well, my domain transfer finally went through. Not that I was told by any of the three parties involved. No, I had to go check it on my own, as I've been doing obsessively for every day this past week to make sure I don't lose the domain due to someone else's idiocy like I did last year.
The domain is now secure till Feb of 2007. This makes me happy.
Hurrah! The little owlies spin and dance and dive back into the prep for their annual party, for they will now be able to properly celebrate their anniversary on Saturday without fear of someone yanking their location out from under their feet. I think they've already started mixing the margaritas. I'm staying out of this one; they're on their own. I've seen them on a sugar high, so I can only imagine what alcohol and sugar will do to them.
Since my Blacklist 1.something was no longer compatible with the new installation of MT 3.15, and since the spammers found me again as of early this morning, I decided to install the newer version of Blacklist as well. I uploaded and installed Blacklist 2.something all by myself today, including figuring out how to run all the test scripts, and changing permissions when the scripts wouldn't run. It now all works. I did it all on my ownsome, without asking Blade to do it.
Well, I'm impressed. I've never done something like this before. And I managed to do it without knowing what perl and mySQL are. (Yeah, I could look them up, because I know they both have .com sites, but I didn't have to, so there. I don't want to further clutter my mind with knowledge I don't need right now. I'm writing a book on Wicca, for heaven's sake, and I've been cutting out extraneous stuff for a reason. Can I focus, please?)
After a month of screw-ups and redirection and being bounced around like a ping-pong ball, I think that I have finally resolved my domain transfer issue.
Long-time readers may vaguely remember that a year ago, I had major communication issues with my previous host: in short, someone else had purchased the domain and the hosting space for me, and I was trying to get both services transferred over to my own account and payment info so that the services wouldn't expire, as his credit card had changed in the meantime. My original host's emails were arriving with no message body, no matter how many emails I sent to them detailing the problem (and the email issue), so in the end everything went bottom-up. The domain went missing for about ten days, during which I screamed at my original host and outlined the problem in living colour for them. They surrendered the domain to me without making me pay for getting it out of suspension, and gave me a free year of registration, which was really, really nice. I still transferred my hosting service elsewhere, though.
Well, in early January I realised that my domain renewal was coming up, and with Blade's help we ascertained where my domain was currently registered. I was listed as admin, registrant, and the tech of the domain, which meant that I should have been able to authorise a transfer to a new registration service. Or so all the transfer request emails coming to me indicated. Right?
Wrong.
I initiated the transfer a month ago. In that time, to try to get the authorisation codes, I've had to talk to my current host (through whom I'm trying to register the domain), the original registation service, and my old host twice a week at least for the past three weeks. Everyone kept sending me to someone else for the codes to authorise the transfer.
The final frustration was a request from a company that I didn't recognise, trying to assume registration of my domain. Since my original host (who has now been identified as "the reseller") removed a cap called a TransferGuard as a result of one of my emails, I assumed this was a move by an opportunistic company to snap up the domain for resale or expensive post-expiration release to me. I blocked it, naturally. Only after the second attempt by this company to assume registration did I contact my hostng service to verify under what name their registration service operated. Sure enough, it was this mystery company. Would have been nice to have been informed when I paid for the transfer and two years of registration for the domain.
But once it resolves, it will all be done and clearly laid out this time, I will know where all the services are coming from and under what name they all operate, and it will all be (gods willing) normal. I paid for two years of service up front, plus initialized my hosting and domain registration for automatic renewal. I refuse to deal with this for a third year in a row. The transfer should resolve sometime this week, which is good, because the domain expires on Friday.
So yes; a very good thing that I began the process a month ago, otherwise I'd be livid and even more stressed than I am right now.
Yesterday Jane asked why people blog. Naturally, I had so much to say about it that my comment was cut off not once, but twice.
I blog for a variety of reasons:It keeps me honest. As a writer, I have to remind myself that a book appearing once a year means that readers only see what I think once a year. A daily web log makes me write every day, and makes me write things that are important to me every day, and write things which other people will read every day. Even if I just comment on my mood, I make sure it's professional to some degree. I want to keep contact with my readers, and a web journal is an extended method of doing this.
It keeps me focused on who I am. I blog about what's important to me, what amuses me, or what's occupying my mind. Sometimes I get conversation in return, sometimes not. I don't blog for the comments, I blog to work my ideas out. (Not necessarily ideas for writing, but most often ideas about writing.) My journal allows me to explore issues in a structured fashion. And, also related to the previous reason, I write them in such a way that it's "publishable" without going through without going through the process of finding a market for a 300-word piece on the subject of whatever's on my mind that day.
I blog as a method of staying in touch with friends and family. I've also met dozens of wonderful new friends via my weblog and/or theirs.
I blog to keep a record of my progress through various situations. I find it extremely useful to be able to look back and see what I was working on at any given time, how I felt about it, and what sort of challenges I faced. I find it fascinating to read the online journals of other authors and artists as they work through a project, and I imagine that I have readers like this, too. Again, it has to with documenting the process of creation. (Can you tell I find the creative process fascinating?)
I agree with your final point: I find personal journals more interesting than the weblogs of companies which detail news and upcoming releases. I think the format of weblogs allows individuals the opportunity to re-examine the concept of personal expression. And while it's true that the format of a weblog means that anyone and everyone with varying degrees of skill at self-expression can post stuff (and yes, there's a lot of dreck and wasted space out there), it also means that people who may otherwise not have had the opportunity to express themselves in a semi-public fashion can share their ideas.
And in the keeping in touch with friends department, I'm declaring a social time-out for the next two weeks, folks. I'm not fit company, everyone and everything irritates me, and I'm going to hibernate for a bit in self- and friend-defense.
Blade upgraded my (and his) MT installation to 3.15 (don't get me started on why, just know that it involves an a lack of courtesy, an invasion of privacy, and lousy communication from the powers that be). This is a test post to make sure it all works as it's supposed to.
Other than this, I really have nothing that I want to say, and if I did, you wouldn't like it anyway.
UPDATE:
Aha. Due to the stranglehold MT's put on comment spam, your comments may not show up immediately; they do directly to a suspended status until approved by me. Then technically once you're approved you should be able to post freely.
FURTHER UPDATE:
I found the problem, thanks to the MT support forums, and removed a couple of outdated Blacklist files in order to allow the MT commenting regulation to function smoothly. Everyone should now be able to post as usual.
Now, if my migraine would just go away...
Only conquering Undead Elbow Macaroni of Unusual Size with my enchanted saucepan could make me laugh this much on a day like this one.
I love you, Ann.
I have been a busy bee. I scanned a whack of old Hallowe'en photos tonight and added three new costumes to the See: Costumes page of the Owldaughter site. Can I just take a moment here to geek out over how nifty I think the new row of costume detail icons is, across the top of that page? I love them. I love how they focus on different parts of the various costumes, and how each is uniquely identifiable by those details. Okay, there's two of the Anna costume, and two of the Scarlet Witch outfit; but they were such cool and very different visuals of the same costume that I wanted to use them. Besides, it's my page and they're my costumes, so there. (Well, the back shot of the Anna corset isn't exactly identifiable, but come on, it's a corset shot, and I love corsets. Do I hear any complaints from my readers about the corset shot? No, I thought not.)
I also uploaded those two new/old articles a couple of days ago and forgot to post it here, apparently:
The Initiation Debate
Solitary Worship vs Coven Work: What's Right For You?
I really should go to sleep, but I'm not tired. I am, however, hungry. Perhaps I shall snack and read in bed until my eyes grow heavy.
Allow me to take this opportunity to laud the subconscious skill of Blade, geek extraordinaire.
I lost video on my machine when a small item fell off my desk and gently thwacked the casing of my computer. I rebooted thrice; I reseated cables; I called Blade when nothing worked, but before attempting to reseat the video card. "I'll call you right back," he said.
And lo, when I hung up and rebooted yet again just to do something constructive while I waited for the phone to ring, there before me I had video once again.
"I don't know what you did, but thank you," I said when he called back moments later. "It's working again."
"Er," he said. "Okay."
Sometimes, it's just a case of putting the fear of Geek into your machine.
I upgraded to the newly available version 10 of Windows Media Player yesterday (I was operating with version 8), and apart from not liking the basic skin (which seems to be the only one that operates in the full screen mode), I've discovered that like a wind-up toy, it tends to get stuck in a corner. In the past half-hour, this has been its so-called random playlist:
Farscape: Fields of Joy (twice)
Farscape: Delvian Dreams (twice)
Series of Unfortunate Events: An Unpleasant Experience Involving a Train (twice)
Series of Unfortunate Events: Drive Away (end title) (twice)
and two John Williams tracks. Overall, it seems inordinately fond of A Series of Unfortunate Events, which makes me wonder if I ought to back up my hard drives again, just in case...
Here I am, coming at you from a new 17" Viewsonic LCD in a 1280x1024 setting. I have so much room on my desk that I hardly know what to do with it. (Yeah, right. At the moment there's a Maggie-cat, a glass of vegetable juice, and any minute now there will be a pile of papers and notebooks and reference material for book-writing. It's simply a matter of time.)
Already there's a major difference: my screen is about two feet away. I no longer feel as if the monitor is attempting to eat my face.
And I can see so much! It's huge!
This Viewsonic VX715 was an excellent buy for me. Blade and I have been researching and taking field trips and such over the past couple of weeks, and this is the result. Not only is it a decent LCD for my needs (my needs, Dear Readers, not yours, before you start pointing out refresh rates etc; I'm a text girl, not a games/video girl) but I got it for about 75$ less than what we'd originally seen it priced at. So in the end, I got a great LCD with a fabulous square footage, taxes included for under $500 -- which was my original uneducated optimistic budget quote to Blade. It's not the newest thing on the market, but it suits me just fine.
Plus it's an office thing, which means it gets worked into expenses come tax-time. So Happy Solstice to me, and to my book!
I use Google a lot, but I've never clicked on the "More" buttons, or explored beyond the main page.
Today I did. And I found the beta version of Google Scholar Search.
For those of us who are academics, and who get frustrated with the endless pap that we have to sift through when we do a regular Google search, the "Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."
Whee!
I hope this brings as much joy to you as it has to me. And if you knew about this already, why the hell haven't you told me?
While ogling LCD monitors online, I realised that if I buy one, a chunk of it gets written off as a home office purchase, the same way my ISP and DSL gets written off.
Ooooo. Oh, my.
Ugh.
Yes, the time stamp is correct. I took that two-hour nap around dinner, and I've been up ever since.
So after adding to my NaNo word count, I decded to work on the Owldaughter site. Not only have the new reviews been posted, but the See page has now been activated, with two categories: Work, and Play. They're nowhere near complete, but because I don't have a functioning scanner I can't do much more at the moment.
I now have an evil headache. I'm going to take some headache candy, and go back to bed.
The Samhain book reviews are up; check out my reviews of Second Circle by Venecia Rauls, and Advanced Witchcraft by Edain McCoy.
And I forgot to mention that HRH's acceptance into the computer animation program arrived today. He has a student number and everything. Let's hear it for retraining and updating work skills!
Another round of thanks go to Blade for helping me install updates to MT. I have absolutely no idea what I would do without him. Bother Scott, probably.
Because she can evoke from her readers every single emotion, from fear to anger to whatever emotion it is which leads to outrageous giggling, I give you Dooce. I've been reading her weblog as long as I've been blogging (yeah, that would put it right around the "she got Dooced" time), and I wanted to point her out to people who might not know her.
Th entry of September 14, 2004, entitled All questions must be submitted in writing, is particularly poignant.
I will always remember those few hours, and the days of worry leading up to those few hours, and the years and years leading up to those days when I didn’t know what it was like to have my soul wrapped inside the palm of a baby.
After the usual frustration and bureaucratic stupidity which accompanies issues such as this, I have installed my brand-new DSL modem and now have a somewhat faster connection. (The increased speed is nost noticeable when downloading music, thank the gods.) And yes, the phone now works at the same time.
I'm probably still going to ignore you if you call, though.
Everyone okay? All still accounted for?
We are now powered by Movable Type. And we have lost all our titles, gorramit. Am now going back over 1.2K entries and reconstructing. Also assigning categories. Hate css. Hate, hate, hate. It has rules, and those rules aren't evident to me yet. I suppose I'll eventually learn the same way I learned HTML -- by messing things up until I get it right.
Thank you, Blade, for your expertise and guidance during this process. There is Sauvignon Blanc in your future.
We lost all comments, by the bye; I discovered that Haloscan only kept about four months on file, the bastards. And if I wanted to export those, I'd've had to upgrade my account, which means paying $12 US to release four lousy months of comments, while abandoning the service. So, Dear Readers, I love you all, thanks for the past encouragement and deep thoughts, let's write more comments that are mine all mine.
This is just a place holder, repeatedly changed and modified to make sure the install didn't break :)
Blade's in the process of doing that MT migration thing for the Court. Over the next few days things might go a bit wonky. Beaks and wingtips inside the blog at all times, please.
There. HRH has an on-line CV and sample portfolio, whether he likes it or not. For the moment, please don't add it to your links; it needs final approval and so forth. Don't bother pointing out that there's no contact info; I know there isn't. The site isn't meant to advertise, it's meant to serve as a literal electronic portfolio, the URL of which will be included in applications made by HRH to lucky studios and businesses who as of yet are unaware of his talents and skills.
I appear to have a stomach-ache. Eating would probably help.
I've just finished editing the first two chapters of my manuscript.
They're good. In fact, they're much better than I remember them. My line editor is a genius at suggesting the occasional alternate word, and moving a word to a different position in a sentence in order to make it just that much smoother. To my immense glee, there aren't many edits at all, and lots of positive comments and queries for further personal interest. She described it as clean, solid, and the best New Age text that she has ever read. And get this -- the manuscript is running "a bit long." Muah-hah-hah! Better to cut here and there to tighten things up than to produce masses of new material!
Chapter Two, the chapter on history, is definitely better than I remember. This is the chapter I wanted to cut completely when I submitted the manuscript, remember? But upon a fresh re-read it's solid, and it's important to give the reader a sense of where it all came from, and what the major influences have been.
And, true to form, my tea is now cold. All is right with the world. Except for the fact that I have to make more tea.
I finished my new Music page of the site last night. I was rather surprised to discover that I've only been with the orchestra for three seasons, not four, and I'm rather impressed at the amount of repertoire I've acquired since joining them.
Rumour has it that my goddaughter is currently enthralled with celli. I must get the viola fixed so that she can hold it like a cello and mess about with it.
Note: a cool bath before bed brings the body temperature down, and the world doesn't seem as humid and infernal as it actually is. I had a wonderful night's sleep. Although swinging my legs over the edge of the bed in the morning only to discover that my feet no longer reach the floor is still slightly disconcerting. It will fade in time.
So now that the owlies have moved, the I've-been-meaning-to-update-the-website-design-scheme project which had been lagging suddenly became much more pressing. So voila: the new Owldaughter design ought to be omnipresent. If you find a page in the old style, or a broken link, let me know via the contact buttons.
The owlies hoot and pop champagne bottles to celebrate their new home. Kudos to Blade of General Galaxy Studios who made the move so enjoyable.
Now to trudge back and update my URL with webrings and subscription services...
The little owlies request that you hold onto your hats and socks and keep all wingtips inside the blog as it changes its location to the Owldaughter domain. We might be down for all of half an hour at midday today; you'll likely not even sense motion as Blade skillfully manipulates time and space.
The owlies thank you for your attention. The new location will be posted soon so that you may all update your links and bookmarks accordingly.
HRH received the GGS-RENEGADE from the hands of Skippy this afternoon. We spent a lovely afternoon with my in-laws, and now that we're home... he's plugged it in, popped headphones on, and is playing Alpha Centauri.
So I might as well play NeverWinter Nights, as he's absorbed in his own laptop computer.
Thanks, Skippy!
Welcome to the grand unveiling of the official Owls' Court banner!
Many thanks and effusive compliments go to my big brother and talented artist Talyesin, the professional who constructed this work of art for me and all the little owls. They are quite chuffed, and keep loading the page to see the images of themselves appear.
Every couple of weeks I do something to the Owldaughter website to keep it current. I've just fnished a whack of spiritual stuff which you can check out if you're interested on the new Believe page, which also has links to the second page and the spiritual articles. I learned how to use anchor tags today. (Thanks again for my new book, Ceri!)
I have the front and back windows wide open, letting the incredibly warm wind through to air out the house. All the cats are plastered against the screens, wildly sniffing the outdoor smells.
Now it's lunchtime, and then I'll sit down with my chapter-by-chapter outline of my book and expand everything in point form. Who knows what I'll discover belongs in which chapter.
I spent the afternoon finally loading up the rest of the articles over at Owldaughter - Read as well as mirroring them at Owldaughter - Believe. I'd been holding off because, in uncharacteristically poor academic ettiquette, when I wrote my original articles I forgot to note down my sources. There was no way in heck I was going to post articles that clearly used sources other than my own brain and not cite them. So this afternoon I spent frustrating amounts of time sorting through Celtic reference sites, looking for articles that seemed familiar.
I found them, in the end, and I've posted pretty much everything to Owldaughter. My next project involves coding and uploading my Pagan book reviews, and submitting the review page URL to Witchvox as a review site.
I feel cross-eyed but satisfied with my work.
Victory!
As you can see, the images are back on the Owlyblog. Owldaughter is back up and running!
So the site was only down for ten days in total. Irritating, but it was all worked out. My old host graciously transferred the domain over without charge as an apology for the misunderstanding (which surprised me simply because I'm so used to corps not caring).
Now I just need to finish straightening out my email.
Update: And... done! All Owldaughter email addresses are operative! Of course, if you sent anything to one in the past ten days, it was lost...
Before you update your links:
I might not have to change the domain name after all. My previous web host appear apologetic for their screw-up and have offered to transfer my Owldaughter.org domain to me and waive the $190 USD fee usually involved as a result of this sort of situation.
Stay tuned.
Aha.
Due to irreconcilable differences with my previous host, my domain name will be changing. By the end of the week, all Owldaughter content will be accessible at:
And yes, the Owldaughter email accounts will be up and running again, just with the new suffix instead of the old.
I love bureaucracy.
Ceri, Scott: you guys just rock.
After an afternoon of feeling odd, and frustration about my lift home and the timing thereof, I found a flat-screen monitor and a brand-new light tablet waiting for me. All the weariness and annoyance about the lift vanished.
I love the monitor! It's so... clear, and not-flickery! I'm waiting to install the light tablet until I have the new computer as well. (New for me, that is. The monitor is also of the new-for-me persuasion.)
Speaking of boxes, the cardboard box that the monitor came in is now occupied by two cats, who meow every once in a while, just for fun. I believe the need to be inside cardboard boxes to be genetically programmed into household felines.
Caught up in the project editing nightmare and the race against the deadline, I managed to miss the second anniversary of Owls' Court last Thursday February 12.
I must really have been fried to miss the hordes of tap-dancing owls wearing pointy party hats and blowing noisemakers.
How amusing. Neil Gaiman got a l33t message and a fan translated it for him.
Thought the translation (liberal in places) would be interesting to those of you who were teasing me about knowing how to read it. Okay, I actually thought you'd laugh too.
And damn, I completely and totally forgot that Gaiman had written a short story called The Daughter of Owls, found in the Smoke and Mirrors collection. This makes me feel incredibly guilty and a right twit.
Hey, the Owlyblog counter just hit 16,160.
You have no lives, do you. I certainly can't imagine why you drop by so often to see what's going on in mine, but thank you.
Wow. I just spent my afternoon formatting, coding, and finally uploading half of the articles I'd thought of putting on the Owldaughter - Read page.
I completely forgot about the chicken in the oven, though. I think it might be overdone.
But damn it, I've updated the colour style of the pages, and created a link for half the pieces I wanted to list. Go me!
Another friend has launched a web site! This one is called Dance on the Sidewalk, and showcases Tara's wonderful line of what she calls functional art: hand-decorated furniture and trompe-l'oeuil work.
The best part about it? There are little owlies everywhere. Anyone who uses owlies on their business cards is automatically inducted into the newly-formed Owldaughter Guild (the inner workings of which I'll figure out someday later). Muah-hah-hah!
Drumroll, please....
(Ah. The equivalent here at the Owlyblog is a Busby Berkley-type tap dance performed by tiny sugar-high owls. It's going to be one of those days, I can tell.)
Ahem.
Owldaughter.org is now up and running.
"Up and running" means functional to the extent that I've been able to design and create the basic pages, link them all together, and get the image to actually show, after figuring out the correct paths and directories this morning. As time goes on, I'll start filling in the pages. The elementary structure is there, however, and I'm terribly, terribly impressed with myself, as I didn't know a thing about HTML a year ago today.
So, yay me! Pass me a marzipan mouse!
One whole year of the Owlyblog! You should see the ever-present multitude of little owls reeling around over here wearing party hats, overdosing on marzipan mice and Vanilla Coke. Amusing, really.
Hmm. My site meter seems to be down.
Going to check it out, I discovered some interesting referrals for this owlyblog, such as:
- bad writers (fourth hit out of 1,400,000, alas; this is hardly encouraging for someone who is a writer by profession)
- dip pens
- owl costume pattern
- inflatable pony popped (for which I am number one of only two hits)
- Peek Freans cookies (number 57 of many, many, many - why on earth did they click on me?)
- Alice in Wonderland mythic forest
Unfortunately, when you do a search for "good writers" I'm nowhere to be seen...
Downloaded and installed Opera this morning. I found this in the user agreement:
You acknowledge that the software is not intended for use in (1) on-line control of aircraft, air traffic, aircraft navigation or aircraft communications; or (2) in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility.
Well, gosh. What did I download this for, then?
I don’t know what scares me more: the fact that they feel this warning must be issued, or that (according to recent market percentages) over 90% of people will turn to IE instead, being denied the use of Opera for these particular purposes.
Oyez, oyez!
His Majesty's web mistress is pleased to announce that The King of Canada now has his very own blog, serving as weekly updates in his quest to restore Canada to a monarchy.
Serve us well and you will be rewarded when he is victorious. (I think MLG has a lock on the Buckingham position, but there are several other places about this court in exile that are equally exciting career opportunities.)
I honestly didn't mean to announce it for another couple of days, since I literally only founded it as he was making dinner last night, but the timing in the conversation at MLG's housewarming last night was too perfect. Speaking of the housewarming, is't possible that JD didn't get a picture of the Mediaeval Baebes who were in attendance?
Callooh! Callay! My comments are back!
Turns out an interesting bit of code that didn't belong there crept in when I reinstalled them. Very interesting code, which looked pretty well-thought-out, and which had nothing to do with me. Cut and paste describes my advanced HTML abilities. Anywhats, problem solved.
Comments appear to be down again, even though I reinstalled them. Send me an owl - er, e-mail and let me know if they're up or down for you. I'm beginning to think it's just me.
Ye gods. I woke up, got a drink of water, sat down with my laptop and editorialised for three hours.
I'm going for a walk.
If you're reading this, then you should probably read the Brunching Shuttlecocks on web logs.
Goodness, people seem to blaming me for their free will and personal decisions to begin blogs...
A curse upon a little owl who has poisioned my mind to think that this may actually be a productive use of my time... I'll get her. Oh yes, I'll get her...
It was completely unintentional, I assure you.
Ye gods! We're at 990 visitors, after only two and a half months of what Kat calls mindspillage.
I wasn't expecting to be celebrating one thousand visitors so soon. I recently changed my counter because I was getting suspicious at how many visits were being clocked in. I kept both counters on the site for a while, and sure enough, they were disagreeing; the original counter must have been counting page views as well as visits. So I dropped it and felt virtuous.
And yet... here we are. When I log on tomorrow we just might have passed the thousand mark.
Hmm. People must be reading this or something.
(Ha! I know the truth. People were just hitting the site over and over in the last three days, desperately seeking news about The Peanut...)
That's it. I have arrived.
If you search "owl" and "cello" on Google, I'm your first hit.
Oddly enough, "Autumn" and "cello" doesn't pull me up at all in the top 100 hits. Hmm.
But if you search "Lakeshore Chamber Orchestra", I'm the ninth hit - and the nineteenth. The LCO web site doesn't show up at all in the top 100.
The mystical workings of search engines are beyond this simple Pagan owl worshipper...
I love reading other people's blogs. When I read blogs of people I know personally, I can hear their voices. Like Ceri, for instance - I can hear her voice perfectly. Other blogs I read, those blogs written by people I've never met in my life, like Kat's, are blogs where I get to imagine a voice speaking the post aloud. I have fun doing it. It's so interesting to see how a personality can leap out of someone's writing style and present you with a mental image of who the author is. Nine times out of ten, you'll never meet the person so you'll never know how close you were. That tenth time, though, you're either validated in knowing they're just like you imagined them, or completely thrown by how off you were! Ah, the anonymity of the Internet, where you can pretend to be someone else entirely...