Monthly Archives: May 2004

more wordpress experimentation

I did a little bit of work on the css for my wordpress knitting blog, I downloaded one of the excellent styles on Alex King’s wordpress styles page and modified all of the images and used different colors. I’d really like to be able to come up with both the structure and css for a site design someday, but I’m happy with the design. It kept me occupied over the weekend. This was the first time I’ve really played around with Fireworks for many, many hours. I’m really not that comfortable with using image editing software yet.

So, many thanks to my friend from library school who sold me her copy of Dreamweaver Studio MX for cheap!!!

The more I play around with wordpress, the better I feel about migrating over to it. I have the go ahead to migrate over my little sister’s blog, and I think wordpress will be a better option for her as well, because it makes it easier to add and categorize sidebar links without having to know html. In this case, installing another instance of wordpress just in her subdomain makes sense as well. So I will switch her over in the next couple weeks before I switch over this blog. Because what are little sister’s blogs for, if not to test out blog software migration?

you know you are dating a librarian when…

You call up your boyfriend to whine about your illness, speculating that you may be dying of diphtheria or consumption, and he proceeds to take a medical dictionary off the shelf and starts reading the symptoms of diphtheria to you.

Librarians have a reference book for any occasion.

croak

I managed to catch a cold to keep me company over Memorial Day Weekend. I feel as if a teeny tiny group of vicious weasels have set up camp in my throat, and are now engaged in a flesh tearing hoe down to the sound of really annoying banjo music.

I’ve been getting some knitting done, playing computer games, watching netflix dvds, and ordering my final “birthday presents to myself from me” (the new book by the author of Feeling Sorry for Celia, the Year of Secret Assignments, the Chris Ware all comics issue of McSweeney’s, and a couple manga). Now I’m going to see if I can gather my strenth to go out and procure some diet ginger ale and pizza, which I’m sure is the most healthy thing a sick person could possibly eat.

early birthday shopping habits

Is it bad that even though my birthday is around 3 weeks away, I’ve been doing a little random spending with the “its my birthday present to myself” justification? I’ve bought some more manga recently (2 volumes of Planetes and volume 1 of Tokyo Babylon. I also bought a little bit of yarn. I think I’m coming down with a cold, even though I went to the yarn store, I totally forgot my main reason for going there, getting some woolwash. I’m doing a bit of mind numbing repetitive work from home now and even though it is hard to concentrate because of the impending cold, I can look up from time to time and watch the Transporter, which breaks up the monotony a little bit.

Well, if I am home sick over memorial day weekend, at least I have reading material and yarn for a quick project to keep myself occupied.

his dark materials on del.icio.us

A nice way to get news on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials triliogy via del.icio.us, a group of people are saving news items with the tag “hdm.”

Latest news — Chris Weitz of American Pie is going to direct the Tom Stoppard scripted movie adaptation of The Golden Compass. Weitz also co-directed “About a Boy” so he has worked with screen adaptations of novels before.

teenage moping remains eternal

I find the return of Morrissey weirdly comforting. It’s like something familiar is being resurrected from my childhood. Now I’m feeling bad that I tossed my cd of “The Queen is Dead” off the balcony of the apartment I moved into right after high school (I was experiencing a fit of Morrissey hate). It landed in the street and was promptly smashed under the wheels of a passing semi, but now I have the urge to listen to “Cemetary Gates”.

Other good songs:
Your Feet’s Too Big
May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up your Nose

Morrissey should cover those songs. That would be excellent.

I got wordpress

I managed to get wordpress going. I haven’t transferred anything over. I decided to set up a knitting blog, as it was the easiest subcategory of the things that I write about here to spin off into its own area. There will probably be very intermittent blogging going over there, as I am slow with the knitting, and it is more of a test blog than anything else.

The fabled 5 minute set-up took me more like 15 minutes, but I was trying to set things up during the commerical breaks of the Alias season finale. Is it bad that I find slightly sadistic torturing Vaughn so much more attractive than the mopey Vaughn that has been present for most of the season? So far, I’m digging wordpress, but I’m going to give myself some time to play around with it before I decide if I want to transfer everything over.

I feel like I have a shiny new toy! I am such a geek!

now and then here and there

If you are a young Japanese boy and you wake up all cheerful one day, go to school and afterwards climb a tower to watch the sunset in the late afternoon where you encounter a mysterious and quiet girl with blue hair, there is a good chance you will suddenly be kidnapped by interdimensional robots operated by an evil military organization.

This is what happens to the young hero Shu of “Now and Then, Here and There.” I had a feeling something horrible would happen to him when in the opening scene of the series he gleefully sits down at the breakfast table to eat some nato. Now, I know some people love Nato. I’ve met people who think it is a fabuous dish to eat in the morning, perhaps with an egg broken over it. Nato is a dish made out of fermented soybeans. It is brown and stringy, and it looks and smells like I what I would imagine would come out of an alien if they had an upset tummy. I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with people who adore nato, it is just not for me 🙂

So with the introduction of Nato so early in the series, I had a feeling that things would take a sudden turn for the worse. After a rough day at school where he loses a kendo match, Shu is watching the sunset with a enigmatic girl named Lala Ru, when suddenly several robots materialize (a couple are giant mechanical dragons or snakes) and kidnap Lala, with Shu accidently pulled into an interdimensional vortex. Shu ends up on the run on a giant military ship, captured, beaten, tortured by a sadistic king…then it starts to get worse. The style of animation is simplistic and many of the characters in the series are children, but this contrasts greatly with the plot as Shu is confronted with the horrors of war. It doesn’t seem to be the stereotypical “plucky boy gets a robot and perseveres against his enemies through will power and determination” type of series that I originally thought it was going to be after watching the first half of episode one. Now and Then, Here and There is on three disks, and I’ve only watched the first one so far. I’m not sure how or if Shu will manage to rescue Lala and get back to Japan, but I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series.