Site Maintenance

Supposedly this plugin will connect me to my Twitter page.

Update: Okay, it worked.

Well, I finally managed to upgrade my plugins and my Wordpress install to the latest version. That’s that for this blog for now. In other news… yay, I finally managed to find a cheap corded keyboard for my desktop — the Walmart in Waynesboro had a pile of them on a lower shelf in their electronics department — all the boxes were damaged in some way; they looked like they’d fallen off the back of the proverbial truck. But they were only ten bucks what the hell. Anyway, I plugged it in, it seems to work just fine, so now I won’t have to worry that my battery will die when I’m in the middle of typing something.

But I’m not typing this on the desktop, but my laptop — I’m in the middle of backing up files off the desktop to my tiny flash drive, preparatory to the upgrading of my memory. Yes, the memory chips came in yesterday via Amazon. I can’t wait to open up the desktop and load its nice new brain. Then I’m going to do a total wipe and reinstall of Windows XP and those programs I want to use. And… one of these days I’m going to invest in a new monitor, if I can keep myself employed. You can get a nice widescreen monitor these days for under two hundred dollars. The little one I have works fine, but it is little (smaller than my laptop’s — I think it’s a fourteen incher or less) and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. But that’s for the future, assuming I don’t break the computer when I install the new memory.

In other news, I’m getting my teeth fixed, finally! As in, I’m getting all the horrid cavities drilled and filled, so maybe I will be able to go out in public without a bag over my head. It’s a bitch to drive in those things… I also need bridges and things but that’s for the future — right now I have to keep the teeth I do have in my head. I have an appointment in less than two weeks for a cleaning, and then one a week later for the worst of the front teeth. And so on. I can’t wait. (That should show you how badly I need this done; normally I hate going to the dentist, but am paying for that irrational hatred now. So now I love the dentist.)

Um… there was more, but I can’t remember what it was. I’ll update later if I feel like it.

Update: argh. I installed the memory — or rather, attempted to do so. Only to find out that either something is wrong with 1) the second memory slot, 2) the second 1 GB chip, or 3) me. I did have trouble getting the chip to stay in the slot — and when I finally did, turning on the computer resulted in that appalling sustained beep computers make when you do something wrong to their innards. So I removed the second chip, turned the computer back on, and it worked fine, albeit with only 1 GB of RAM not 2 like I wanted. The offending slot, by the way, is the one that wasn’t used — there was only one memory chip (a 256 KB one) in the other slot that works. So I’m thinking either that slot has something wrong with it — like it’s dead — or else it needs a jumper switched somewhere on the motherboard and that’s beyond me at the moment. (Well, like ever — if motherboard manipulation is needed I’m calling in an expert.) I suppose I could have switched out the other chip just to make sure the second new one works and I haven’t destroyed it by touching it all over (“only hold it by the ends,” shyeah, right), but I’m too tired. Still on the laptop — though the desktop does work and 1 GB is pretty fast for Windows XP. But I want 2 GB! Frown.

You’ll all be glad to know I’ve decided to keep the comments. I might up the reply depth to two or three more. What I am going to dispense with: categories, tags.

I’m doing laundry right now. My life hasn’t been very exciting lately and nothing has irritated me enough for me to want to post about it. I’ve still got the part-time job, so I’m not as broke as I was. (I will be putting the Paypal link up just in case though.) The weather has improved over the past few days — it got up into the high forties today, which feels almost like summer now that I’ve acclimated. Still, there are just huge piles of snow everywhere, and it will probably be on the ground until Easter. Well, now I can say I have experienced snow. One of the few new experiences I actually wanted to have has been checked off. (Not on the list: skydiving, mountain-climbing — I find mountain driving scary enough thanks — bungee jumping, any of that nonsense.)

I’m disappointed in Glenn Beck. I don’t listen to/watch him, but I was still expecting better of him than “I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America.” Feeling like a freak has been my armor and strength my whole life — I’m tired of hearing that the be-all and end-all of existence is total acceptance by society. (Which is one of the many reasons I can’t get behind the whole gay marriage thing. Yearning to be “married” — how mundane and bourgeois can you get! I expect gays to be at the forefront of all that is different and interesting and eccentric, not whining and clawing at Middle America for love and acceptance. Gather ’round, children, and I’ll tell you about how in my day the very idea of being thought of as just another bunch of squares would have made any proud gay man or woman spit in disgust. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to rinse my dentures.) Anyway, I used to hear that Beck’s shtick was being a big crybaby, but he seemed to have moved away from that when it was made clear to him that it pissed off the manlier elements in conservative groups. Looks like he’s gone back into whine mode. It’s fitting that he did it in front of an audience of beta males at CPAC. Include me out. If I wanted to be “accepted” by the powers that be in the US today I’d slap an Obama sticker on my car and swear I loved Big Unicorn. That’s what it’s going to take to not be treated like a “freak” these days, at least in the big cities, so you might as well get used to it. (And living in semi-rural Virginia isn’t necessarily an escape — there are a lot of college towns in the Shenandoah Valley, and Staunton where I live is Obama central.)

In other news: I’m currently on my Windows computer. It’s slow, but the laptop was starting to piss me off. Even after completely wiping and reinstalling the operating system it still gets logy and overheats and so on. I don’t think it’s the operating system (it’s currently Kubuntu, which seems to have good memory management), I think it’s the brand. Dells just seem to have problems. Anyway, I’m giving it a rest. Oh — and I finally broke down and ordered two new memory chips (1 GB each) for the desktop, which right now is limping along at 256 KB of RAM. This will bring it up to its top speed (yes, I checked). Then I’m going to do a complete wipe and reinstall of everything. This will happen this coming weekend, as the RAM is due to be delivered on Friday (barring things like snowstorms, knock on wood…), and then I may be able to post a bit more frequently since, hopefully, I won’t spend most of my time swearing at the computer for being so slow.

That’s all for now. Later, mes amis. If you want to read the nonsense that I find even too ridiculous for this site, see me at my Tumblr blog. (I will not call it a “Tumblog.” Good grief.)

Things I am thinking of dispensing with on this blog:

• Categories (I don’t like the ones I came up with this time around, and seriously, does anyone care about what category someone’s blog posts are in? And my posts tend to wander all over the place, so they are hard to categorize.)
• My page listings — that’s where I have my essays (well, where I was going to put them), my short stories and novel chapters, my about page, etc., but I don’t think I’ve gotten more than a handful of visits to any of them. I may keep an “about” page, or just put a couple of lines of descriptive text in the sidebar, or nothing at all. You all know me, and for those who don’t, my posts should give the world enough information. Anyway, I am thinking of moving my non-blog writing stuff to another domain entirely.
• Tags. I don’t see the point of them, though on the Tumblr site I’ve had a bit of fun with them, but Tumblr is not to be taken seriously. Well, this blog isn’t exactly serious, but you see what I mean.
• Comments. I get hardly any comments these days, and every single problem my site has ever had seems to be due to spammers attacking whatever comment scripts my various blog installs have loaded. I have a Disqus account — I might add that to the site instead.
• A blogroll. I don’t usually go to blogs just to use their blogrolls. And I’m always changing my blog favorites — I’ll read one site for a while, get bored, and move onto another. It just takes up space on the sidebar.

Those are the exciting things I’ve been thinking about this weekend. As you can see the goal is to strip down this blog to its essential blogness, without all of that extra stuff that just gets in the way and distract. And you may notice that I’ve already removed the page, category, and tag listings. I’ll also be trying out various minimalistic themes and setups until I get everything the way I want it.

Update: okay, I added a plugin that removed extra things from the admin screen (things like the Wordpress logo and such), which helped, but the admin area is still very slow to load. I think Firefox just does not like rendering the Wordpress dashboard. The images that make up the side menu and the formatting buttons all take some time to come up. I’ve got 1.5 gigabytes of RAM on this machine and that’s as far as I can take it, so I don’t know what to do. Stupid Firefox I don’t want to use Konqeror — Gmail and all other Google sites hate it and say “it’s not standard.” Feh.

Do not adjust your set — I am changing the theme — yes, again. The goal is as always readability, and cutting down on clutter, along with trying to avoid ugliness. I’m still on the fence regarding Wordpress itself — it’s great to use, but the admin screens have gotten cluttered, though I’ve removed as much as possible via the screen options. I’m looking into plugins that will simplify the admin screen further, though adding stuff to remove stuff isn’t really what I had in mind. I also still have to research other blogging software.

On the other hand, Wordpress has become very stable in terms of spam-deflecting, or so my hosting service informs me. It turns out some of my older blogs that are set up under an old install of Movable Type (version 2.661, which you can’t even upgrade any more) came under spam attack and it was affected other servers. I wondered why my site has been experiencing slowdowns recently. They emailed me about it but I either never got the email or deleted it by mistake. Anyway, that blog setup will probably have to be ported into a Wordpress install. I won’t be updating it to Movable Type — that program has become such a pain to install the last time I used it was in 2007.

Anyway that’s what’s been going on here. Oh, and I’m still fighting off this cold (I’m at the coughing/scratchy throat/incessant post nasal drip stage) and staying indoors. And it’s going to snow more tomorrow. Oy.

Oh look — as if I needed one, another reason not to join Facebook. Call me the last holdout if you like, but I’m an antisocial misanthrope (as opposed to the kind who like to hang out with people just so they can torture themselves with all the stupid things humans do), so why would I join yet another social networking site, especially one as overrun with sheer stupidity as Facebook? WTF are those “games”? I don’t even game. I play Solitaire, or the Mahjongg game my Ubuntu setup comes with. And I haven’t had a computer virus in years, and I don’t want one.

Facebook and other sites like it have nothing for me. I do like Tumblr, mostly because it has a simple interface and lots of nice themes, and the social networking stuff isn’t too intrusive — but at the same time it’s becoming something of a headache. For one thing, there are too many Obama fans (but I might as well say that about life, and I can at least tweak the Tumblr folk with one of my obnoxious posts — I can’t do anything about the real life ones except roll my eyes at their bumper stickers) and the Doctor Who fans on Tumblr all seem to be the young type who just got into Tennant’s Doctor and they’re all Doctor ‘n’ Rose shippers, barf.

But that leads me to my next topic. I’m getting less and less pleased with Wordpress. Not that it’s a horrible program — it’s not — but it’s getting more and more complex as it gets more and more popular. I’d say it’s about as popular now as Movable Type was a few years ago, and it’s getting more and more commercial in its focus. I don’t have anything against a commercial focus in general, just not for me and my site. A few years ago I briefly experimented with ads on my blog, but I decided to dump them. Ads just aren’t for me, no matter how skint I am. All there will ever be is a Paypal link at most, and you see that I have even taken that off the front page and put it over into a page titled “Coffee Fund.” Anyway, Wordpress is very complex and heavy these days, and it just does more than I want a blog program to do. Here’s what I want: a simple interface where I can post, a simple way to set up the site theme, a way to control comments so you can weed out spam and trolls, and… that’s it. The only extras I can think of that I’d also like would be a way to add static pages, but they aren’t absolutely necessary. Even configurable side menus for links and latest entry lists and so on aren’t absolutely necessary, though some kind of archive listing is good for people who want to read your back catalogue. Most of the Tumblr setups do this sort of bare bones thing, and their interface is easy as pie for adding posts. They also have split posting types into different things: regular text entries, videos, audio files, links, and chats. They also have this reblogging thing which is nice but it’s internal to Tumblr blogs. I don’t entirely like the setup but it is easy to use and uncluttered. I’m sick of clutter.

Anyway, I’ve been trying out different blogging programs, some of them in their infancy or at least toddlerhood, and I will be reviewing them here over the next few posts. If I find one that comes closest to what I want I may do the site over. We’ll see.

Very clever — you’ve programmed your bot to almost communicate like a person. For half a second I thought that the person with the rocketmail address and the website that was nothing but a loud, ugly acne treatment ad (the ad did effectively resemble an internet version of the condition it was hawking a treatment for) was serious with the comment asking if I had ever thought of adding videos to my site because “I enjoyed your article but I guess I’m more of a visual reader.”

But only for half a second. To spammer oblivion the message went. IF, however, you do happen to be a real person and are confused by my actions, allow me to invite you to fuck yourself with a Flip camera. They’re on sale at Amazon.

I hate spammers and people whose websites are nothing but a single ugly page hawking an overpriced product that does the same thing as a generic brand I can get at Rite-Aid for a few bucks and people who tell me to add memory-hogging junk to my own website because they are too lazy/stupid/both to read THEM BIG WERDS.

Do not comment here using an email address you got at one of those “disposable” email address websites. Those go straight into Akismet’s spam queue, and no matter how coherent or on-topic the comment is I will delete it permanently just like I delete all the other spam. You must use a real, permanent email address. It can be a secondary one that you rarely use, but it has to be real.

Update, February 1, 2010: The page has been removed. I told you I wasn’t sure about this social media thing. Someone whose Tumblr site I “follow” decided to load up porn on their site. You can’t see it on my own site, only I see it on my Tumblr “dashboard,” but I am still annoyed enough to be thinking about blocking them. It’s not that I have anything against pictures of naked people per se; I just don’t like to be ambushed with them. Also, the guy wasn’t my type; I have a very specific type and all others need to remain clothed in my presence.

I have added a page showing an embedded version of my Tumblr site. I’m not so sure about this “social website” thing. I mostly use Tumblr because it’s easy to use for purposes of linking to pictures of Doctor Who stuff without going through the whole download/upload/write a post here on so frivolous a subject. Also I like Tumblr’s posting interface, though the setup doesn’t really lend itself to long, thoughtful posts. But lately I’ve been unable to write long, thoughtful posts, so it works for me. But Spleenville is my main website, the one I actually pay money to keep on the internet, so I’ve got to get myself back to work, so to speak. Also, I got into it with several people when I broke through their warm, cuddly cloud of self-regard over Obamacare, so maybe I need to stay away from social media like Twitter and Tumblr and so on. But their interface, so quick and easy to use… unlike Wordpress which is getting to be kind of a pain. There is blogging software that people are writing that is Tumblr-like in its ease of use while resulting in a more blog-like website, but I had to remove about four thousand spams from the experimental blog I had set up with that, so it isn’t exactly the most secure. (It does have an anti-spam plugin that took a couple of clicks to set up but it wasn’t Akismet, but another one that I had to sign up for, but that was free. So there you go.)

I’m also thinking about changing the focus of my Asides category, which I have set up for a “side blog” (you can see it in the right side menu under “Asides”). I don’t know what I want to use it for yet though. Stay tuned.

Something in the previous post was screwing up this theme, which I really wanted to use, so I put it back in draft. Anyway, I’m currently back on the slooooooowwwwww desktop. I’ve decided I’m going to get the RAM upgrade though. Soon. Before I start foaming at the mouth. Then I’m going to wipe this hard drive clean and reinstall Windows. Nothing like a nice, clean, reinstall. I’m even thinking of doing one on the laptop with Ubuntu. It’s starting to run slow again, not to mention Firefox will. Not. Stay. Open. Even though there have been half a dozen updates since. None of them for Firefox for Linux, though. So I’ve been using Opera on the laptop which is okay, but has quirks of its own.

Anyway, what I’ve been doing: well, not much, beyond swearing at my computers and sitting on the couch. Well I have been working — part time but four hours five days a week is better than the 0 hours 0 days a week I’d previously been working. And my boss gave me his old vacuum cleaner, which I really needed because my sinuses have been acting way up due to having to keep the windows closed in this old house. Though today it’s so warm (I realize that a few months ago I would not have described temperatures in the low fifties as anywhere near “warm” but that was before I’d experienced piles and piles of snow everywhere) that I could very well open the windows now. People are outside wearing short-sleeved shirts; I won’t go that far but I just went out with my only outer covering the fuzzy jacket I bought at Walmart for seven bucks.

Speaking of Walmart, look what I bought to back up my valuable internet pr0n collection files. People complain about not having flying cars and jetpacks in 2010, but who needs those when you can stuff 4 GB of info onto something smaller than the first joint of your thumb. For less than fifteen bucks. Remember when people were all excited about 3 1/4 inch diskettes to replace those huge old floppies that were like the records I used to cut out of the backs of cereal boxes when I was a kid? Well I do. I also remember when dinosaurs walked the earth, but never mind that now. Anyway, I think this tiny little flash drive is beyond cool.

Aaaand… I actually started this post in the afternoon, and then a million things intervened — laundry, needing to go to the convenience store for detergent, passing a local bookstore on the way that was going out of business and buying some books and then telling my friend about it and when he saw the books I got (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, The Paris Sketchbook by William Makepeace Thackeray, and Boswell’s Journal Of A Tour To The Hebrides (I’m a sucker for travel diaries and diaries in general and the Hawthorne thing is a murder mystery that I hope is more interesting than The House Of Seven Gables)) my friend jumped up, grabbed his coat, ran out the door, and came back an hour later asking me to help him go fetch about twenty books and a big table thing he had bought… And then I was exhausted and wanted pizza so the pizza had to be ordered. And then I started having fun on Tumblr with someone who posted this moronic cartoon about the health care manufactured “crisis” and he unfollowed me so I expect any minute now to read all sorts of sad posts about how I’ve ruined the nice safe friendly community with my meanness. Life is good.