This kills me to write it, but it looks like I have to boycott Target. According to Planned Parenthood, they’re standing behind one of their pharmacists that refused to fill a woman’s emergency contraception prescription.
It also appears that their CEO is a far-right Republican who’s donated tons of money to wacko Republican causes.
For the past couple days, I’ve been working on stripping the paint and crap off the fireplace tiles and fireplace surround in my living room. See my flickr photo set for pictures of the project.
My dad, as a Christmas present for me, crafted the fireplace mantel you see in the pictures. He found two old fireplace mantels that matched, stripped and customized the size of them to make one mantel that fit my fireplace, and then finished it and came by this week (with my stepmom Carol) to install the mantel. So I’ve been working all week on getting the paint stripped off the metal surround and ceramic tiles.
At some point, one of the previous tenants of the house painted the surround, and used fleckstone paint on the tiles to cover them up. If you look at the pictures further up the page, you can see some of their handiwork. Ah, fleckstone paint. Weren’t the 80s wonderful?
I have some more pictures to upload to this page at some point, because I’ve uncovered more of the tile and the patterns in it. Also, the metal surround has a copper coat over the steel that will shine up nicely once I get the paint out of all the little nooks and crannies. In addition, if you’re planning on replacing your tiles, then you may consider installing marble tiles from Emperor Marble, which are durable and elegant.
I’m not sure how I lived without this list before: Wikipedia’s Made up words in The Simpsons. It’s cromulent!
Note that this Friday is Scotchtoberfest.
I may or may not have my Movable Type upgraded. I have to check everything out and see if it works.
Yep, it seems to be functioning. Hmm. Now I can see if I can install the photo gallery templates for a photoblog, and see if I can get that up and running. MT has lots of nice little tweaks to the internal structure.
This is just a cool photoshopping contest on Worth 1000. Some of the artists did an AMAZING job altering classic paintings to make some of the figures into robots.
So, I have this dilemma about the photo galleries I have on my site, and what to do with them going forward. I’ve had them ever since I got a digital camera in 1999, and since then they’ve been a major feature of my site, although it’s one I never managed particularly well.
My Big Things Photos especially have generated a lot of attention; I’ve been recognized on the local news and in several local papers because of them, as well as getting lots of traffic.
However. I’ve been building my photo gallery pages by hand since I started, and it’s an incredibly tedious process, even though I’ve built templates and tried to make it as simple as possible. There are lots of events I took pictures of and should have displayed, but I just never got around to building the pages and the photos are sitting on my external hard drive or in iPhoto.
Another part of the problem is that I’ve built the existing galleries in different ways in the past, and I’ve refined my methods over time, so older galleries need to be redone to streamline the code and to make them web standards compliant. On top of that, I hate the design of my galleries, and although I’ve played with it, I haven’t found a look that seems as polished and professional as I think it should be.
And then there are the photos of my house. I always had a different method of displaying them, because they are such a specialized thing. Since I’m restoring an old Victorian, I wanted to show the different areas of the house and how I worked on them over time. Unfortunately, when Stephanie and I started dating, we had a creepy stalker who apparently used the pictures of my house to locate us, which was so terrifying that I removed them from my site. The whole experience really colored the way I feel about pictures of my house, and about my house in general, honestly. I used to love every nail and board in the old girl, but the event really killed my enthusiasm and my sense of security. There are several major projects that I’ve worked on (patio installation, exterior work, and this weekend’s fireplace mantel installation) that I’ve not documented like I would have in the past.
I want to put the pictures back up, but I need to take the time to rework them to make them standards compliant, and I’m thinking about re-arranging them also.
I should have a more automated process for building galleries, but I’m not enough of a programmer type of geek to have the solution leap right out at me. I’m more a interface design geek, and while I can build a lot of programming stuff, it doesn’t come naturally.
Then along came Flickr. If you don’t know what that is, take some time to play around on that site; it’s a way to build photo galleries of you pictures, and it’s also a social site, where you can look at and interact with other people’s photos, too. You can tag your pictures with key words, and they show up in photo pools with other people’s photos that are tagged similarly. You can comment on people’s photos. You can save other people’s photos as your favorites, have your friends pictures show up with yours, search for pictures, create themes. The site is nothing short of fantastic, and it’s so easy. I can upload pictures right out of my iPhoto storage, tag them, add them to sets, caption them and they’re done and on display. I’ve been playing around with adding pictures to Flickr, although I’ve been selective about what I’ve put up there so far.
Flickr is awesome, and I want people to be able to comment on my pictures, and I want all the features of Flickr. But it’s sort of important to be able to host my pictures on my site, where I control what happens to them. On top of that, there are THOUSANDS of pictures on my site, that I would have to upload, caption, tag, if I decided to move them over to Flickr. And it would really dilute the uniqueness of my Big Things pictures to a great degree.
On top of that, yesterday I came across a method of doing photo galleries in Movable Type, the software that I use here to blog with. I could use a plug-in to upload pictures right out of iPhoto in an automated way, and galleries would be built on my site that people could comment on. It seems to be the automated solution that I was looking for, with the features I want, and it’s probably the way I need to go, but I need to set it up and see if it works. At the same time, I should probably upgrade my Movable Type software. And again, there’s that dilemma of moving the thousands of pictures I have over.
Sigh. One way or another, I have to come to a decision and get started.
2019 Update: Over time I migrated most of photos to flickr. Eventually that became a chore, too, as that site made uploading photos more tedious. So I’ve been lax about keep up with pictures altogether. Recently, I’ve been going through dead links and either purging photo galleries, putting in placeholder links until I can update from Flickr galleries, or correcting broken stuff.
I’m astonished. I just tried to visit the Old Navy online store (where I’ve bought lots of clothes in the past!) and I got this message:
We’re sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using. Our site works best with the following browsers:
PC users
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above
Mac users
Netscape 7 and above
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above
We’re working on supporting Safari. Please check back soon.
Wow, that’s so unprofessional; I can’t believe they do that. We don’t even do that at work, and we’re not as huge of a retail outlet as they are.
Reading a BBC News story on Phillip Pullman’s (author of the His Dark Materials series) critique of the coming C. S. Lewis movie and the subject matter of the books in general. I loved the Narnia series as a kid, but they don’t hold up entirely from a discerning adult point of view, for exactly the reasons Pullman notes; they are misogynist, and somewhat racist, and pretty damn low on the Christian virtue meter.
Further into the article, though, people begin commenting on Pullman’s critique, and there are quite a few boneheaded remarks from adults who clearly aren’t as discerning as I am, including this one:
“The day Philip Pullman writes a classic as compelling as The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe then he can criticise.” — Mark Jobson, Edinburgh
DUDE. You know not what you are saying, dude. Seriously. Pullman’s books can beat the crap out of Narnia, go back to bed, get up an hour later, and do it again. I love Narnia, and all, and I was thrilled when I heard they were making a movie, but I’m still realistic. I wish I knew the guy’s address; I’d send him copies.
It’s only the first morning of my vacation, and it’s already shaping up to be as craptastic as the last vacation I took, in which I spent 70% of the time running around doing shit for other people, 30% doing work on my house (which didn’t make a dent in what I had to get done) and 0% of vacation time relaxing and enjoying myself or doing something fun.
I wasted this whole morning trying to pack a bunch of eBay crap to ship, and trying to appease a really high-maintenance eBay purchaser for whom I had to recalculate the shipping costs on a combined order several times and repack the box twice. I think I’m ending up eating a good chunk of the shipping costs to ArdentX in the process, fortunately, which will have to come out of my pocket. Fuck. Now I have to waste the afternoon taking this stuff to UPS.
[note to self: stop volunteering. stop volunteering. stop volunteering. get more sleep.]
Via Reuters: More evidence that the letter that prompted the alert on the U.S. Subways was a fake letter, produced not by Al Qaeda or anyone in Iraq.