Robust McManlyPants on Average Display

The further adventures of Whitten continue to be chronicled at Pigs Are Good People.

So, the switch only took a few minutes. From here, everything looks A-OK. If you find a problem, please email me.

OK. This is a question to my fellow bloggers, all of ya: have you ever gotten a comment just so strange, so totally over-the-top weirdo bizarro fud-up that it was tempting both (a) to delete it immediately for fear of the search-engine referrals it might generate and (b) to keep it around like some sort of caged performance artist, a little snapshot of the intersection of serious mental breakdown and the Internet?

I’m, uh, I’m just asking. Rhetorically.

*cough*

OK, so I’m not just rhetorically asking. And I approved it, because I just said in the last thread that I only delete comments when they’re spam. I’m 99.99% sure it’s spam, anyway, just some crazy-bot that slipped past the whole question-and-answer thing in the comment field. Right? That happens, doesn’t it? With the advent of WordPress I’ve never even had to consider whether someone could get past that, though. Still, it’s so unrelated to the thread in question I am 99.99% sure that it was a bot. It’s too bad, really, because I’d love to know which column is which in the dichotomy they set up in one paragraph.

On the chance I just rolled double 00′s twice on that d100 check, though, and that was a live person, and because it’s funny as shit, I kept it around. And, in case it was a live person? Seriously? Please, please get some help. The aliens did not set up Borders as the good guys and Barnes & Noble as their evil counterpart (or the other way around, depending on that same which column is which question).

Jesus H. on a stick. Some people. At least we’re not talking about my dick anymore.

I am serious about the weird-ass comments question, though. What do you do with yours? I know we all get them. If this dusty corner of the interwebs gets them, I can’t even imagine what weird shit someone like apostropher has seen.

Well, here’s the first five pages or so, anyway. It’s all rough draft, just stuff I managed to work out tonight after having spent a couple hours this afternoon dithering over all the questions of setting and characters.

I really enjoyed writing these first few pages just to ease me into it – Withrow is an old gaming character, and it’s very easy to slip back into his skin – and next I’m going to write The College Town. I’m really stoked about that one because it’s based on a dream I had a few months ago and it’s going to be the first time in a long time that I’ve had a female main character, and I’m looking forward to getting to have that perspective again.

OK, so Pam of Pam’s House Blend had me on her list of seven folks she wanted to see do the 7×7 meme, so here I am, and thank goodness because otherwise I have nothing to say today and I really, really do love to hear myself talk.

Seven Things To Do Before I Die:

• See a novel worth reading that’s been printed and on the shelf in a bookstore and has my name on the spine
• Visit Russia again.
• Visit Scotland again.
• Learn Japanese.
• See my name next to The Boyf’s on a legal marriage license.
• Learn to create some visual art (even my stick figures are horrible mutants).
• Live next to a large body of water (either The Lake or at the Outer Banks, preferably).

Seven Things I Cannot Do:

• Draw or paint.
• Speak Spanish comfortably at a conversational level.
• Live too near my relatives.
• Count cards with any complexity.
• Vote Republican.
• Fly without completely losing my cool.
• Handle stressful situations without inappropriate humor.

Seven Things That Attract Me To Blogging:

• I love to hear myself talk. No, really. I am a shy exhibitionist. A blog is a great way to expose my thoughts without the terrifying risk of having to say them outloud and listen to others’ reactions. That’s dumb and neurotic, yes, I know.
• The sense that if I’m going to sit back and enjoy what other people have to say it isn’t fair for me not to contribute. (I don’t think poorly of blog-readers who don’t blog, though – this is one of those Puritan work-ethic things that I apply only to myself because I’m neurotic.)
• The internet as the swap-meet of ideas. I am a true old-school internet idealist in a lot of ways.
• The opportunity to give the finger to authority in a public forum.
• Blogs are a great place to tuck away a nagging idea and then revisit it later. I have used blog posts as places to stash links and thoughts that I knew I would later use again when writing.
• Maintaining a stage-presence requires coming up with something to put on stage. Having a blog forces me to write, even though it’s not fiction and even when I don’t have anything to say. This is a good way to keep myself at the keyboard.
• I like blogdom’s way of providing a means to keep up with friends even when I don’t get to talk to them as often as I wish.

Seven Things I Say Most Often:

• Bah!
• It was the funniest. Thing. Ever.
• Awesome!
• Eeeeeexcellent.
• I’m just going to go check my mule for a second…
• (Followed by) OK, so I ended up spending three hours playing World of Warcraft…
• OK, so…

Seven Books That I Love:

• The Bridge of Birds, by Barry Hughart – a detective story set in a China that never was.
• Good Omens, by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett – how the Apocalypse nearly happens, and how funny it is.
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker – this is my favorite novel of all time, bar none. I first read it in 7th grade, and have read it dozens of times since then. It is easily the best vampire novel ever written, though I do honestly think Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire is a close second – second only because it hasn’t had a hundred years to prove it’ll still be kicking around, though I do honestly think that a hundred years from now it will be studied as a coded parable for closeted gay life (and yes, I am mentioning it so I can sneak in an eighth book).
• Body of Secrets, by James Bamford – it discusses the history, mission and methods of the NSA, and is fascinating.
• Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte – arguably the best work of any of the Bronte sisters, and a powerful and emotionally engaging tale of high passion on the desolate moors of Scotland. I love this novel. This is easily the best novel I read in all of high school. OK, maybe it was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. (And ha! I snuck in a ninth book!)
• Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson – fabulously energetic and creative and mud-splashed science fiction.
• Foundation, by Isaac Asimov – the whole series of series (the Robot, Empire and Foundation books) is pretty damn good reading (even if some books in the series are a little uneven compared to the rest), but this one kicks off my favorite part, the Foundation stories. Creative and intelligently told and all about being smarter, not tougher, than the other guy. I also recommend The Caves of Steel, the practical kicker for the Robot series, and yes, that means I snuck in a tenth book. You have no idea how hard it was to limit myself to ten.

Seven Movies That I Watch Over And Over Again:

• Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me
• Breakfast at Tiffany’s
• Six Degrees of Separation
• A Christmas Story
• Alien
• Night of the Living Dead
• The Princess Bride

Seven People To Whom I Pass The Meme:

• I’d love to see apostropher and/or Froz Gobo do it, but I doubt they would because they are (in all seriousness) too busy posting their own awesome stuff.
• Katastrophes, because I know there will be some overlap and I want to snatch up and read/watch what does not overlap.
• Bascha, for the same reason.
• Mr. Saturday, again for the same reason.
• Owlmother, ditto.
• Kath, same reason.
• Bill Clinton, because he is awesome.

One of the many advantages of WordPress is the ShortStat plugin. It produces a very slick and simple display of site statistics in easy-to-read displays that are far superior to my hosting provider’s built-in stats package or anything Pivot ever did. One of the many things it has helped clarify for me are the search terms people are using that bring them here. My favorites so far:

• “robust pants”
• “miss me camo pants” (isn’t that the point with all of them?)
• “lavender vendor machine” (I like that one!)
• “steve in escrow love punishment” (my personal favorite)
• “virginia slim 120s, tranny,” however, is easily the winner either of weirdest search term to lead to my blog or harshest way of describing what one needs from the convenience store, ever.

I love ShortStat.

So, one of my absolute favorite blogs, Republic of Dogs, is currently hosting a bake-off. Their entries have been mailed out to their judges, and I am deeply envious of those who will get to taste these creations. I have spent a goodly portion of the afternoon just staring at their entries. I have to share this one in particular, from the blog’s host, Res Publica. He describes the following:

5.) Chocolate Macaroon Sandwich Cookies – I heart these in a way that some might consider unwholesome. I could easily stand in the kitchen and eat the entire batch. If you love chocolate, these will be a near-religious experience. The cookie itself is a chocolate-almond macaroon that comes out crispy on the edges and chewy in the center. They get sandwiched around a dark chocolate ganache with just a touch of coffee flavor. After sitting for a day or so, the cookie and the filling just sort of meld together into one extremely, severely delicious mouthful.

It is terrible and wrong of him to inflict such thoughts on the world and not share the recipe. So, I’ve emailed him to ask for it. In the South, asking someone for a recipe is basically the highest compliment that can be paid, and it is a sort of sacred rite. To ask for a recipe is to compliment the chef and pay high honors to their work. To receive the recipe, on the other hand, is in some ways an even higher honor. When my mother sent me the recipe for her cornbread after hearing about my own disastrous* attempt at a “Mexican” cornbread, it was both a gentle ribbing for my results and an endorsement of my skills by sharing a recipe she’s been asked for many, many times.

Not to put any cultural pressure on him or anything.

UPDATE: Res is a scholar and a gentleman, and sent me links. Whee! I’m going to make cookies tomorrow! Thank you, Res!

–
* “Disastrous” only in a purely orthodox cornbreadishness sense. As stuff-in-a-bowl, it was delicious even if I do say so myself.

I’ve been with WordPress for a few days now, and I’m never going back to Pivot. I confess to being tempted to try Lyceum, because it’s from my peeps at ibiblio, but I only went to WP because of the conversion script and I don’t think I can handle trying anything else for a while.

I’d originally been concerned that I’d never figure out how to edit the template in WordPress, but Katastrophes spent a few incredibly helpful minutes with me on Saturday at Bascha & Kath‘s casual and very fun holiday shindig and, all of a sudden, I got how to deal with a stylesheet (and, in fact, what a stylesheet is). I’m not as big a fan of the administrative interface, in some ways, but it’s not like it’s hard to use, it’s just difference and I am the sort that fears change. Otherwise, it is better in every way.

Mr. Saturday, you want WordPress. You want it real bad.

Abruptly segueing, I’d like to point you right at KJ‘s pictures of Santapocalypse (aka Santanarchy, aka SantaRampage) in Nashville. Lots of Santas at a lot of bars having a lot of drinks. That is just golden.

Well, I’ve updated Pigs Are Good People. The theme I’m using there will change, yes, but that’s what’s up for right now. I’m tired. I’ve spent like four hours tonight playing with web things and I still haven’t figured out how to split the links on the right side of the page into distinct groups – they’re supposed to be organized by relationship to me (The Boyf, St. A’s, Friends and Stuff I Read), but they’re all just one big ol’ list of links. Ah well.

Speaking of web things, I have also installed Gallery2 and imported my current gallery into it. Take a look at each and tell me what you think – which is faster? Which looks better? Gallery2 displays a bunch of photography information by default – is it obnoxious? I’m not trying to seem pretentious, it’s just there and I don’t know how to make it go away and, hey, maybe it’s interesting to someone.

Obviously, I’ve upgraded.

The straw that broke the camel’s back for me, re: Pivot, was when the latest version’s new WYSIWYG editor “scrunched” all the text in posts. Gone were my deliciously clean paragraph breaks. Gone! And what was the response in their support forum?

“It’s a feature, not a bug,” essentially. What they said in response to those who raised the issue was that it never should have worked like that in the first place – “worked like that” meaning “looked decent,” apparently – and so they weren’t terribly interested in fixing it. At least, that’s how it came off to me.

Couple that with the fact that the Pivot-to-Wordpress script reached version 2.0 and in a test run it processed everything cleanly without the funky line-breaks from the time before? Yeah. I was sold.

So now I’m on WordPress. And I’m going to convert Pigs Are Good People shortly. There are a few little weird things (it adds a “below the fold” type “read the rest of…” link to everything, but that may be an artifact of the converter script), but overall I am very pleased.

Clearly, I am still sorting out the theme. I’m going to end up just making one of my own, probably, all black and dull like before, but hey. It’s simple, and I’m a creature of habit.

Quick reminder:  Carolina Rollergirls bout on December 4.  You know you want to go!

If you’re a gamer and you’re in a position to give, it’s time again to consider Child’s Play.  I made my donation a couple of weeks ago.  It is well worth it, and every penny goes directly to putting something entertaining and educational in the hands of a child whose Christmas probably otherwise sucks ass. 

The Boyf went out with Mr. Saturday, Pants Wilder and Andy to see GARMONBOZIA play again on the 17th, this time at Reservoir.  Reservoir used to be Go!, and when it was, it was a much better place to see a band.  That’s really all there is to it.  Reservoir has a better "feel" than Go! did, but Go! was a better place to hear a band perform live.  Largely, I think, this had to do with them having a stage.  But hey, it was still a great show, and this time I got some even better pictures.  I’m going to be putting them up over the holiday.

Saturday is my family’s self-selected Thanksgiving, because it doesn’t require anyone to cook and socialize and be up late and go to bed feeling stuffed and then get up for work the next morning.  So, I’m going to be spending Thursday & Friday working on NaNoWriMo and shopping and playing World of Warcraft and generally kicking back.  It will be awesome.

On that note, I’m well past 30K words.  Only 7 days left, I know, but with devoted effort tomorrow, Friday and Monday, I can wrap it up with no sweat.  The most recent PDF, if you’re insane enough to be reading it, isn’t actually the most up-to-date version, but hey.  I’ll post a new one after I get done with tomorrow’s 7K word goal. 

I considered doing some writing last night, since I got some done at work, but when I got home The Boyf suggested we polish off the rest of Clue, as it was burning space on the TiVo.  Gods, but I love that movie.  I loved it as a kid (the version that I saw in the theatre had the Miss Scarlett ending), and I hadn’t seen it in years.  At one point I said to The Boyf:  "I am a sucker for a running-around-in-a-clumsy-mob comedy," and gods but does Clue deliver on that front.  Plus, Tim Curry.  Purr.

I went ahead and bought my NaNo self-price this year:  an iPod.  I am a whore for shinies.  I am an absolute whore.  I also bought an FM adapter so that I can play it on my car stereo.  It will fortify me for doing the family dinner on Saturday, and it will usher me back to warmth and my cat and my boyfriend that same night. 

Speaking of WoW and music, for months now I’ve been lamenting that I couldn’t find an add-on that would let me control iTunes from within World of Warcraft.  Then, I found just such an add-on:  WoWPlayer.  Then, I found out Mac support got dropped at precisely the same time I started playing WoW.  Then, I found out that the way the add-on works is going to be rendered unusable by the 1.9 patch when it comes out, so it’s going to be gone from Windows, as well.  So, fuckbunnies.

I think this means someone in our group needs to learn to code in LUA.  And it isn’t me.  Trust me on that.  The last program I wrote was in MacTuring.  It was 1994.  It did basketball averages.  It was for an assignment, I assure you.  And it sucked.  I got a B on a program that was, like, twenty lines long.  I don’t have a programmer’s brain.  Ask me to figure out why Networks A, B and C can’t communicate freely with D through your firewall, but E can, despite none of those networks being explicitly mentioned in the rulebase – leaving me to dig into implied rules, SmartDefense and all sorts of fun under-the-hood goodies on a Checkpoint – and I’m your man.  I did this today, in fact, and left a customer literally whooping for joy after months of not being able to figure something out on their own.  But ask me to code my way out of a wet paper sack – open at both ends, a knife in one hand and a blowtorch in the other – and I would die of starvation in the damp center of said sack.  I’m just not cut out for that shit. Still, the engineer in me looks at the question of Can something in WoW monitor and control iTunes? and I think Of course it can, you dumb shit.  It’s not like it can possibly be that hard – I just don’t know the language in that foreign realm.  I’m left thinking that if I tried it – much like asking for the bathroom in Russian – I’d be just as likely to end up pissing my pants on a street corner and calling it success as I would finding the bathroom.

No, I did not piss my pants on a street corner in Russia.  It’s just a random example.  I was very nearly slaughtered by the ninjas of the mind in St. Petersburg, though.

Long story.

(more…)

I just read this entry in the blog of a New Orleansian who got to return to his house the other day.  I’m sitting here at work all vaklempt.  It’s really, really beautiful.

I am such a softy.

At any rate, I continue to be addicted to MSNBC.com’s on-the-scene
reporters who are basically just driving around talking to people,
blogs from the area, etc.  All the stuff about how bad FEMA blew
it and/or the governor and/or the mayor doesn’t really interest me, to
be honest.  It doesn’t surprise me that the Bush administration
fucks things up – does it surprise anyone? – and it sure as shit
doesn’t save anyone’s life, at any rate.  I prefer to take my
disaster response coverage in more personal portions.  I’m sure
there are those who consider it ghoulish voyeurism, but I’d much rather
learn the on-the-ground realities of life in that sort of situation by
watching them up-close-and-personal (comfortably mediated by the
interwebs, of course, because I am a fat-ass American who can’t be
bothered by the ugliness of reality) than by watching the Weather
Channel and seeing all this as some sanitized Science Club presentation. (more…)

I’m afraid that, to counter ongoing comment-spam, I have enabled the
“spamquiz” feature of Pivot Blacklist.  In short, to comment, you
must input the correct answer to a short question when
commenting.  This, in the words of Pivot Blacklist, “baffles”
spambots.  My question to you is, is this a pain in the
tuckus?  Should I turn it off?  KJ
was beaten by it once yesterday (the answer is “manly” by the way), and
I don’t want to make people hate me for having added something to the
comment process.  If you’ve been beaten by this, just drop me a
line at:

robustmcmanlypants (at) nc (dot) rr (dot) com
or
michael (at) metalab (dot) unc (dot) edu

I would also gladly entertain suggests of more obvious questions to post.

I’ve also decided to use the .htaccess generator in Blacklist to
populate some rules that simply disallow any access to the site at all if referred from a domain that includes any of a selection of obvious spam-words.  To demonstrate my own cluelessness, I nearly asked in this post that anyone who couldn’t get to the site at all just email me, as well.  At least the problem with doing so, once I started to type it, became obvious before I was done. (more…)

So, I’m sticking with Pivot.  I like the new release candidate for
1.30, and Pivot-Blacklist is fixed and updating, and referrer
spam-blocking seems to be working, and all in all I am happy.  I
have finally, finally gotten Permalinks and Archive Links to show up at
the bottom of entries rather than at the top.  This pleases me
greatly.

I like WP, but it just seems really complicated in a lot of ways and
Pivot’s various down-sides, though surely real, are ones to which I
have grown accustomed.

I just know you’re all fascinated. (more…)

So, at Pigs Are Good People, I’m running the latest RC of Pivot. 
It includes, by default, a list of most recent referrers to the
site.  This table has, in the time I was on vacation, become
nothing but a list of spam URLs.

So, today I finally got off my butt and installed Pivot Blacklist for that site.  I’d figured, tucked away as it was, it could wait.  It couldn’t wait.

The problem is, I downloaded and installed PBL just fine but when I
went to update the blacklist, I got an error that the list could not be
updated.  I tried it on this blog’s installation of Blacklist and
got the same error – and a notice that it hadn’t updated in a month.

Great.

Katastrophes, Mr. Pink Eyes, Mr. Saturday,
anybody out there who’s running Pivot Blacklist at all, are you having
the same problem?  There’s been nothing posted on the project site
since May when he put out 0.8.9.  (Update, from before I even posted this,
because in going there to get the URL for the Pivot-Blacklist site I
saw the post:  he’s posted about it, but has no fix yet.)

I would also like to note that there are some really grody referrer
spam URLs out there.  Today I got to block words I really had
never even considered appearing on the front page of my little
in-character blog.  I mean, for fuck’s sake.  Honestly.

In the meantime, the garden has started to produce more steadily. 
It’s odd.  I pulled one of the biggest squash I’ve seen out of the
garden when we got back from vacation.  It had been just a little
yellow sliver of potential when we left and when we got back it was
huge.  The zucchini?  Still zilch.  The bell
peppers?  Not a one.  Jalapenos?  By the motherfucking
truckload.  I got a gypsy pepper bigger than any I’ve ever seen
and some Hungarian Hot-Wax peppers to beat the band.  And I have
at least three more tomatoes coming in.

Gardening is weird.

In the flower front, the (now huge-ass) Hosta that KJ
got us for a housewarming present last year is now officially ginormous
and it has four (4) flowering stalks coming up.  Pictures
forthcoming. 

I still find myself staring at this picture, occasionally.  I look at it and wonder, what was the artist thinking?  Honestly.  I can’t figure it out.  What part of that didn’t seem creepy to them? (more…)