kid stuff

Yesterday the Sniglet asked Ignatz: "Why you hafta go to school every time?" (yes, he talks like that.)

Ignatz said, "Because grown-ups think suffering builds character."

playing catch-up

Right, there are a few things I've neglected to mention lately. Firstly, thanks Kel for the movie suggestions, I will look into them. Keep 'em coming, everybody. DrBob is...uh, disconcerted at how enthusiastically I've adopted this idea. "I don't even have a concept yet," he says. Well of course not. You make the movie-list, and then you decide what concept goes best with the movies you've chosen. It's like writing a paper in college: you write the whole thing first, then decide what the point is and put that in the first and last paragraphs, and voilá. Or is that voilà? Dang, I can never remember.

Elsewhere. I set up a bloggerblog for Ignatz too, but he doesn't want to use it. Like me, he can't be bothered to learn a new interface, since he already knows how to work the old one. I hoped he would gradually take over the coding of his blog, but no. He doesn't even remember to change the color from month to month. I had to go in and clean up his blog a few days ago. Yes, it does bother me a bit that he has absolutely no interest in anything that could ever be useful, just his stupid Duel Masters cards and shoot'em up computer games.

Blogger sent back an auto-reply with a couple places to look for the answer to my question, and I haven't done that yet. I will. Meanwhile, I am trying to get the Rome trip from last march documented. Look for that, as a work-in-progress, oh, tomorrow or so. It will take awhile to finish. Let's hope I get it done before we go to Croatia in august. Or possibly september. I also signed up to blogrolling.com (blogroller.com?) but that's all I did, sign up. I haven't set anything up yet. That is me, all start, no finish. I have to stop that. My living-room floor is looking like the forest floor again, and my laundry smells like feet. No, the clean stuff. I don't know what went wrong with that.

Oh, and the weather broke. As you can see from my weatherpixie, it is raining and raining. Well, it is as I write. By the time you get around to checking it will probably not be, but it won't be 86° either. That's okay, I was out of Sangría anyway.

I'm sure there's much more, but none of it is leaping to mind.

Later.

blogger on thin ice

So I got this from Mary:

>> I tried to comment on the blog.  It seemed to demand a
>> registration, which I
>> quit after it seemed to imply I was signing up for
>> my own blog. Clicked
>> on something that I thought might work without the
>> sign-up, but I
>> didn't expect it to go. That was a week ago, or so.

I have appealed to the blogger.com people for help on this, and I hope they'll be able to resolve it. My only reason for using this instead of doing it by hand is that I don't know how to add the comment feature to my own blog (to be honest, I haven't even tried to find out). But if the Great Unregistered can't comment here, then comments don't work, for my purposes, and there's no point in staying.

We'll see what develops.

that was me not blogging.

Get used to it. Sorry, I'm mean and nasty, and then I wonder why my kids are such smartasses.

Right, remember a few weeks ago, when I said I had nothing to do, but about five massive things hanging over my head, all dependent on some action from someone else, before I could get started on them? Well, four of them have landed, which is why you're not hearing much from me lately. And tragically, the fifth - which was dependent on my boss, He Who Is Much Too Busy To Actually Get Anything Done - has now been passed to K and L, who are much more efficient, so that is really really pending now, any minute.

Also, the weather has been fantastic yesterday and today. I often have to stop what I'm doing to go out and just stand in it for a few minutes.

a brief, shining moment in the academic catbird seat

I just finished my Week 2 assignment and submitted it, right on time, checked my answers, probably did a pretty good job, and am off to "a strong start" - my teacher said that after I turned in the Week 1 assignment. I set aside exactly the right amount of time for studying this week, got my assignment done exactly when I planned to. I'm so cool. Only thing is, this week and last week we covered the stuff I already know - the stuff I used when I built the JOB database - specifically, creating, populating, and querying databases. As soon as we start studying new-to-me stuff (design, normalization) - um, that would be next week - I am in deep doo-doo. Bright spot: at least the kids will be back in school when the scary part starts. Whew.

helloooo...

Okay, I'm pretty sure I blogged already today, but I drank a tank of coffee around 10pm, so even though it is Very Very Late, and the demon spawn will wake me Very Very Early with a demand for breakfast (a sandwich, on toast, with mayonnaise, mustard, ham, cheese, sliced pickles, and sliced tomatoes, and a glass of water with a piece of lemon perched on the rim), I am wide awake. There are two loads of laundry staring at me, and I am not folding them - I hear Kelly saying "shame on you", but I can't help it. I cannot fold laundry without something else to do as well, and it's much too late to start a movie.

Oh! speaking of movies, I have an interesting request: He Who Must Be Humored is planning a seminar in a year or so, on The Middle Ages in Film. He wants movies set between about 400 and about 1400 A.D, from different eras of the Movie Age, to look at how the popular image of the Middle Ages has changed over time. I have appointed myself the task of finding suitable movies, and am delegating it to you, my lovelies. Because it's interesting. He will definitely be including Monty Python and the Holy Grail, but for others, it is not yet decided. Some limitations, because there must be limits (he can't show 200 movies in one semester): Europe, please. I know that movies on Feudal Japan would be fascinating, but that's outside the scope of this class. Also, fantasy films with a sort of medieval flavor are out - no Legend, no Willow, probably no Princess Bride. And probably no Shakespeare. He's definitely Renaissance, and while I think some of his tragedies were set in the Middle Ages (Lear and Macbeth leap to mind, though I could be wrong there), when you watch the movies you're having to filter through both the filmmaker's ideas about medieval Europe, and Shakespeare's as well, which might be a bit too much. I forgot to ask him about TV series...Blackadder might be good, and some of the Brother Cadfael stories have been televised as well, I think. Oh, and no cartoons, so Redwall is right out.

While we're at it, does anybody remember a movie about medieval Iceland, the director was named Hrafn something, I think, and the heroine had a daughter named Sol...something about doomed love...I saw it at the Grand Illusion in 1991 or so, and I think DrBob would like it, but I can't remember the title. Film fans? Anyone?

Can't wait to hear your suggestions. Remember, we're talking about summer 2006 at the earliest, so if you think of anything over the next year, I'd love to hear about it.

vacations. gack.

I seem to remember a kind-of-cool weekend, but now I'm in hell. DrBob's gone to Munich, I was alone at home all day with the Sniglet, we drove eachother crazy. Oh, right, so this is why moms try to make friends with other moms, so they can get out of the house from time to time! I thought kindergarten would take care of that for me, but they have totally let me down this time. Last monday may have been worse, when Ignatz was home too and all they did was fight. But then again, maybe this is worse. I cannot describe the mental state you reach when you have had zero interaction with anyone other than a 4-year-old for twelve hours. It's beyond bizarre. I wish I could floss my brain.

why blogger?

I chose this blogging...thingy because the others didn't have as many fonts. Well, sort of. Typepad wants you to pay them, which is fair, and I don't not-want-to because I'm cheap, but because I don't really need the services they offer. If I did, I would find their prices absolutely reasonable. Blog-city has a bunch of templates, but won't let me preview them, so I'd have to change, save, post, update, check, reject, change again, save again, etc. Too much process for my attention span and available time. Bloglines had even fewer fonts than this - it combines an RSS reader with blogging software, which is a cool idea, but I didn't really like the way the RSS reader worked. Think I'll stick with Newsgator awhile longer. Anyway, my initial point: I chose blogger.com because it had the most fonts, but there are still not enough. Not for me, because I am always a whisper away from plunging into the abyss of font-geekness. I don't let myself fall because in my line(s) of work, there is no profit in becoming a font-geek, but it's like defying gravity. It requires actual, sustained effort.

Is this working? Is it better than my old blog? I can't decide. Maybe it's too soon to tell. Maybe I should stay with blog-city after all.

the grisly aftermath

Well, it was a fun evening. The winning entry was a complete non-event, and much better performances were overlooked, but that happens a lot. For the Yanks who constitute the vast majority of my readers, a quick rundown of the Way It Works may be in order. You can also read the official rules, if you have loads of time and infinite patience. I haven't read them.

Right, so it's a contest, obviously. Each country sends a performer to do the song that won their local contest. Countries used to be able to do two songs each, back when only five countries participated. Now, with all these new countries popping up in Eastern Europe, there are so many competitors that they had to break the contest up into two events, a semifinal and a final. The top 14 automatically get a place in the next year's final, and everyone else who wants in has to compete in the semifinal. The top ten go on to the final, but every participating country gets to vote. The voting takes a long time. There is one exception at work here, or rather, four: Germany, France, Spain and the UK always get in, no matter how bad they sucked last year - I'm not altogether sure why; that's probably in the rules somewhere. Interestingly, those four countries came in dead last this year.

Of course the voting is political. Austria will never have a chance, because they don't have any kind of lobby. On the other hand, Malta generally do well because nobody hates them. And Greece automatically gets top points from Cyprus, Macedonia and Albania. The Scandinavians always vote for eachother. So part of the fun is trying to predict how the voting will go, with all the various competing factors, because it's never totally about the music.

Anyway. It was a fun evening, even if the best song didn't win. Best songs; there were several I would have jumped up and down for.

Tonight's the night

It's finally come, the night of the kitsch-zombies, the Eurovision Song Contest! Somehow, don't ask me how, I have convinced DrBob that we need to watch this from a pub in Munich. It's been a long hard struggle to get my Eurovision obsession recognized. For years I've watched it scrunched up in the blue chair (okay, just pretend that one's blue), scooted up close to our miniscule TV set, all alone and giggling madly. That's how I spent thursday evening, but never again. It's time for me to be among my people.

So, theoretically...

...I could post in a different color every time. I dunno, there might be something immoral about that. It would clash with my blog-template too.

By now you've been pointed here by my regular blog, but I should mention that this is just an experiment. It might be easier, but it lacks something ... specifically, the lilac background, which I know is silly and distracting, but I love it anyway, so neener. I also know I could put it up here as well, quite easily in fact. But there's the rub.

I'm learning something about me: I hate learning stuff twice, I hate doing the same stuff twice - that must be where my housework problem comes from. I learned HTML by hand, and then when I had to learn DreamWeaver it was infuriating to waste the time learning all this highlight-click-drag crapola just to do something I already knew how to do. So now I have my own blog all set up and I know how to change it when I want to, etcetera, why learn my way around blogger.com?

Um, because you can leave comments. And because the blogroll thing might be a bit more maintainable. And overall, the added benefits may turn out to be worth having to learn a new version of what I already know. I guess we'll see. Kelly, the professional web-developer, uses blogger.com, because she knows that it's stupid to re-invent the wheel all the time. Kelly is smart. I should be more like Kelly, less like Julia Larwood, the Woman Who Drops Things, from the Sarah Caudwell mysteries. Great books, by the way.

Testing, testing, one two tres cuatro...

Ummm, yeah. This is yet another test entry, for a blog I may not even keep. I had one...somewhere else too, but I can't remember how to find it, or what my userid or password is. That may be a challenge here too, since my first several choices were already taken, mostly by people who have not updated their blogs in at least two years, not that I'm annoyed by that or anything. Anyway, here we are just seeing what it looks like, and if this is an easier way to maintain my blogroll and get feedback. We'll see how it goes.

La la la...