all things me

I’m browsing WordPress plugins/hacks and just installed a paginating plugin by Scriptygoddess. Earlier I installed Wp-grins, i.e. clickable smileys for posts and comments. Hmm… what else could I get.

@ 20:23
(yay, Scrubs is on in 7 minutes!)
OK, I downloaded a Condensed content for date and category archives that shows the first n words of an entry (in monthly archives and category view). I’m having trouble deciding which I’d use: paginating or condensing…

Ahh… I always chuckle at bad layouts (I don’t mean the link above). Chuckle away if this looks bad on your screen, but for me it looks mighty fine.

Last week I was home alone for the first time in my life (believe me — that’s possible). I have been alone at my grandparents’ and at my aunt’s (with kids though) for a couple of nights but never at home.

Oh how it was wonderful.

When my parents + sister left for summer cottage on Tuesday I couldn’t wait to go home from work *via grocery store*. I bought milk, juice, and turkey cold cuts.

At home, I watched tv — upstairs. I made myself dinner — upstairs. Spaghetti bolognese had never tasted so good — with so little spices (I’m not exactly a chef…). I listened to the radio — upstairs — and wasn’t afraid to sing a little. Oh, and I played the piano!! Only two pieces though (Am Strande by George Posca and… some other thing Sorry, can’t remember the title. Something in G Minor by Beethoven I think).

I also double checked the locks before going to bed and listened to every creak and squeak, and car driving by. And left for work each morning dreading that’d be the day I forget my keys.

In case you didn’t get it, the title is an allusion to Milan Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” which I haven’t read — yet?

Today at the grocery store a little boy snatched my packet of minced meat. He was so quick that I didn’t even notice. I was packing the things into the shopping bag and the packet had disappeared. The cashier noticed that the boy had something in his hand (he was a kid to the lady next in line). It turned out that they had a similar package. Hard working shop assistant I must say.

@ 21:05
Joined Dreamweaver fanlisting.
It’s called WYSIWYG but I’ve never thought of Dreamweaver as wysiwyg… Although it really is what-you-see-is-what-you-get and no extra crap. (I haven’t used it exclusively as wysiwyg so I don’t know how it handles the adding and removing and moving of code.)

Now I’m gonna go watch 2001 Space Travesty. Ta ta!

Word of the Day: Wonky — shaky, awry, crazy
(picked up from Black House (the book I’m reading…))

This is another excuse for posting a WOTD… Although, I have posted JUST WOTDs or QOTDs and nothing else. Oh well.

I forgot to watch the 2nd part of the gross parasite series but luckily (darn I’m lucky — no, really) they re-ran it on a digital channel and I just happened to check the programs for the channel in yester’s paper. And it just happened to be on later that night.
This time it wasn’t that gross (although there was one maggot) — only mosquitoes and diseases they spread. Of course it’s awful to have malaria, sleeping sickness, etc. in the world, but I’m talking about the *gross-factor*.

@ 9:58
Ok, this is weird.
The library man just called me. Yesterday I went to the library to look for a grammar book but it couldn’t be found anywhere. Now it had emerged. How did he know who I was? Very spooky. xD (I know there’s not a smiley for that, but sometimes I just can’t resist you know) I have to make one myself if there’s a blank one available.
Oh yeah: Due date 13.8. (I can’t access my menu (on the right) from work)
I didn’t desperately need the book but I couldn’t NOT go get it It might turn out to be useful cause sometimes I do need some grammar info which is difficult to find online.

@ 15:28
Uh-oooooh…

Finland gained its independence in 1919.

Says Bartleby (or The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition). That’d be 1917, thank you very much. Unless the Americans wouldn’t accept the independency until 1919…? And actually wouldn’t that be independencY (not independence)? Oh, no, sorry. Both are good.

The (late) Finnish band Ultra Bra (“bra” as in good in Swedish) sings in their song “Ilmiöitä” (quoting from memory, I’ll check it if I remember):

Jos aina törmää samaan ihmisen kadulla, alkaa pidemmän päälle tervehtiä, vaikka ei tiedä tämän nimeä.

I.e. “if one always runs into the same person on the street, eventually one starts greeting them even though one doesn’t know their name.”
I tend to go to the bus stop around the same time every morning (around 8:10) and there’s the same bus driver every time and he always starts his shift on the bus I’m getting on. So, last week I think, he started saying good morning. This morning he also said something else but I couldn’t make out what it was and didn’t start huh?-ing.

The same band sings in the same song “if a girl doesn’t drink (alcohol), she’s probably pregnant”. Uh-oh… Maybe truth isn’t in songs after all.

Sometimes people don’t need long “acquiantance(ship)” (whoa, I spelled it correctly the 1st time round), though. Yesterday on the way *from* work at the *tram* stop a woman told me about just coming from the hair dresser’s and taking the tram so that her hair wouldn’t get messy She had been at the hd‘s just a week ago but a rain had ruined her hair that time (with all the sprays and things so it was all flat and funny) and she thought she’d have to wait for at least some time before going back. Dang, I haven’t been at the hair dresser’s for a year!!

Last night I woke up at 3:20 am because the rain was so loud. And the morning before that I woke up around 5 am for no reason. Apparently I’m getting enough sleep. But why am I so tired?

Quote from an unknown source:

There are only 10 kinds of people in this world. Those whose understand binary, and those who don’t.

Spotted in the manual for command zip (on department’s Linux):
-x files
       Explicitly exclude the specified files

I still don’t know how to zip files though… Why can’t there be a LinZip?

Phew… *wipes forehead* I thought I’d messed up things (this blog) really badly. The post IDs have an annoying auto incrementing number so after I accidentally deleted all my previous 87 posts imported from Greymatter and re-imported them only to notice that the ID was 160 and something (well, 87 + 87 + 2 = 176?) so I deleted them again (ALL messages this time cause I thought that would solve it. Well, it didn’t) — only to notice that the number had gotten to 200+. I know this isn’t a big deal but I want to know how many posts I have without having to do complicated calculations.

Anyway, finally I found a “no-no” way to do it. I emptied my posts table in MySQL and that solved it. Now I’ve imported my old GM entries and re-wrote (I had copied them to safety) the two I had added after moving to WordPress. And when I press Publish, this one should get number 90. Will you keep your fingers crossed for me? I can’t, I’m going to slap my hands over my eyes — tight.

WOOOOHOOOOOO!

I’m going to publish this new blog now. Even though I haven’t customized and designed it to exactly what I want it to end up being. But I’m not going to update Greymatter anymore so I might as well change to this one. Now, I haven’t changed the intra-blog links yet. I’m going to do it some day when I get an inspiration. I also haven’t changed all the Greymatter formattings (** for bold) but I’m going to do it soon.
Oh yeah, silly me: I moved to WordPress

There is one annoyance in WordPress, from a linguist’s point of view. In the default CSS the titles in the menu were *made* lowercase (that was in the code itself “text-transform: lowercase”). AAAAAAAGH!!!
Another thing was the abbreviation of June and July to Jun and Jul respectively. That might be because I’m only an English-as-foreign-language person though…
@ 15:47 on July 16 {
Another annoyance. When I choose to see all posts in a category that happens to be a parent category, all the posts to the sub-cats are shown too. Have to look into that if I could change that; I wouldn’t want to make all the categories into “top level” categories.
}
@ 13:52 on July 26 {
I’ve never understood the practise of putting the comment’s permalink in the time… oooh! Away! I put a # sign which I’ve also seen marking the comment permalink and at least it’s logical (at least to people who’ve written HTML), it’s an anchor (or a bookmark) to that particular comment.
}

Also, as a Greymatter convert (I moved to WP mainly because my hostess Shirasade’s webspace provider frowns upon Greymatter and also because it was getting kinda slow rebuilding all the pages after each change. Maybe it was better to move this early (with only 87 entries)) I miss having a nice list of titles-only after searching, for example.

Oh well, I’ll give this one a go.

Well then. Yesterday I went to see Van Helsing with my sister. It had an… interesting… plot and the music (the theme, in a way) was amazing!!
I also bought Christine (an S. King book — do I need to say that?).
Today I went to see Secret Window (based on the Secret Window, Secret Garden novella in Four Past Midnight — by S. King; do I need to say that?) with a friend of mine.
I also bought Rose Madder (an S. King book — do I need to say that?)

I haven’t scanned them for my bookshelf at TGWLSK yet.

Oh yeah. I saw The Song of Susannah in the bookstore. *drooooool* Lovely turquoise cover and a silvery bookmark ribbon in between the pages. A bookmark! Each book should have one of those so that people wouldn’t make dog-ears. Too bad I have Wolves of the Calla as the Grant edition not the Hodder & Stoughton. Although… the Grant edition of SoS is beautiful too… maybe I should look for that? But my first 4 DTs are in that H&S box. Agh. I’m torn.

Word of the Day: curmudgeon — an ill-tempered person full of resentment and stubborn notions; a churlish, irascible fellow; mocker, debunker

@ 15:31
I’m pretty sure I woke up with my mobile in my hand and the alarm clock slash radio playing music. Both indicate that I had woken (or not…) to the alarms and silenced them — and fallen asleep right afterwards. But I’m not completely sure.