not falling down

Thus begins… KIND OF ABOUT SUPERHEROES WEEK on ANACRUSIS

Idiotcams now completely redone, with occasional director’s commentary. I believe that just about doubled the size of my Flickr stream. It’s interesting to watch the annual picture count through the years: 39 in 2001, 89 in 2002, peaking at 115 in 2003, then suddenly dropping to 16 in 2004, 7 in 2005, 6 in 2006, and only two so far this year.

Is there anybody pretending to be in love with Scarlett Johansson who is not, in point of fact, still in love with Charlotte from Lost in Translation? With the girl in the white jacket with the clear umbrella? In love with Sofia Coppola’s vulnerable little other-self in the pink wig with her head on your shoulder who is maybe going to get a zit under the corner of her mouth? Because if so: you’re doing it wrong.

Or with the Air song, or with this song “Too Young” by Phoenix that’s only in it for like five seconds.

All the old blogs have been moved over to Wordpress. People who blog or used to blog here: I’ll email you later with instructions and logins and stuff. When I find the strength. The Dispatch is a work in progress, as WP has no provision for importing comments except from other WP blogs, so I’m doing it manually. I didn’t realize it had this much content.

I’ve also uploaded the Idiotcams, all 278 of them, to Flickr. Now I just get to go through and retitle and retag every… one… of them.

I really miss NewsBruiser.

The animal turned one year old on Tuesday; there was a party with cake and everything, which I got to attend via webcam. We live in the future.

Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) I was too exhausted to write another story for the Anacrusis queue, so Maria wrote one for me. You probably cannot guess what it is about.

Once there was the puppiest chomper in all the land. She woke up in
her chompy bed scratching her chompy head. Today was an especially chompy day.

She climbed into all the windows and looked out. She took all the
socks from the hamper and hid them. She sniffed.

Something was off.

The chomper followed Person to the car. They went adventuring!
Person bought a large box.

They got home. All of the chomper’s friends sang songs to her and
gave her stuff and there was a cake with her name on it!

It was the chompiest. She went to sleep.

Okay, the highest-volume blogs are up, all content and categories and whatnot included. They also, regrettably, all look like Wordpress blogs. I’ll fix that after I spend tomorrow importing the lower-volume ones.

With the exception of the calendar, category and random-entry pages, all the old links to everything SHOULD be working, so please let me know if you find stuff that isn’t. I’m tired. It’s almost 5 am here.

But there will be an Anacrusis later today.

I’ve fallen prey to the great Dreamhost CPU disaster and what that basically means is I have to change my weblog software. I’m very unhappy about this, but I can’t afford to move to a dedicated server and I don’t believe the situation would improve at another host. At least I won’t have to bug Leonard for help anymore (this is a lie, I’m writing him an email right now).

NewsBruiser did exactly what I needed it to do for almost four years and I’ll miss using it. Those of you whose blogs I host, I’m sorry; I’ll be sending out a guided tour email once I’ve got (sigh) Wordpress or whatever up and running. The front page of NFD is static, so it will remain up for the duration, but everything else will go down later today.

THINGS NEVER TO DO.

1. Store images in a database without a really good reason.
2. Store them in BLOB fields, rather than MEDIUMBLOBs or even LONGBLOBs.
3. Preconvert them to ASCII, rather than native binary, and ignore that your database is Unicode, and will inflate the images to eight times their size.
   • (Consequence, just so we’re clear: those images you’re storing now get cut off after 1.5 kilobytes, for no readily apparent reason. For comparison, your typical Flickr photo preview is over 50k.)

4. Fail to document any of this.
5. QUIT AND LEAVE ME TO FIX YOUR HORRIBLE HACKWORK.

Blaaah. I’m tired of computers. My hair is 10% whiter after today.

And tomorrow, deep in the pixel trenches, we peasants will still toil on.

Quick fanboy bit here, just for the benefit of Google.

There are three significant fonts in Brick, and I accidentally discovered all three of them in separate places. The block title on the posters is in Font Bureau’s Giza. The title that zooms away after the cold open is Todd Bushman’s Cipher. The front of the party invitation is MillaN’s Sand.