I was rudely rousted from slumber at two in the morning by the building’s fire alarm. Ten minutes later, four fire trucks showed up outside my window. Fifteen minutes later, they were gone and I was back asleep. It was worth it for the lights and the snow.
I have this horrible feeling that the database the site is running on is hopelessly fubared. A lot of the older content isn’t indexing correctly, and there’s a lot of debris hanging around from my previous installations. All of which is just to say that, having finally started towards a site I find nearly optimal, I may have to take it all back to formula. At least the process is bound to be much quicker the second third fourth fifth time around.
Who knows, maybe it will right itself somehow. In the meantime, I’m playing around with sitemaps to see if that helps my indexing. Wish me luck!
There’s some small amount of joy in messing around with code until you break it, and then backtracking to figure out if there’s some other way you could make it work. Granted, I’d probably have much greater success if I had even more than the slightest idea what I’m doing. I doubt it would be quite as much fun, though.
On a more practical note, if someone could tell me how to combine the functionality of Kashou’s Inline Ajax Comments with Mike Smullin’s Ajax Comments 2.0, I’d be incredibly grateful. I fiddled plenty, but it’s not something I’m likely to figure out on my own.
No matter the facts of our past, it seems that every memory carries a hint of melancholy. What are these days we’ve put behind us, what bonds were forged then broken? What then do we become, we strongly forged yet pulled asunder chains? Are these chinks in our armor, then, from gnashing together, from pulling apart, from trying to find that place where we could link together like a magic trick?
When it comes to separation, I’ve never been very proficient. One lucid moment of deja vu and deep inside I’m sure that all of this happens simultaneously. But we organize, we pull things apart here, put them together over there, arrange them by genre and color and place, until the synchronicity is all gone and we’re left with neat little piles, each one tagged and indexed and we wonder why we feel sad when we look upon our great achievement.
It’s natural, maybe inevitable. There’s no reconciliation. Once we’ve made our piles, we’ll never again find their homes, never again be able to separate them out and recreate the synchronous, chaotic jumble that we somehow tumbled out of.
It’s okay. We’ve arranged ourselves into vast libraries, now we get to be librarians: we provide access to some, deny it to others; we give out parts of ourselves and then, almost inevitably, demand them back; we reclassify certain parts as our standards change; and maybe, if we’re very lucky, we find a quiet moment when, alone and lost in the stacks, rustling through pages of memories, we rediscover some beautiful treasure that we had long since forgotten.
Maybe that’s what makes it all worthwhile.
That is over. Now I know how to salute beauty.
– A. Rimbaud (tr. by Louise Varèse)
WYSIWYG editors are just plain annoying. They load slow and they try to do everything for you, but they do it wrong. I mean, haven’t these people learned anything from MS Word!? The default editor has a handy link button, and will even do bold and italics for me if I become too lazy to bracket my b’s and i’s, and really, that’s all I need.
At the moment I’m hanging out, slightly buzzed off a Canadian table wine called “Cochon Mignon” (cute pig), which is actually quite good, and thinking about doing my homework for tomorrow (which I imagine I really should). Next week we have our first set of due dates, as far as assignments go. I’m not quite stressed … yet. I work best under pressure.
The new site loads much faster than the old one. I attribute part of that to the shiny new underbelly of WordPress 2.1, and some of it to my having somehow broken my old install with random plugin installations and too many bells and whistles. This install I will keep clean and limber, because I like it that it loads much faster than it used to. And really, what is a blog besides a place to put words? Of all the communication mediums, words have always been my favorite anyway, so even in this age of fancy podcasts and youtubisms, I figure they’re what I’ll stick with. I have some fun plans for some other projects, though who knows if I’ll ever follow through on them. Mostly I just get excited about having plans, so much so that I really don’t feel like doing anything about them would contribute to my excitement. I’d much rather just plan things. One of the things I always forget when moving urls around is that it breaks referral links. Mostly, this means that the handy links I got from the Librarian Avengers “Why you should fall to your knees and worship a librarian” link won’t give me all the fancy hits that it used to. Rather, it will just direct to my boring, empty (but very speedy), portal page.
Speaking of which, my portal page uses Drupal, which is itself kind of fun. It’s nice to get out there and try out some new software every now and again. I even installed it manually, since Dreamhost doesn’t have a Drupal one-click install (yes, I really am that lazy most of the time). It kind of makes me wish I was in the web design course this term, but I am glad to be getting my requirements out of the way so that I can have fun next year (I think). I also, from time to time, mourn the fact than I’m not in McNally’s history of libraries class, but I guess it’s too late to do anything about that now. I’m excited about taking his history of books and print course next year, so at least that’s something.
Alright, back to the wine, and maybe even some studying….
So here’s the new look!
What, you weren’t expecting a new look?
Well … it’s too late now, so you’d better like it.
I upgraded to WP2.1, which is fresh and clean, and figured I’d take the opportunity to move some things around. The plain ‘ol ahniwa.com url now points to what I admit is currently a very undeveloped portal page. And the blog has moved next door to its old home, now lurking at ahniwa.com/blog. I guess it’s true when they say that the only constant is change.
I hope you’ll forgive me for not posting an “actual” post. I’ve been sitting in front of this computer for too many hours already, staring at text, and I haven’t eaten since about one. On a sidenote, the new WP is named Ella, after Ella Fitzgerald. So that’s pretty neat.
There’s a certain point in any foreign experience when a person hits a certain peak. The awkwardness of the new situation has worn off, for the most part, and while things are still new, they’ve also reached a point of comfort where you feel like you can be yourself. You, in turn, are a new experience to the other people involved in this foreign environment, which can in turn itself be kind of eye-opening.
This is the point I remember feeling, at one point in France. This is the feeling I had freshman year at Evergreen. It’s even the feeling I had when I came back to Olympia, both times, from France and Ohio, though in those cases there was an interesting blend of newness and familiarity. It’s the point that, in no small part, drove me to Montreal. It’s a point of self-discovery, or maybe of re-discovery of those parts of yourself that you love best. When we exist in an environment that is used to us, it’s inevitable that it will start to take us for granted, and that we in turn will take ourselves for granted. In a new environment, we’re fresh; we’re seen through new eyes and can therefore see ourselves through new eyes.
In these brief flashes of insight I’m a poet in love with the world; I want to dance at midnight, drink coffee ’til dawn; I want to improvise pirate stories by flashlight around a bottle of whiskey. I want to smile, I want to cry, and I want to laugh out loud at the complicated, perfect beauty of the world.
Every once in awhile I tell myself, “Self, today is the day that I’m going to start blogging on a daily basis.”
My self usually responds by saying, “Do I even know you?”, and goes to sit on the other side of the bus.
Regardless of my split personality problems, I really do intend to create florid, captivating windows into which one might peer into my life. That is my intention. But, I suppose like all intentions, good and otherwise, it ain’t haulin’ water. Or, bizarre analogies aside, intentions and actions are different beasts. In any case, I’m on day two of such a spurt, however brief it may end up lasting. Hopefully, by day three, or four, or eventually, one hopes, I’ll stop starting said blog entries by talking about how I hope to blog more. I don’t really care what you think of it, but it bores me to tears.
So far, today’s been a long day of reading, class, conversation, studies, a lecture, a group discussion, and for lunch: some tasty salami. Now I’ve got rice on the stove and swing classes in about an hour. I have two classes on Wednesday nights, Lindy [Hop] 3 and Blues. This is week 3, and so far the lindy class is quite easy, though a nice review, and the blues class is kicking my ass. I knew it would. Blues, or at least blues lindy, is to me what the dance is all about. Or perhaps it just emphasizes those things that I think dancing should be all about from the get-go. It focuses on the music, it stresses mood and emotive dancing, and it makes you move your ass. That last one is very important. Unfortunately, it’s also my biggest problem at the moment. Body isolation is tough for me, and while I can do a certain amount, even with my hips (and ass), really getting into it, pushing down, committing entirely to it, is really tough for me.
I know I’m there to learn, but with how long I’ve been dancing, I always feel like I should learn things naturally, that I should be able to pick new things up quickly and move on. I tend to get down on myself, but in a way it’s also kind of invigorating to really have to work to understand what I’m doing, what I’m doing wrong, and what I can do to improve. I’ll keep going until I figure it out. At least, that’s the vow I made to myself, but then you know how well he and I get along.
And in writing, for that matter. But I’d like you to know that even though I haven’t blogged much lately, i.e. lately in the last two years except for in spurts and I’m very aware of it, that I DID have a conversation about blogging today with someone in my class, and that that has to count for something.
So as to not just blog about blogging, which is what bloggers do when they start to feel bad about not blogging because they feel like something is better than nothing even if it is just autoreflective and uninteresting tripe (something I do try to avoid, dear readers) — I’ve begun to play World of Warcraft again and I’m having a grand old time. Sure, it can be difficult to juggle WoW time with, oh, let’s say, homework time, but I’ve actually found a very simple compromise. Just don’t do your homework. I find that by avoiding the conflict altogether I not only save time by not doing homework, but I also save time by not even feeling conflicted! How cool is that!
No, really though, I’ve actually been both keeping up on my work (which is so far just a lot lot lot of reading), and rapidly gaining levels in WoW. My goal is to catch up with my friends who play, which means just a few levels to go, and then I can adjust myself to a more leisurely playing schedule (note that I say that as though I can control my gaming proclivities, hah!).
Oh, right, and I’ve also been swing dancing a lot, so go me! Last but not least, here is a goose:
Sufficiently snowy.
While I was on a very nice Christmas vacation back in Olympia, I was sent a few interesting library-related stories that I thought I’d link to here for your reading pleasure. Hope everyone had a great holiday and that the new year is off to a good start!
Lock the Library! Teens are rowdy, that’s just the way it is. Hormones or something.
Librarians stake their future on open source. “A group of librarians at the Georgia Public Library Service has developed an open source, enterprise-class library management system that may revolutionize the way large-scale libraries are run.”
Holiday updates and such will be posted in due course, along with some of the photos I took on my shiny new camera. Stay tuned!