candy addict

yes. I am addicted to candy.

We dressed up at work, and had a little costume contest. I actually won 3rd place, despite putting very little effort into my costume (even less than last weekend)! I won a duffel bag.

Everyone brought candy, and I brought not one, but two of the horribly expensive candy grab bags that you only see around this time of year at gas stations and convenience stores. I stopped at the Walgreens that is a block from my house because it was convenient. Anyway, I couldn’t decide between the Sweet Tarts/Spree/Bit o’ Honey or the Willy Wanka bag. In the end, I had to get both, but I was seriously leaning towards the Willy Wonda because it had Bottlecaps in it! They don’t sell bottle caps ANYWHERE that I know of in minneapolis. Anyway, I’ve already eaten all the bottlecaps. I’m onto sweet tarts now.

more green than you can shake a stick at

I just got done helping irish-girl give her site a major overhaul. She’s using movable type now, and I was actually pretty impressed that it only took one night to do all the stuff we did. (7-ish to 12:45-ish) She had a design already, and the part I thought was going to take the longest was integrating that with the movable type templates. That turned out to be pretty painless, overall (although it was still what took the longest). I thought for sure we were going to mess stuff up left and right, but there was only one or maybe two misshaps the whole evening. Then again, I’m sure she’ll find more to change in the comming weeks.

The whole process reminded me how much I want to overhaul my own site. I haven’t really changed much of anything on my archives templates, in part because I liked the idea of keeping the “defaults” so much, but I’m a version behind on those already, so I should just break down and make the changes I’ve been wanting to make. (like adding comments links to the posts on the monthly pages, and maybe adding side nav on the individual archives pages…)

I really want to play some GTA: Vice City before going to bed, but it’s getting late… (I can’t believe I’m saying that.) So anyway, go visit meghan’s site–and update your bookmarks.. her blog is the index now.

wireless minneapolis

There is a decent article on wireless hot spots in the twin cities area over at Pioneer Press, or should I say TwinCities.com. Whatever happened to Pioneer Planet anyway? I used to know a guy who claimed to have been its brainchild… wish I could remember his name… I remember looking him up a couple of years ago, and I never got around to emailing him. (It was when I was looking for a job, and then I got one…)

Anyway, wireless!!! Yay!

Note: I read this article yesterday, but due to some fluctuations in space time and n-dimensional space, I was not able to post until today.

blogthink

It occurs to me this morning that, while movable type does a great job of keeping file sizes generally low (mostly because it is XHTML transitional) there are still a lot of files it creates, and (hence take up a lot of space) on my server. My first thought was that rendering pages dynamically via some kind of php script or something would cut back dramatically on the file sizes. But I’m not sure google likes to index dynamic pages… I realized that I actually knew next to nothing about this, so I wasted most of the morning reading about various methods of getting the ? out of your URL on dynamic pages. To make a long story short, there’s no way I’m going to actually do this, since it would require pretty much require re-writing movable type, (or at least writing an extensive plugin) but it’s fun to think about.

I’m also thinking about starting a photo blog. That would give me an excuse to carry around my digital camera again.

birthdays and anniversaries

Today is my brother Dan’s birthday. (Yes, they’re all crammed in together.) He doesn’t even know this blog exists, but I’m happy for him anyway, so there it is. Also, happy belated birthday to this blog, which is now 1 year old.

Here are some of the fine words my email client’s spell checking mechanism suggested when I spelled anniversary with one n instead of two: animosities, anises, animadvert (huh?), and nailers. Notice: anniversaries was not among the suggestions. (Don’t ask why I was spell checking with my email client, let it suffice to say my IM client came up with the correct spelling.)

brotherhood of impending doom II

I laid on the couch this afternoon watching Brotherhood of the Wolf and wanting to be a director or cinamatographer. I love those slow motion action shots, particularly in the first fight scene, there were these shots of raindrops hitting the puddles that were just extraordinary.

There is a new movie theater opening up downtown today, and for a week they’re showing second run movies for $1 a show. Yet another reason I’d rather be working downtown. I guess they’re going to have abnormally cheap matine shows even after they begin showing the good stuff, and my friend Jason is bragging that he’ll be able to walk through the skyways and make the 5:00 show after work.

Today is Laura’s birthday!

I would love to say I got her all kinds of boyfriendly gifts, but the truth is I got her this totally utilitarian cheepo gift that probably isn’t even worth mentioning. I had debated getting her various other more “expressive” things, but they would all have required I break the no-credit-card rule that I have been following for the last 3 or 4 months now.

I think she’ll understand… maybe.

BTW, she is the only person (I’m aware of) who reads this thing regularly, yet has never posted a comment. She still sometimes likes to pretend she doesn’t read it, but I know better. Isn’t that cute?

piracy for the masses!

I have again discovered a p2p file sharing client I like, this time in winMX. Amazingly, this little bugger contains no ads or popups, and doesn’t install fifty demo programs on your computer when you install it. It also supports simultaneous downloading from multiple locations to maximize your bandwidth (although I have yet to beat the 250k download speeds I was getting last night over http!). Unfortunately, it’s only for windows.

I had recently tried to use eDonkey, but something needs to be configured differently in my router, I think. I need to open some ports or something. (winMX informed me of this, whereas eDonkey just kept timing out on server after server.)

ye blog of olde

I had a blog back in 1998 (but of course I didn’t call it that, and I hand-coded all my entries). I called it lit tech (or living poem, apparently). I’d forgotten all about it till yesterday when I was cleaning out my web directories.