etc.

Best kiss stories over at Que Sera, go read.

I just got a message from my sister saying that they had just toured the caves at Moet & Chandon. So I took a virtual tour.

I was off work yesterday (which is why I was home to administer first aid to the leaky window in case you were wondering) and I spent all day at my desk making all sorts of good, wholesome progress. Ditto for this morning, I am now about 900 words away from my limit, and even though we’re only talking about a first draft, I’m taking huge, exhale-worthy relief and solace in the fact that those 900 words will be knocked off before the day is out, leaving me with a whopping 10 unexpected days to polish, proof, farm out to other proofers, and render this baby into suitable first draft form. All that worry, all for nothing.

So when all your time is being spent poring over a desk, something has to suffer, right? Well, just about everything has suffered. My diet yesterday consisted of one plain yoghurt, three cups of tea, two hot dogs with ketchup; the house too is suffering, dust bunnies have joined forces with cat hair to form masses that threaten to take over every corner of this house, we’re talking about tumbleweed-sized lumps that our cats are cowering before; and then there’s the desk. When we bought the desk from the previous owners of the house (they would have had to break it down to get it out of the room and down two flights of stairs and it likely would not have survived reassembly), I remember half-thinking there’s no WAY we’re EVER going to need a desk that size, je-sus. Given that I’ve managed to cover practically every square inch of it, if we hadn’t bought it, regret would be coming around to bite me in the butt right about now.

Oh and both the mail man and the courier guy rang my doorbell before dropping off my stuff so nothing was lost to wind and rain after all. I stand humbled.

If you read Davezilla with any regularity, you probably know all about his annoying words posts. I read through all the posts in the category last night and was on the floor clutching my laugh-induced-aching-stomach by the end of it.

The rain has stopped and now it’s just mostly raging winds. It’s the remnants of Isabel, as far as I can tell, even though those remnants aren’t supposed to hit for another three hours or so. While tap, tap, tapping away on my computer here, I heard small dripping sounds amidst the clamour of the big juicy raindrops hitting the skylight and the big, leafy trees capitulating to the wind. The dripping sounds were close, closer than those coming from our overflowing eaves troughs, so I had a look at the window. The culprit: rain was sneaking it’s way through the tiny fissures around the window AC, but it was nothing a little duct tape and a just-in-case bucket couldn’t handle (duct tape makes me feel like a DIY goddess). I’ve been going back and forth on should we leave the AC in the window all winter or pack it away like the instruction manual said we should. Packing it away is sounding like the most logical, albeit pain-in-the-ass, course of action.

I’m expecting a package or two to arrive today so every few minutes I am up and out of my chair, checking out the threshold down below to see if they have been left outside the door to the forces of wind and rain. This impatience is tempered by feeling pretty awful for mail delivery workers on a day like this.

Blogger Pro is no more. If you paid for it, you should already have received a message from Ev about a sweatshirt with your name on it.

Crazy authors’ names demystified.

After 12 consecutive months of bother with a sham ISP (I haven’t kept up but it looks like they’re back in business, buyer beware), I have to say that these past 3 months with a decent, dependable provider have been a pleasure. It’s nice not to have to go days at a time with intermittent mail delivery and server malfunctions.

Apart for dependability and practically 100% up-time, another upshot of hosting with DreamHost is their deliciously detailed log files. I would read these log files over my web stats everytime, they’re the real goods when it comes to what goes on around here when I’m not looking (which is most of the time). Some averages recently discovered:

Most of these came as no surprise, the one exception was the high number of daily reads on the bibliolatry feed. I’ve had an ongoing love-hate relationship with aggregators ever since one in particular chewed up and spat out my hard drive last year, so it still boggles the mind to think that people depend on them for their daily content.

For whatever reason, it only just occured to me that if you are reading someone’s online journal/weblog as one long narrative, month after month all in one go, you’re really getting things backward unless you start at the bottom of the page and move up. I can see the value in having the most recent post on the top of the main page, but when it comes to archives, shouldn’t it be the other way around? Don’t mind all this meta-analysis, given that I am thoroughly emersed in this article (which is on blogs by the way, have I not mentioned that before?) I can’t look at a single blog (mine included) without critically examining the format.

Which is why (barely, actually) I have rearranged, added-to, and reformatted the EAC archive because the same should hold true for pictures. Looking at all those old pictures, I’m starting to think of the EAC format as fairly vapid, so you might expect a few experimental shots in the near future. Just a heads-up.

Oh and new header. In case you haven’t already noticed, I have some sort of fickle imagination when it comes to web design.

Another book I picked up to fill in some background reading for my article on blogs and libraries. I didn’t actually get a lot of fodder for the article, but I would recommend this book to anyone with a blogging jones. I stumbled upon the whole weblog phenomenon in 2000, right about when I started library school (coincidence? I think not. But that’s for another time). I was intrigued from the get go and haphazardly followed a fairly illogical bread crumb trail from one blog to another. I didn’t know much about who the big players were, well maybe enough to know that a link from Kottke had you off to the races but not much beyond that. I didn’t know who was who, who coined the term “weblog”, who decided how to pronounce it that way, or any of those wee historical details. This book fills all of that backstory right in. Many of the contributions were previously published blog posts too so the style is comfortably familiar. Since the blog phenomenon is proving itself to be more than a fad (4 years on the Internet is a lifetime), I have a feeling that this book will only become more important as time passes.