this just in:

Remember the content thief?

I just got an email from the folks at Live Journal:

Thank you for your report. Upon investigation, we have permanently suspended this account for violations of the Terms of Service.

Cool!

Thank you, Live Journal!

under construction ~again!~

Okay I finally got tired of my half-done template with one too many columns... please bear with me as I get things back in order!

Green Hard Hat by melodi2

Template credit: The Greenery Template by Ourblogtemplates.com

Header image credit: adapted from DualScreen Wallpaper by the folks at OurBlogTemplates.

UPDATE:
As much as i ~heart~ OurBlogTemplates, I do wish they'd go back and fix their older templates, so that I don't have to do the following every time I switch:

• I like the Blogger NavBar!
• I want the quick edit pencil!
• Ditto the "email this post" icon! (same as above, look for "email-post-icon" and replace with icon18_email.gif)
• Do I have to fix comments every. single. time?

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or subscribing via email. I'm on Twitter too!

it's Kit Kat time, again!

Hey, remember back in late June I said that the naranek household was moving? So THAT time, we were moving about 2 blocks West from where we'd lived for almost 3 years in Chicago.

Now, we're moving about 3.5 HOURS ...
... SOUTH ...

Springfield, here we come!

... and it should be home for many years to come.

We move this weekend.




Hopefully U-Haul has a van we can hire at such short notice.

[... in case you were wondering, we knew the move was pending, but the actual green light and be-in-Springfield-by-this-date was sprung on us this morning... so we've got this Labor Day weekend to pack & move ... F. U. N. !! ... thankfully we managed to find us a place to move TO .. it's not on Evergreen Terrace tho, d'oh!!]

so once again, Life after Work will be taking a break for about a week or so.

See y'all on the other side!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or subscribing via email. I'm on Twitter too!

Is it KitKat time?

Life After Work will be on a short break for slightly over a week, until early July: the Naranek household will be moving (within Chicago, no worries), and will be needing a lot of non-internet time to pack, move, unpack and settle in the new place.

^^ no, that's not me!

By all means, please follow me on Twitter for random updates over the next week or so, and beyond. And in case you haven't already done so, how about taking this opportunity to subscribe to this blog via email or in a reader? This way you'll easily know when I'm back in action! :)

Cheers!

[Photo Credit: Moving Woman by jynmeyer]

How I have ended up with WAY too many blogs to keep track of, and why things are going to change around here... (#990)

Back in 2004, when i first started blogging, I had no idea how to find other blogs to read if not to hit the "next blog" button at the top left of the blogger navbar.

Then I signed up with Little Neo, a blog directory/exchange thingy by the owner of NeoWorx - you know, the one with the scrolling list of visitors by country? So that worked for a long time; met people like Moxie, Monsoon and Omni; SG and Ron Allan by exploring another blogger's blogrolls; ended up loading up my blogroll. I ended up nixing NeoWorx though - they were having loads (haha) of problems with their widget - because if it, nothing else on my page was loading. So off it went.

In 2006 I participated in the Lost Blogs grassroots marketing campaign, and have continued to follow many of the people I met during this exercise. I also visited many people who left witty comments on these blogs, and thus my blogroll continued to expand...

Then last year I joined the Entrecard community and boy oh boy did I find a whole bunch of new blogs to read!! Sure, I had a lot of forgettable ones that dropped by that I felt obligated to drop back on, but still, barring those, I have found a whole bunch of new blogs I enjoy reading. For the longest time, blogrolling.com was down so I couldn't add any sites, and now that they are up I don't like their new interface and feel, so I have not added any sites, otherwise I think you'll see a blogroll that's perhaps double what you see now!

Then I joined today.com, figuring I might as well get a little $$ back for blogging, without whoring myself out to PayPerPost, and without being responsible for the ads that would appear on the site. Through that community I have also found many thoroughly enjoyable blogs about a whole variety of topics. Putting on my "expat" hat, I have also fostered ties with many bloggers that would otherwise have been lost in the sea of blogs.

There was also a lot of overlap of EC and today.com, and it was good.

Then came Entrecard's decision to all of a sudden to impose paid ads to run on our widgets. Then came today.com's banning of Entrecard. Then they allowed EC but wouldn't pay for traffic from EC. Then EC's credit-buyback looked like it was going to be skewed towards power droppers, and those who didn't accept those paid ads could forget ever getting $$ back for their credits. Then EC changed its forums and people must apply in order to be allowed into the forums, probably because of a lot of disgruntlement over all these changes. Then back at today.com, almost everyone was demoted from Pay-Per-Post to being paid just for traffic. Thing is, what counts as traffic, and the pay rate, has been unclear for ages. This set a whole bunch of today.com bloggers up in arms, voicing their dissatisfaction in forums and of course on their blogs. Then came the culling of the squeaky wheels, the deletion of offending posts, and what essentially amounts to the firing of said dissatisfied bloggers; unfortunately some who had expressed unhappiness but hadn't decided one way or another were also culled. Thus was born the group of Today Exiles, a vocal community now actively dissuading anyone from joining or advertising with today.com.

... and I'm standing back watching all this happen, and I wonder, is it all worth it?

For Entrecard: nope. I have finally decided. I will be pulling out of EC. All three blogs. I have obligations in terms of 4000 credits of "sponsorship" of blog contests - I will make sure I fulfill these first before I leave. So PinayJade, loutianren, and Lola, keep an eye out for emails about this, k? In the meantime, I advertising like crazy, just to get rid of the bulk of my EC credits, screw the credit buyback program.

For today.com: unlike others, I am not up in arms about the recent happenings. Perhaps it's because I am blessed/cursed with the ability to see both sides to a story, and understand what is happening, and why. Perhaps it's because I'm not as invested in my today.com blogs (yes, plural) as others were - I noticed that many of the disaffected were first-time bloggers, I think that makes a big difference. Don't get me wrong, I'm not siding with one group or the other. But for the moment I will be continuing with today.com... I just may not put as much attention on my blogs there - not being paid per post, I don't see why I should slave over getting one post out every day. Working on traffic, then I just need to make sure I up my knowledge in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) so that my posts turn up on front page of searches. Try "Paht Chee" ... or "Malaysia movies"... (without the quotes, even): I'm already there. Yay!

... I'll be posting a little bit more later about how I plan to divide my time/attention among my blogs. My writing persona has suffered tremendously, her creative outlet overlooked and set aside way too often for way too long. She needs time to herself, and fore herself, too.

My apologies for the long, ranting, and ultimately interesting only to me probably, post. Better posts coming next week.

I hope!

:p

... oh, and all those blogs in my blogroll? The ones I threatened to add to Google Reader? I am seriously thinking about culling them all, and starting from scratch. Okay perhaps that's too drastic. I'll think of something. But I will be making some changes around here. I will. I will, I will, I will!!

:p

If you enjoy reading and visiting this blog, please consider subscribing to my feed or subscribing via email. Thank you.

#985: 20 out of 100 ain't bad?

So this is Post Number 985 for this particular blog, since its start in October 2004... How should I mark #1000? Suggestions welcome!! :)

On another note: Saw this at i hate kit kats a while ago, and decided to try it out. Yes another meme, and another book-related one at that. So sue me! :D

= = =

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy the list, and put an 'x' after those you have read, count 'em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2. The Lord of the Rings ( ) (I tried - twice!)
   
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) (multiple times, only #7 once so far)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( )
6. The Bible - ( )
7. Wuthering Heights ( )
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X) (Does the abridged version in school count?)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ( )
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X) (twice)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( )
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame ( )
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( )
34. Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ( ) [and this is separate from #33 why?]
    
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38. Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving ( )
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery ( )
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy ()
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ()
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding ( )
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (X)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (X)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( )
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen ( )
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth ( )
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X) (Again - does the abridged version count?)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61. Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck ( )
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas( )
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( ) (Couldn't get past the second page!)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X) (Abridged!! Do you see a pattern here?)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (X) (Children's Illustrated version count?)
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75. Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76. The Inferno – Dante ( )
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78. Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80. Possession - AS Byat ( )
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens ( )
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell ( )
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( )
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert ( )
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry ()
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White ()
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (X) (I do NOT recommend this insipid read!)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( ) [and this is separate from #14 why?]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
     

So that's 20 for me. How about you?

I have to point out that this list is pretty random - I doubt its origins "from the BBC", and the sloppy entries (Shakespeare and CS Lewis) turn this into a joke.

However, it's amusing for me to look at this list and have absolutely NO desire to even touch many of the works listed. You see, I have this aversion to "classic" "literature": it's a reflexive instinctual reaction developed from childhood, from school, where if you were "good in English" then it was assumed you liked/read classics by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, etc. I very much preferred fantasy, regular fiction and Stephen King; had no patience for the stuffy classics; and knew I was judged lacking by certain peers and teachers. Me being me, I put on my stone face and thick skin and did my own thing.

Of the 20 I have read above, I think I would recommend The Time-Traveler's Wife: it is an excellent read, just make sure you have a box of tissues with you, especially when nearing the end of the book!

Of the remaining 80 above, Possession by A S Byatt has been on my to-read list for about a year. I first heard about her when taking my Fairy Tales class: she has a short story collection of modern / re-written / new fairy tales that were well-written. She comes across as a very articulate writer, and while I'm not a fan of love stories per se, I am very interested in the description of what this book is about. I also have the movie version somewhere on my Netflix queue - we'll see which I get to first! :)

As usual, feel free to tag yourself! Do drop me a comment with a link to your post if you try this out on your own site, k? I'd love to see your own comments to the list.

Cheers!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or subscribing via email. I'm on Twitter too!

overfed?!

Hi All!

This just might happen to me soon:


Over the course of the next few days, I hope to be moving ALL the links from my blogrolls in this sidebar into my Google Reader PLUS lots of newer ones I never did get around to adding to said blogroll. I don't know if this will be a quick endeavour, or whether it'll transform into a monster that sucks me into another dimension of space and time. I don't know whether I can add categories / subfolders into the public "Blogs I Follow" -- I sure hope so, otherwise I really WILL be "overfed" by all those RSS feeds!

Lots of unknowns.

Wish me luck!

btw - liked this cartoon? It's from We Blog Cartoons - check it out!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed or subscribing via email. I'm on Twitter too!

Blogrolling Schmogrolling!

so, what is up with blogrolling.com?

For the longest time, we couldn't login, they said they were upgrading things; I heard elsewhere they had been hacked, which is what prompted the freeze and upgrade.

Then we could login and add new links, but couldn't delete any.

And now?? Now they have friggin ads!! At least the target="_blank" function is working again... but I'd REALLY like to have the links in alphabetical order please?!

... oh, and how do you like the new look? I'm still missing a good header, and need to figure out exactly what goes where... This template can be expanded into 8 columns, I probably don't need them all though, LoL! Anything specific you'd like to see in my sidebars/footers? Drop me a line!

If you liked this post, please consider subscribing to my feed, and checking out my other blog: a malaysian abroad

greeeeeeeeeeeeeen!

yes yes yes I need to tone down the color... but hey! Welcome to the new look of Life After Work! It's been long overdue!!

Nerdy things to share about this round of change:

• I heart ourblogtemplates.com! This is the ONLY blogger template resource I've found that has taken the time to fully define and correlate all the fonts and colors upfront such that they can be tweaked from the Fonts and Colors tab in the Layout panel. As such, I am currently having a GREEN theme, as your bleeding eyes can probably tell, but if/when I want to jazz it up to different tones of blue, brown, whatever, I can do it very easily.


• I really like how the linkbar blends well with the black blogger navbar :) Yes yes I could make it blend with any of the other colored blogger navbars (see previous bullet point) but I'll stay away from unnecessary tweaking right now... but since it's built by a widget, I can't have any humorous hover text, oh well...


• Thanks to advice found here and here, I've managed to have the QuickEdit tool (convenient for me, you won't see it) and e-Mail Link (that envelope&arrow icon - useful to readers, I hope!) reappear. I don't know when/why they disappeared, but I've missed them!


• to my surprise I wasn't on feedburner?!! I suppose it was my other blog/personality that had tried it out. Anyways, so I'm redirecting the blogger default feed to/via feedburner now; hopefully that doesn't negatively impact existing subscribers :D


• Blogger's got some really nifty widgets now, including their version of a blogroll! So I'm gonna be deserting my blogroll from blogroll.com in favor of Blogger's, and will divvy it up into categories, including Face-to-Face, i.e. "Bloggers I've Met"


• have unsuccessfully tried to add a tabbed sidebar - got it mostly there, then started tweaking,,, and it all went kablooey... I'll keep trying... but it's already 2:45 a.m. ... not sure just how much more real progress I'll make right now... UPDATE: found a better/easier version here, done ~3:20am!!

... and finally

• I feel I've been rather stagnant, in terms of my producing blog posts and my discovering new blogs (and therefore, hopefully, having new folk discovering me) ... my other blog personality tried BlogExplosion but found it rather superficial, so I'm in no hurry to repeat that path here. Instead, I'm trying out Entrecard. Its concept is for folk within the network to drop their calling card when visiting each other... of course, every drop/visit gets a credit, and build up credits in order to "advertise" on others' sites. It'll probably be as superficial as BE, but perhaps I'll see some new faces, and get inspired to write more/better!

time for change!

testing out a new look!! (original here).

whaddaya think?

I think it's waaaay too blue... but I can probably tweak that... ... ... once I figure out how to play with the header to make it like the one currently in use here, with the 15+ headers randomly shown for each page load - not ready to part with that :)

And while you're there, answer the poll too, k?

Cheers, and have a auspicious 8/8/08!! :)

message for those using RSS to read me

.. you're gonna be seeing a whole lot of old posts getting republished ... I'm moving as many of my old images from flickr to the picasa web albums linked to google. Sorry about that! I've reached Feb 2006... another 2+ years to go... ugh!!

(note to self - continue from here)

tinkering....

no this is NOT a scheme to make you hit F5 / refresh so that I log more page views per visitor... but you'll only see the result of my latest tinkering with this blog if you *do* hit F5/refresh... so humor me please and refresh this page? Thanx! You like? Me being me, I'm going to go for overkill and load up like TEN or MORE since I found so many I liked, LoL!

Sources:
- hack: here
- images: here, here and mostly here.


P/S> the next step is to incorporate elements of / change this into a Neo-type blog. Work in progress: here

Recent Entertainment

TV+Movies:
Who is Cletis Tout?
Recommended by Netflix, and, surprisingly, very enjoyable! Kosh and I burst out laughing at so many things; we both appreciate choppy/screwy timelines and interruptions in the narrative flow - and this has loads of both - which added to the enjoyment. Just go watch it :-)

Nanny McPhee
Mary Poppins meets The Sound of Music, with a soundtrack that reminded me for some reason of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Another thoroughly enjoyable movie, with only the CGI donkey that really marred the tale.

[added June 18th: had slipped my mind earlier]
Next Stop, Wonderland
A romantic comedy that's not sappy or oozing with sugar coating, starring no names I recognize, and very endearing. The scene between mother & daughter, each with her own take on reality was breathtaking. Lots of humor - understated. Go. Watch.
[/end add]

The 4400 - new season starts tonight on usa: I *so* can't wait! I'm pro-promicin myself - how about you?

Robot Chicken's 30min Star Wars special is on tonight too! Don't miss it on [adult swim]!

Books:
In a spurt of Dune/Arrakis/Rakis-related reading, I've made my way through the last three of the original series by Frank Herbert. Wow. There's so much depth to the books, even as I could barely wade past so many places where Herbert seemed to be mired in words words words words words words and words: there were so many pearls of wisdom, so many lessons to be learnt, if only one could just. get. beyond. the. friggin. words. Worthy of a reread, in about 5 years or so ;-)

next books in line to be read: the first two books in Anne Bishop's Ephemera series. Sebastian & Belladonna. I was intrigued by the premise of different "landscapes", worlds of both Light and Dark, connected by Bridges, "created" by Landscapers, but travelers needed to "... travel lightly: because what you bring with you becomes part of the landscape."

Blog Updates:
so I've played around with the sidebar a bit more... hidden most of everything within those collapsible bars [now a better shade of green]. Still need to study the coding to finetune [i.e. CLEAN UP!] the inconsistencies in font type and size... grrrrrr!

it's called K2

... i bit the bullet and changed templates again.

.. took me all of 5 minutes! I suppose I'm getting the hang of the New Blogger?

Of course there are lots of little things to tweak... but this is *so* much more peaceful than that previous one. And it's still within the nature//tree/wood//earth theme I wanted.

Yay!

grrrrrrr!

it's almost 2am.

this is friggin irritating.

so I decided to go ahead and change the template already, and will catch up with the retroactive labeling of my posts over the nest week or so.

but.

ONE: i have no idea why items in the sidebar are not lining up in a straight line! I first noticed it when the profile and archives didn't match up with the hacked labels boxes.... thought it was a function of "blogger" vs "hack" settings... then I looked at "misc stuff to sort" and omg I just about died! As far as I know there aren't any padding/margin/alignment functions associated with those individual items, and yet they are all over the place?! Can anyone shed some light on this?

TWO: i'd decided I wasn't going to clutter the sidebar with a whole list of blogs: I'd only keep the referrer.org list because it's really kewl and it would reward the most recent referrers, so i spent a lot of time clicking on each and every one of my blogroll links to check if they were still active, then adding them to my Google Reader, assuming I could share who/what I read, kinda like how I've seen bloglines work. Only like 2 minutes ago did I come to the realization (please tell me I'm wrong, someone!) that it doesn't quite work that way: the main "share" page is meant for individual posts/articles I deem worthy to highlight! Unless I want to provide 5 different links to my 5 different public folders, which I wouldn't want to anyway because the presentation/layout sux, it looks like I'm gonna have to establish my reads on bloglines.

THREE: After seeing how my whole bunch of text seems to be just sitting there on the screen, I realise that the default font(s) [and sizes thereof!] for this template are really unappealing to me. Looks like arial will be a safe choice although if i want something fancier, for the titles/headers, the choices get rather tough: I might go with Lucida Handwriting...

will decide later.

I really can't do much more screen time.

I feel my eyes sizzling as my brain melts...

230am as I post this.

argh!

will be back online on Sunday.

ciao!

like Axl Rose said...

... all you need is just a little patience...["regular" blogging will commence... sometime... I assure you!]

in the meantime,

... I was idly checking my sitemeter stats, and saw that someone by the name of rachel82111 (from Oz, if I'm not mistaken) pointed to this blog (shoulda been this post, but who's complaining?) from Yahoo!Answers... on guess what question? "Once you have a floater in your eye is it there all day every day?"

LoL!

No idea who rachel82111 is, but thanx gurrl! :-)

Labels, part deux

decluttering my labels

quick note to those few who subscribe to this page's feed, you might be seeing my very very old posts coming up as new/unread: no worries, I'm just retroactively adding labels to them.

fyi, I only started randomly assigning labels to my posts since maybe last December, and I very quickly realised they were going to get out of control! So one of the items to do before the "Life After Work rebirth" was to come up with a relatively simple yet MECE* set of labels that would cover the gamut of my ramblings here.

* MECE = Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive ;-)

I referred to some other blogs, consulted del.icio.us & technorati (not very useful!), scribbled on a few pieces of paper... Took a few iterations, but I think I've finally got it! ... Of course, this will entail my going back and re-re-relabeling some posts, aarrggghhh!

So much for doing it right the first time :-(

Here, for my reference as much as yours, is my list of labels:

Location of contents

• US (for general US stuff)
• Urbana (specific to Urbana)
• Chicago (ditto)
  
• MY (for all things Malaysian)
  
• CH (for all things Swiss)
• ROW ("rest of the world")
• in transit (for vacations / traveling between countries)

General Stuff

• TV+Movies
• Books
• Music
• Food
• Fluff (all them quizzes, jokes and fillers)
• Memes (yes, they are a category by themselves, LoL!)
• Neat Stuff (educational / neat stuff/links, usu found on the 'net)
• Blog admin (actually a subset of Navel-gazing below: talking purely about this blog, template, traffic,,, kinda like this post!)

Deeper stuff

• Point+Laugh : where I ridicule people/things who deserve it :-)
• Point+Rant : where I go off on people/things that grind my gears ;-)
• Point+Ponder : where I look (back) at life/childhood/events and ruminate on lessons learned; includes some attempts at philosophizing
• Soapbox : may overlap with the "point+" series, but includes a much stronger opinion aspect, with the intention of challenging people's biases, attitudes, etc and exhorting change
  
• Navel-gazing : where I go into minute details of things that interest me and which probably bore readers to tears, LoL!
  

Limited Edition / Special Interest : to be added to sparingly

• Babylon5
• Meat Loaf
• LawyersArePigs
• The Lost Blogs

so that's 20 "main" categories, with 4 "special" tags. relatively manageable.

.... riiiiiiiiiight.... back to "work"!

UPDATE @ 250pm: probably going to change the above even more, LoL! Oh, and in case you were curious, next major project will be to move most, if not all, of my blogroll reads into my GoogleReader.

grumble grumble grumble!

Good news: yesterday I stumbled across a really nice and simple template which I've decided to use for this blog's next "look".

Grumble news: the back-up of existing posts is NOT going well!

Firstly, the Blog Collector (Lite) is such a bare-bones program it's actually extremely unappealing to use. And it only works "properly" on Kosh's side of the 'puter [his account, maybe because he's the administrator?] - on top of that, the "remove blog" or "refresh" commands could not be executed either! In addition, it only saves the posts, not the post page which includes comments. And worst of all... they say that the free/lite version has a limit to the number of posts per blog that it will back-up, but nowhere on the site did I find an actual number... if I'd known it was around 60 I wouldn't have even bothered with it! I have over SEVEN HUNDRED posts! And you know what, I ain't gonna shell out USD 70 to remove this limit when I'm not impressed with the program itself anyway!

Coming to that conclusion took a few hours, what with the downloading, installing, failed attempts to back-up from my side, backing-up from Kosh's side, etc etc etc... so then we looked at HTTrack, which unfortunately didn't have much going for it Mac-wise... if we were really adventurous we could try to play around with a Linus-based package for it, but well, we ain't gonna.

So... looks like it's gonna be manual back-ups for me! Gaaarrhhhh!!

So consider this blog to be on vacation this week: hopefully by this time next week she'll be revamped and ready to go again.

'till then,

ciao!

blog update update

(First talked about here, then here)

So I've been playing around with a New Blogger template, and I've pretty much got the hang of it. Also came to the conclusion that I didn't really need a 3-column layout, because I found a few nifty hacks/services that can reduce the clutter on my sidebar. And I've found one or two nifty templates out there I can just tweak slightly in order to get the look I want. Kewl!

Now for the not-losing-everything-when-I-move part:

I'll drive myself cross-eyed doing the back-ups manually [serves me right for not keeping on the ball since last August?!!]... Found a potentially very helpful service provided by Blog Collector, (and perhaps to a lesser extent, HTTrack).

I *will* get going on this so that I can really sink my teeth into tinkering with this site... I'm sooooooooooooo bored with its looks right now! :)

Also, I've crumbled and succumbed to the Google Monster at Blogger's repeated urging:

• for all blog/internet-related correspondence I will now be using azlynne1972[at]gmail[dot]com, so fellow blog-buddies, go ahead and update your address books accordingly, thanks!
• IMPORTANT NOTE to friends, ex-colleagues, and acquaintances (established from 1995 - ~2004): please stick to azlynne1972[at]yahoo[dot]com, okay? It's easier for me to segregate personalities this way :-)

Now, off to get groceries. Shouldn't shop while I'm hungry though, LoL!