Meta

No earth-shattering consequences to this one, though; well, probably not for anyone but me, that is.

Our amazing tech deity just sent me an email, calling me on my “seven readers” schtick—apparently he got curious, and peeked at the November stats. Holy schmoly—over 24,000 people have dropped by! Many are apparently coming for the food ... so I guess I’d better get the next “cooking the alphabet” feature up. Cookie Monster is going to be sooo disappointed ...

(I, however, am astonished [and yes, a little pleased] that so many individuals come by here.)

Speaking blogistically, that is. Mr. Endervidual has started his own blog, titled Memory, Making, Meaning. Sounds intriguing with or without the commas ...

Well, that was pretty painless—from this side of the move, anyway. All the heavy lifting was done by the all-powerful techdeity; and many thanks to him for a job very well done.

Now, off I go to reconfigure my email client for the new server ... and may I suggest that y’all go off to browse the July/August issue of Sunni’s Salon? I know it was long in coming, but I hope you’ll find it worth the wait!

... We’re in the process of moving this domain to another server, and I’d hate to lose any contributions to the conversation here. Either I or our allmighty Godemperor will post a notice when it’s safe to start chattering again.

Oh, and using my Gmail eddress [sunni.snake] during the switchover is probably a good idea too.

Thanks to everyone who kindly let me know about the site being down yesterday. Dunno what the problem was (other than it being some kind of server glitch), but I hope it’s behind us for good. Anyway, that unpleasant discovery wasn’t the worst part of the day ...

The first I am surprised I didn’t create from the outset, when we began our arduous migration to Drupal [the buffalo got nothing on the difficulties we faced!]: tips and tricks. Any kind of helpful hint, product or software recommendation, etc., that we post should go in this category; and I expect that an accompanying category tag will help further classify them (e.g., pood, Pengy Power), although I am not going to be the tagging police and insist upon it.

The second is a bit of inspiration that came to me yesterday, to help me be more consistent about sharing fun things I discover as I cook. “Cooking the alphabet” is intended to be a semi-regular feature, focusing upon some food or spice—one for each letter of the alphabet. Some will be commonplace, while others will be unusual. I’ll try to include at least one recipe with each letter, but won’t guarantee it. And I will probably break my loose rule of focusing on ingredients rather than final dishes at some point, but I doubt anyone here will care all that much about that. I have the first entry in mind already, but need to get this issue of Sunni’s Salon finished before I can indulge myself.

If any Conspirators want to do their own cook the alphabet series as well, I think that would be marvelous. Or you dear readers can run with the idea yourselves, too. It ain’t as though I’m going to copyright the idea.

Update: How could I have forgotten to mention “Wisdom and Inspiration”? Well, I did; sorry. As the name suggests, that category is intended to mostly be a repository of quotes and other bits of wisdom or insight. Certainly not only from “famous” people, either!

I am allowing the domain “realidrebellion.com” to expire—and it will expire in just a few days. I’ve never searched for the phrase, but nearly every time I see a Real ID-related piece, that phrase is mentioned. Thus, I think that the domain name is worth something, and would like to see it go to someone willing to do something meaningful with it (“meaningful” here meaning anything besides those fake sites that exist just to get ad view revenues).

I’ve never let a domain expire before, so I don’t know if I can facilitate someone else buying it. But if that’s possible, I will certainly try to help. The current registrar is GoDaddy, if that matters. Email me if you’re interested: sunni at this domain dot com.

The Blogger Real ID Rebellion site will continue, powered primarily by Michael. And deep thanks to him for stepping up as I have withdrawn from formal activism.

Well. Now that I’m finally here, I don’t know where to begin. Oh, yeah, that should be easy: HughesNet sucks.

Just about the only thing that I’ve been able to keep up with of late is my work on updating all the old Greymatter blog entries. They were transformed into Drupal format via a nifty script our tech admin wrote, but there were a few glitches, the primary one being that all posts apparently got labeled as being authored by me. So, I’ve been sifting through them, making the following changes as needed: 1] correct authorship; 2] correct URLs referring to previous blog entries; 3] remove the coding that forces clicks to open new windows; and 4] categorizing the entry. It appears from my testing that our search function is heavily dependent upon the category structure.

This might seem like a lot of work, with little benefit to it, but I think it’s important. The site will be internally smooth agan when I’m finished, and will be a more accurate record than it is now of who said what, way back when. My daily goal has been to update ten entries per day, which has been easy to accomplish. At this pace I will be through the entire blog in around three months. (We’re still working on how to handle the nonblog static pages I’d created; and yes, I’m the spanner in the works yet again.)

But of course, when I look at some older entries I see other things I’m tempted to change ... a change of mind about a site I’d featured as a “site of the week” for example, or mentions of sites I know aren’t around any longer. The perfectionist editor in me is never satisfied: and it’s true, sometimes I have removed links or – much more frequently – updated links, especially ones that point to friends’ sites. I’m trying very hard not to change the fundamental nature of any post, but it’s sometimes a challenge ... a bit of awkward phrasing or a misspelling jumps out at me, and my fingers want to “improve” what’s there. But change isn’t necessarily improvement, and I know that under the guise of “cleaning up” lies the murky depths of spin, obfuscation, and the like. I may not like some of the things I’ve written, or how I wrote about them, but I am not interested in reconstructing my past. I do too much of that in my head as is ... it’s inescapable.

Just as William James observed in his comments about dipping into a stream, one never dips into the same blogstream twice. And in dipping into my past – at least as represented here – I realize that there’s no such thing as sufficient hindsight that yields a final, “correct” view.

Well, we might not be ready for everything, but tough: sometime soon this site will be moving over to its new software home. The appearance is pretty much the same, but a few differences will be apparent. Commenting will be enabled again—however, one will need to sign up to be able to comment (sorry ‘bout that). Please bear with us as we upgrade, and if you see some problem with the site or old entries, let me know so it can be fixed. Tusen takk, and see you on the other side!

Hi all! If you’re reading this it means that our tech guru has worked his magic and our new site, running Drupal is live. You should notice some small differences in appearance, but most of the changes are behind the scenes. I imagine there’ll be a few bumps and snags as everything gets moved over, so please bear with us. If you spot one, please let me know so we can get it fixed ASAP.

Meantime, it’s good to be able to get the conversation going again, so please, sign up so that you can contribute your thoughts!

A quick catch-up on doings here in answer to some oft-asked questions, and some important, but not so oft-repeated questions or statements ...

Well, the good news is that I survived this truffle-making round ... over 350 truffles made. But it took longer than I had planned (keeping the chocolate in temper was the primary time-eater), and did leave me in a time crunch. The truffles have been sent on their ways, however; and I hope to get some pictures up later today. I took lots of shots of all the goodies lined up, but haven’t had time to so much as glance at them.

I noticed Sunday evening that my hands were starting to feel quite dry ... not surprising, given how often I needed to wash—or at least rinse— them while working. Using lotion isn't a good idea while working with chocolate; if it’s strongly scented it could contaminate the chocolate, and I’ve been told some of the substances commonly found in lotions can interfere with tempering, too. Best not to take any chances. But by the time Monday was done, my hands were full-on chapped, and painfully sore. Any motion that required moving my fingers was uncomfortable, at the least. Taking yesterday off from typing and washing helped a lot, but my hands aren’t completely healed yet. Not sure how to tackle this unexpected problem in future rounds ...

Yesterday afternoon, I noticed an uncomfortable sensation taking root in my head, but being out shopping, I wasn’t able to do much about it. It felt a lot like a caffeine-withdrawal headache, but that didn’t seem possible to me; I’d had my usual morning dose of coffee. Giving in to the temptation of a Coke, the discomfort eased ... but returned a couple hours after I’d finished the drink. Upon returning home, I ate a bit of chocolate, and again, the headache dissipated some. Now, I hadn’t been licking my fingers, nor liberally sampling my wares, so I was at something of a loss to explain this until some research this morning turned up what I had begun suspecting: caffeine is absorbed through the skin; and with my hands having chocolate all over them for the better part of two days, it seems likely that I was getting a steady low dose—and not working with chocolate yesterday, the withdrawal kicked in. “Kick” is the right word, too: when I woke up this morning, my head was really throbbing. Still working on eliminating that. I guess that means that this product would work as billed, although I wouldn’t count on absorbing a cuppa’s worth from a typical shower.

And last, I really took a hit on private shipping on the truffle orders! I underestimated how much weight the boxes add to orders ... still a lot of room for improvement, packaging-wise. But progress is being made, so I’m not too unhappy.

In other “ouchy” news, commenting remains turned off, as the spambots appear to be hovering nearby still. I hate to say it, but we may not be able to re-enable comments until after the move to the new software platform is complete. Progress on that project is proceeding well, however; my goal is to accomplish it before February 1. And it has become top priority, so off to it I go.

I just found out from my host that some php play on another site has been causing the entire server to crash. Dunno if it's fixed for good now or not, so please bear with us as things may be bumpy for a bit still. I'll try to add something more substantive later today, server (and snolfs) permitting.

It's come to my attention that at least one vermin has been harvesting eddresses from the comments left here. That irks me greatly.

Filling in the eddress field when leaving a comment is optional. (I'd tried to modify the code when I updated the site's look to make that clear, but it got lost in the errors that I've not yet completely debugged.) To minimize your risk of having an eddress harvested and used to spam you, don't leave an eddress. If you'd like to give other visitors the ability to contact you, you can do so in the comments proper, in a format that robots can't harvest, e.g.: name -at- domain -dot- extension .

[This item is no longer relevant, as this site is run by different software now.]