Category: Meta

Crankypantsing, Meta

Turkey Week (US) Randomness

Shelly

First, I did some redecorating over the weekend. For those of you who stopped by while things were in a state of flux, my apologies on the intermittent ugliness. There is a law of coding that states that, when you fix a problem that occurs in one browser, it breaks something of equal importance in another. Ye, verily, it is true, and I proved it over and over and over again. I don’t have Netscape (nor a connection hearty enough to download it), so I can’t check for problems there. When I get a chance, I’ll make sure things look okay in Opera. For now, though, everything seems to be working properly in Firefox and IE. According to Sitemeter, those are the two browsers most visitors are using, so that takes care of the majority of y’all. If anyone is having problems, just let me know. Problems with the new blog template, that is. For everything else, you’re on your own.

In driving news, it’s official: I am an asswagon magnet. I feel like I spend an inordinate amount of time complaining about shithead drivers. Surely, there can’t be that many of them on the road? I’ve been doing a lot of carpooling lately with my neighbor, though, so I’ve got an independent a witness. And, it’s true! I am an asswagon magnet. Yesterday, she even commented on it, though she thought that, perhaps, she might be the magnet. I assured her that it was not her fault. I just have a knack for getting behind and/or in front of some spectacularly awful people.

It happened again. I was driving through Ellettsville, when I saw a bunch of emergency lights in the distance. I pulled over and stopped, right before an intersection with a stop light. As the emergency vehicles approached, a car stopped at the crossroad decided it would be a good time to make a left-hand turn, right into the path of what turned out to be three ambulances and a state trooper. WTF?! And, the jerk didn’t even have a green light–I did! I really wonder what the hell is wrong with some people.

I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire over the weekend (fear not, I won’t spoil it for you). It was good, but very different in feel than the previous films. Visually, it was much cleaner and streamlined, I think, but the contrast was not so great that it was distracting. For example, the architecture was more Neogothic than moldering Romanesque, and so the old moving staircases were replaced by spiral stone and wrought iron stairs. Hogwarts seems to have grown considerably in size, as well.

I was worried about how the story would be adapted. The book is long, with a lot of detail that does not lend itself readily to being translated to a visual medium. A good deal of the story–especially toward the beginning–was cut out. Other parts were changed. On the whole, I think those decisions were good. I’ve read some criticism of the romantic content of the movie. I don’t think it was at all out of place, though. First, the kids are growing up, so this is a natural progression. Second, the story is becoming darker, so I think the romantic sub-plot provides a necessary contrast. This is true in the books, but I especially noticed it in the new film. A story that continues to build and build and build in intensity will not be as enjoyable as one that builds, then releases, then builds.

Lastly, I was kind of “meh” about the idea of Ralph Fiennes playing Voldemort. He was great in Spider, but then there’s the inexplicable Maid in Manhattan. But, oh my! He was, I think, a most excellent Voldemort. I was impressed with his makeup, as well. His skin had the sort of translucent cream cheese quality I’d imagined, and the reptilian nose was spot-on. The proto-Voldemort was pretty damned cool, too, though his resemblance to Aylmer made me laugh.

I’ve got more thinking to do on some of the changes, and I’ll have to see it again to be absolutely sure, but my first impression is that the new one is the best of the lot. Well done!

Next, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I have high hopes for it. Hopefully the Christian themes won’t be handled with fists-of-ham. Obviously, they’re present in the story, and they shouldn’t be omitted (not that I think they could be), but I think subtleness is called for. We’ll find out in three weeks!

Meta

What to do if Your Cat Keeps Peeing Blood

Shelly

I hope that the person who stumbled upon my blog by searching for “my cat keeps peeing blood” ended up taking their cat to the vet. That’s one of those things that some people don’t seem to realize is an emergency. In the case of blood in the urine, it’s best to get medical attention as soon as possible, instead of wasting time looking for answers online. For one thing, cats are kind of delicate and the problem can turn life threatening or even deadly with frightening speed. For another, urinary tract infections–which are likely if there’s blood in the urine–are incredibly painful. I wouldn’t want to leave an animal in that sort of pain any longer than absolutely necessary.

So, I hope the animal in question has received appropriate care and is now on the road to recovery.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Stop! Thief!

Shelly

While perusing my website stats, I found that someone was using one of my photographs as the background image for their blog. It was a large image, too, and because they had linked directly to my file instead of placing it on their own server, they were sucking my bandwidth. Bastards! I renamed the file and replaced it with another containing “image used without permission” text.

What is wrong with people? Do they think that, just because they found it on Teh Internets, they have a right to steal it? Or, do they just not care? I don’t get it. It’s not even like this girl was being half-way smart about it, either. If she’d copied it to her own server, I would have been less likely to have noticed (or cared!) that she’d taken it.

And, damn! I made brownies yesterday and forgot to put one in my lunch this morning. I also made some kick-ass vegetable soup, which I did remember to bring. It’s got all sorts of good stuff in it: garlic, green onions, tomatoes, potatoes, broccoli, carrots, celery, and brussels sprouts (I didn’t have cabbage, which is just as well, because I think the brussels sprouts were even better). It’s rich and thick and just what I needed, bein’ deathly ill an’ all.

I received my copy of The Diary of Anne Frank:  the revised critical edition–just in time, too, because I needed something to entertain me while I battled the plague. The book is a bit overwhelming, and, at 800+ pages is too large and heavy to be a comfortable read-in-bed book, but I couldn’t wait to get started on it. I haven’t gotten to the actual diaries yet–yes, diaries, plural. While in hiding, Anne wrote, then rewrote her diary with an eye toward publication. Then, her father expurgated much from the version that was originally published, so there are three versions of the diary–because I’m working my way through the documentation at the beginning of the book. There’s quite a lot of it, so it’s no small feat. Not that it’s not fascinating–it is!–but I can’t wait to get to the diaries themselves. Obviously, I’m reading them because I’m interested in the subject matter. I’m also interested in them as a journaler, though, so that gives me another perspective to consider as I’m reading them.

Meta, Pets, Photography

The face of Jesus in my soup…

Shelly

Or, apparently, in a tree. Or here. He really is everywhere!

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Yahoo is now giving unlimited space for photo storage. I haven’t been actively using my storage space there, because it’s problematic for non-Yahoo users to access, and, they used to have a 20mb storage limit. Twenty megabytes? It is for to laugh!

When I started blogging, I used Hello (a Google-Picasa tie-in), then Flickr. Now, I use a combination of Flickr, my own web space, and Blogger’s photo storage. I’d totally forgotten about my Yahoo space until I got a courtesy reminder from them, telling me that if I did not access my photos at least once every six months, they would delete them. I took a quick look, just to make sure there wasn’t anything important stored there (nope), and saw this photo. The quality is crappy, and I have no idea when it was taken–at least a couple of years ago, I think–but it’s a typical “grazing cow dog” photo, so I thought I’d post it here. Harriet does like her fresh greens!

In other animal news, Rory has yet another UTI. There was a tiny amount of blood in his urine this morning, so I made an appointment to have him seen first thing tomorrow. I know he can’t be comfortable, and he really ought to be seen today, but I can’t face taking another animal back to the old vet. I managed to find another vet who is taking new clients (not as easy as one might think!), but they can’t see him until tomorrow morning.

On the bright side, I got more information and assistance, just from one phone call, than I ever got from the old vet’s office. I’m optimistic, both about the quality of care and the possibility that we may be able to finally get Rory’s crystal problem under control. Another plus is that they don’t usually keep animals overnight. They’re not staffed at night (most regular vets are not), and they feel that animals will be better off at home, where they have supervision and will be more comfortable. I tend to agree.

Today’s cool website contains a collection of black and white photographs, taken from long lost film found in old cameras.

And now, let’s have some fun with searching. The following are search strings used to arrive at either my website or blog:

  • tacky religious art
  • christian sationery
  • dog with a blue tongue
  • marble catholic sculptures
  • sleeping in curlers
  • scintillating scotoma (this one pops up about once or twice a month)
  • puggles (almost a daily occurrence)
  • unbleached waxed bag
  • silly shelly blog (well, duh!)
  • cigarette burns on children (another that pops up once or twice a month)
  • paris hilton porn
  • acupuncture mannequin
Meta

And Another Thing…

Shelly

Whilst going over my blog stats, I noticed that someone Googled, um, Yahoo’d up a helping of “little girl porn” for themselves. Ew. Imagine their surprise when they got here and there was no porn to be had? Another recent search string was “itching like crazy.”

Meanwhile, over at ye olde website, folks were in search of eye patches (my invitation to the Pirate convention must’ve been lost in the mail), photos of bad sideburns (I am not making this up), and tattoos of Boxer dogs.

M’kaythen.

Crankypantsing, Meta, News & Politics, Pets, Photography

Nitpickings and Ramblings

Shelly

Have I mentioned that if it’s not one thing, it’s ten others? Yes! Yes, I believe I have.

I keep finding pesky little issues with the website. Most of them stem from having used my host’s silly web FTP to upload files. Life would’ve been grand if I could’ve used a proper FTP client to do the uploading, but, obviously, that would’ve been far, far too easy. I think there are approximately eleventy-hundred separate files, so when loading them five (yes, *5*) at a time, it’s not surprising that a few went AWOL. I keep a close eye on my error reports and fix problems as I find them, but if y’all run across files that seem to be missing, just let me know and I’ll fix them ASAP. So far, it’s mostly been large images that have gone walkabout, but I also ran across a couple of links that were, um, pointing with their middle fingers. I dunno how that happened, as I used relative URLs for internal links. Another issue has been file names changing case when uploaded. What’s weird is that they changed from lower to upper case. Hmmm. Usually, it’s the other way around.

Anyway, that’s a rambly way of saying that I’m continuing to tidy things up around the edges. Which, you may have guessed, is the story of my life.

No art today. I’ve been driving myself to tears with this Color Erratica round robin. Someone dropped out, causing a log jam of books, so a bunch of us are scrambling to get caught up and get the group back on track. I took a break from it last night, though, and sat on my ass and did N-O-T-H-I-N-G. Well, not exactly nothing. I watched some–you guessed it!–really bad TeeVee. I’ll spare you the details, as there really aren’t any.

The unholy hot weather continues. “They” say we’ll get a break from it tomorrow. I’ll believe it when I see it. In the meantime, because Freshman orientation is over and the wee kiddies and their parents have left the building, and because the heat index has been in the triple digits, and because we supposedly need to conserve energy, The Powers That Be have declared that our building will be having periodic chilled water outages. Yep. When it gets super hot, they turn off our AC. Of course, this is an eleven story building with no windows above the third floor, so it’s not like we need AC or anything. M’kay. All that means that here are about a zillion fans going full-blast, so A) it’s impossible to hear yourself think and B) I really have to question whether there is, in fact, any sort of energy savings at all.

Le sigh. If I ran the world, things would be very, very different. Not better, mind you, just, well, different. For example, we might have year-round snow:

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D002

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And, finally, for those of you who care, the House of Representatives re-upped the Patriot Act. (A pdf of the full text of the Patriot Act can be found here.)

Crankypantsing, Meta

Pee Ess:

Shelly

And another thing… Cutesy flash intros are not so very cute, especially those that force the visitor to solve a logic puzzle in order to enter the website. I tried accessing one site with three different browsers, thinking there was a coding incompatibility, when the real problem was that I was too damned stupid to figure out that I had to drag an object across the screen in order to enter the site. That’s a mean joke to play on people. Call me silly, but it seems to me that giving visitors a reason to turn away defeats the whole purpose of having a web presence. I’m just sayin’…

Crankypantsing, Meta

HTML HELL

Shelly

With the exception of Mr. and Mrs. B’s kick-ass Memorial Day on a Sunday party, I ended up spending the entirety of my mini-vacation working on the new website. Really. The Whole Thing. And, by “whole thing,” I mean 14 hours/day with very few breaks. I have two words to describe the experience: o ick. It’s tedious, nit-picky work. I’m pretty happy with the overall look and the layout, though. It’s visually crisp and simple.

I got to work early this ayem, so I spent some time cruising around, looking at other artists’ websites. What I saw made me glad that I listened to the Little Voice who told me to keep things minimal. She usually knows what she’s talking about. Most of the websites I looked at had a lot of visual junk going on, but most of it served no purpose but to clutter up the screen, eat bandwidth, and show off the author’s mAd c0d1nG Sk1LLz. Folks, just because you can doesn’t mean you should. And that goes double for anything–and I mean a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g–that blinks, bounces, rotates, or does any other sort of virtual calisthenics. Enough, already!

I also spent far too much time re-scanning and re-photographing images. That’s almost as tedious as coding, but the results are proving to be well worth the effort–especially for work with 3D elements that didn’t scan well. Having a serviceable digital camera has made life ever so much easier.

Another thing I’m discovering–and this comes as a surprise to me–is that I have a bit of a disconnect between visual and written expression. I don’t have any illusions about being the author of the next Great American Novel, but I’d like to think that I express myself fairly well with words. However, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to switch back and forth between expressing myself in words and in images. Why is this relevant? Well, I’ve been researching and writing copy to go with much of the artwork for the website. It shouldn’t be rocket science, but I’m finding that changing gears between thinking visually and expressing verbally is not as easy as it once was. So, it’s taking more time and effort than I had anticipated.

Anyway, I still have a metric butt load of work to do, but I’m hoping to get things running in the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, here’s the graphic I’ll be using on my main page. There are few things as beautiful as a contentedly sleeping cat.

Pandora
Pandora

Crankypantsing, Meta

Monday Crankypantsing

Shelly

Apparently, my web host has been having techsicault diffnulties this afternoon. I’ve had trouble getting into various parts of my website (slooooooow and spotty outages), and haven’t been able to access my blog at all, not even the admin parts, all afternoon. It looks like it’s back up now, though. Hrmph.

While checking my error reports, I noticed that I had seriously fubarred the uploading of some of the thumbnail images for the blog, and, since I was wanting to break all the links between the blog and the old website anyway, I went ahead (before the crash) and redirected everything so that it points at the new gallery. I hope. If I’ve missed something, I’m sure it’ll show up in an error report, or just mention it in comments or email and I’ll fix it. As soon as I’m positive I’ve got all the files duplicated properly, and all the links redirected, and all the text info moved (haven’t even started on that, yet), I’ll nuke the old pages.

Happy damned Monday!

Crankypantsing, Meta

It’s Heeeeeeeeeere!

Shelly

I finally got the lion’s share of my website finished and updated. Whew! I think the worst of it was uploading everything. I couldn’t get my FTP program to talk nicely with my host’s system, so I ended up using their web-based FTP. Which only uploads five files at a time. Which was right some Jesus tedious. But it’s done, done, done.

There are a few finishing touches that need to be added and wrinkles that need to be ironed out, but it’s basically done and functional. I’ve got more composition book journal pages to add and I need to figure out why the text-only navigation links at the tops of all the pages aren’t displaying exactly alike. It’s not a big deal, but it’s one of those things that makes me go hmmm. I’ve tested everything in Firefox and IE, and will check them in Opera, too. I don’t have access to Netscape, though, so if any of y’all who use Netscape can test drive it, I’d appreciate it.

Edit: I figured out the problem with the text-only links–I missed uploading style sheets for them–and I’ve fixed it. A bigger issue is that I need to go in and make the full-size images open on top, instead of inside the lower frame. I meant to do that in the first place, but forgot. Blech. That means I’ll have to alter every single slide page, which should be, um, fun.

I’d guess that about half the content is new (or, new to the web). The old stuff has been rephotographed or scanned, so the images are much cleaner. There are a few pieces that need to be reshot, because there’s surface glare, but for the most part, all the images are in decent shape. I’m not normally a fan of frames, but this seemed a logical place to use them. On each gallery page, there are image thumbnails across the top of the page that link to frames that contain mid-sized images and, often, info about the piece. The mid-sized images (most are around 50K) link to big images (most range from 200-500K).

So, without further ado:

http://www.cat-sidh.net