So that work precluding good blogging thing? Expect it to continue through the end of the month. I'm not saying posts will be necessarily less numerous - I am, after all, picking up my shiny! new! laptop! this evening - but they will be crap, as I can't properly incubate them when my job requires more than menial labor in Excel. Also, if I owe you an email, prepare for a slow response... but I swear I'll write eventually!

Two questions for discussion:

1. Names for shiny aluminum things? Robots in film and literature?
2. Bestest OS X software evar?

From here on out, I intend to document everything snazzy I do to this blog on my Codex user page. Tonight, that means writing a bit about how to rename wp-comments-post.php (it's really not that tricky). Readers who are interested in this sort of thing are encouraged to hop over there and join the fun!

Also, I killed off the two alternate themes. They were crap and it wasn't worth even the five minutes it would take to change all the comment script references in them. But the theme competition has ended, and it has all kinds of awesome new themes, some of which I've downloaded. I'll soup up and install 'em any day now, really.

So consider this an open thread with emphasis on blogtinkery.

It's official, signed, sealed, and if not quite delivered, at least dropped in the mailbox: I'm off to UC Berkeley next fall for a Ph.D. from the Department of Earth and Planetary Science. Do not hesitate to fail to withold your applause!

Topics to be covered in the next 5+ years may include (in that nested list format that's so trendy this week):

• Mud:
  • Its squooshiness.
  • Its jiggliness.
  • Its squooshiness when jiggled:
    • On Earth.
    • On Mars.
• Beating civil engineers over the head:
  • Sometimes simplifications are necessary for projects to proceed efficiently.
  • Sometimes they clearly haven't been paying attention to:
    • Seismology.
    • Statistics.

I'm still working out the implications of this decision in the hypothetical case of a Stanford-Iowa State playoff. It's a good thing I have a Division III alma mater and don't really follow college sports at all, or my head might explode.

So I've been hit! And badly, too; the server has been responding at best intermittently this morning. Or perhaps someone else was hit; with 80 sites co-hosted on the same machine it's hard to tell. But the barrage of Spaminator messages appearing at the same time as the site becomes inaccessible is a bit of a coincedence.

I'll have a look-see at renaming wp-comments.php tonight. Any other suggestions for combatting spam without chewing up resources to run it through WordPress and plugins and etc.?

For now, comments from "new" commenters will go into the moderation queue. If yours fails to appear right away, please be patient.

One: I have a new car, and it's a Mercedes, woo woo! Which would mean I'm moving up in the world, except it's from 2020, has a salvage title, and is ugly as sin. However, it does run on diesel, which means it could theoretically run on vegetable oil at some time in the future - if I decide I want a car after all.

Two: I'm souping up a theme or two for competition. If any of you WordPress 1.5 kidz could play with this one a little, and let me know if you find any bugs, I'd be much obliged. Hit the screenshot to download:

One: I've gotten my first comment spam on the new system - that was fast!

Two: I have a CSS question for all y'alls. This page was originally set up with a default link-color rule for the sidebar, header, and footer; links in this box, the #content div, were given a special rule: #content a:link { color: #3fa111; }. Fabulous, yeah? But when I wanted to assign yet another set of colors to the links in the entry-titles, using a.googleju:link { color: black } - no dice. The first rule is considered more specific, because it contains an ID selector, and the second rule only has a class selector. Without declaring my googleju rule to be !important, it was dead in the water.

I don't like to use !important - it's poor form. So I rewrote the stylesheet to make the #content colors the default, and declared exceptions for the other three div's on the page. Which is fine, and will work until/unless I decide I need to put two kinds of links on the sidebar. At that point, it seems my only option is to rewrite all my HTML templates (based on the default WordPress theme) to use class selectors, rather than IDs.

So here's my question: is there some sort of reason the default templates are set up with ID selectors?

(more...)

There is yet another game of prominent liberal male bloggers asking themselves why they don't link to more female bloggers being played at the moment. It's approximately as fun as a game of Chutes and Ladders, which is to say, not very fun at all. (While we're somewhat on the topic, I'd actually be very interested in a game of "where are all the earth science bloggers?" - but not today.)

However, all the cool kids have been analyzing their blogrolls lately, so: My blogroll - or actually, my list of public subscriptions on bloglines, not counting flickr photostreams or webcomics or open-enrollment group blogs like Metafilter or any of that crap - encompasses 28 men, 24 women, 6 male-dominated group blogs, and a whole bunch of people whose genders I can't remember and/or am unable to figure out. Modulo group blogs, that's 46% - fully consistent with a random sampling of an evenly split pool, so nyah.

Okay, this is the WordPress sandbox post! I'm still working on the design, and reassigning old entries to new categories - the mineral puns were cute, but getting old and generally not very useful.

Does anyone know how I get my name to stop showing up as "admin" in the comments? I've set it to "yami" in my user profile but it's just not sticking. - so that one wasn't so hard.

Next question: why isn't the hierarchical category list functioning as advertised? Answer: hide_empty was turned on.

Other transition issues: the import from MT went smoothly, but it seems to have auto-pinged everything all over again. D'oh! My apologies if you've just been slammed with a ton of duplicate trackbacks.

Attn: Snow.
Your attendance record in the past few years has been abysmal. You have less than twenty-four hours to materialize in the Midwest or there will be consequences.

Attn: All Others
I'm off to Iowa and might or might not post until next year. Merry Twinkle-Solstice Time!

It's not so much a choice between applying to grad school and blogging; procrastination is a foregone conclusion. It's a choice between procrastiwhinyblogging about application essays as the retroactive construction of a mendaciously coherent personal narrative (yawn) or doin' some easy stuff. Hugo importunes us all to share our most marvelous self-absorptions of the year; the year ain't over yet, but hell! I hereby promise not to write anything worthwhile until 2020, so that the following posts (in chronological order) can remain my favorites:

1. An Open Letter to the Campbell's Soup People - Frankly I'm in awe of your legal team, because remember what happened when word got out as to how ketchup was counted as a vegetable on school lunch menus?
2. Life of the Mind - [W]e can expect some level of activism/intellectualism from Average Citizen X, and anyone who goes beyond that level can fairly claim to be an activist or an intellectual.
3. Spoons - The spoon is a puddingvore, honed by years of evolution to subsist primarily on yogurt, tapioca, and applesauce.
4. Easy Things that Aren't - We all have our mental blocks, after all, and most of the time we manage to muddle through life anyway.
5. Abortion Post Alpha - When someone else's life depends on your body, just how far up shit creek are you allowed to leave them?

So now: All the cool kids are making Top N lists! You don't want to be left out in the cold, do you? I didn't think so.

Another skunk must've just sprayed in the neighborhood. Holy crap I am sick and tired of skunk spray wafting in on the breeze, seems like every other week something trundles in from the mountains and becomes very upset at what it sees. Altadena seems like a nice little unincorporated community, but it just goes to show, if you're not looking at the world through a skunk's eyes, you're missing out. Phlugh.