Category: Administrative

Picture this

Helmet, with inadvertent self-portrait

If Flickr decides that there has been suspicious activity involving your account, or if you want to access Flickr from a different browser or a different computer, you need to prove to them that you are indeed whoever it is that you are. It’s a simple matter. In my case, I need only respond to emails sent to either of two long-defunct addresses.1 This doesn’t quite make sense to me; I used a different address, which they have, to launch my account there. But the ways of IT are mysterious and not for ordinary mortals to comprehend.

At this time, I can log into Flickr only with one browser and only on one computer. It’s just a matter of time before I’m locked out of my account entirely. Therefore, I’ve started a weblog for my photography, here. I’ll occasionally post a picture or two on Zoopraxiscope, but the full galleries will be at the new site. You can see the rest of the pictures from yesterday’s visit to the Great Plains Renaissance Festival there, for instance.

Testing, testing

One way to display a panorama without using 360Cities:

Treehouse

Clicking on the picture (if you’re using an older version of Safari) or the title in the lower left will take you to its Flickr page, where you should see it at a much larger size.

Click here for another way.

Update: This panorama is now an “Editor’s Pick” at 360Cities. Here it is using their embed code:


Treehouse in the kids’ garden

You can see another, rather different one of my panoramas at the bottom of their homepage.

Now you see it, redux

A recent message from the website host:

System Administration is currently migrating or will be migrating your account … to a newer server to better meet your needs. You should have no downtime during this move, and will be notified with your new server information once it completes. Please postpone changes until the move has been completed and DNS propagation completes.

This may be why my recent posts disappear and reappear and disappear again, and why Steven’s recent comment vanished overnight. You might find it annoying. I find it infuriating.

Testing, testing

Picture is unrelated.
Picture is unrelated.

This is a test of the emergency blogging system. This is only a test. Had this been a real emergency, you would have been instructed to run around in counterclockwise circles waving your laptop overhead, screaming.

(This post should automatically appear on my Facebook and Tumblr pages. Theoretically.)

Update: The “publicize” function in WordPress’ Jetpack works perfectly with Tumblr, which matters very little because I rarely use my Tumblr account. It does not work with Facebook, which matters somewhat more. True, I loathe Facebook and almost never post there. However, it’s the best way to keep tabs on many friends and family, most of whom rarely venture into the more demanding realm of weblogs. It would be convenient for my posts here to automatically appear there, but I’ll have to find some other way to do it.

(If I ever do manage to connect my site to Facebook, it will be interesting to see how many of my “friends” unfriend me when they realize I have conservative tendencies.)

Advisory

I have decided to accept advertising on this weblog, so expect to see occasional announcements of various goods and services. Please note that I preview each ad, and I decline any that does not meet my standards of taste and decorum.

A helpful tip

If you are embarrassed that such an inconsequential weblog as mine links to your site, it’s easy to remedy. Just post a blanket denunciation of the “baby boomers,” and I will delete your link from my blogroll. Kathy Shaidle and Mark Shea both removed themselves from my site in this fashion years ago, as did Vox Day this morning.

I don’t get it

I dismissed Opera as a replacement for Firefox because it doesn’t do bookmarks. Now I’ve discovered to my intense irritation that WordPress doesn’t do blogrolls anymore. Fortunately, there is a plugin that restores the capability, but for a while this morning the atmosphere near my computer was sulphurous. I have lots of links on the previous site that I want to include here, but there is no obvious way to export them. It looks like I’m going to have to manually reconstruct the blogroll, grr. This will take a while. I am not happy.

But I really don’t understand. Why deprecate bookmarks? What’s wrong with blogrolls? And while I’m kvetching, why the obsession with magazine-style layouts these days? Sure, they look nice, but they’re a pain to navigate, particularly on a dinky laptop screen.

栗コーダーポップスオーケストラ

Yotsuba&!

Here’s the track list from 「よつばと!」イメージアルバム「よつばと♪」, which I’m listening to right now:

よあけ
よつば、めをさます
よつば、とーちゃんをおこす
とーちゃん、にどねする
よつば、とーちゃんをおこす（はげしく）
よつば、おなかがすく
あさごはんのしたく
あさごはんをたべる
あとかたづけをする
よつば、でかける
よつば、こうえんであそぶ
よつばとえな
ふたりでおえかき
とーちゃん、はたらく
よつば、おなかがすく
はらへったおんど
ひるごはんのしたく
ひるごはんをたべる
おひるね
なつのごご
ひとりでおえかき
よつばのちいさなだいぼうけん
よつばととーちゃん
ゆうすずみ
とーちゃんとおでかけ (ー Odekake and fine)
オカイモノのうた
かえりみち
カレーをつくる
カレーをたべる（とてもおいしく）
おふろにはいる
きょうもいちにちたのしかった
おやすみなさい
またあした

If you see Japanese characters, that means that the database is set up correctly.

I finally found out why I couldn’t use non-English characters on my weblog. If you used Fantastico or something similar to install WordPress, as I carelessly did several years ago, it would set “latin1” as the character set in MySQL instead of UTF8, thus changing all the kanji to question marks. It’s possible to fix the database, but it looks like a nightmare for someone who prefers to do as little coding as possible. I figured it would be much simpler simply to start a new weblog and import the old data to the new site.

So, welcome to the new weblog, pretty much the same as the old weblog. I’ll be doing some tidying-up over the next week or so, and soon it should be no uglier than its predecessor.

If you see a box with a question mark where a picture should be, click on the box. That will bring the picture up.

Ignore this post

The most recent upgrade to WordPress broke an essential function. I’m going to try various experiments to isolate the problem and fix it, if I can. While I’m tearing my hair out, this place might look different. Don’t be alarmed; that roar you hear in the distance is just me yelling at the monitor.

Update: Fixed. Flexible Lightbox and WordPress don’t play together nicely anymore.

Christmas_lightbox

Testing …

If I have the feeds set up right, this post should appear at Anime Nano but not at Facebook. (Yeah, I am on Facebook, and no, I’m not very friendly. I’m there mainly to keep tabs on friends and family. If you want to know what’s on my mind, my weblog is the source to consult.)

… testing

If I have the feeds set up right, this post should appear — eventually — at Facebook but not at Anime Nano.

The amount of trash Askimet is catching indicates that bookmarks and links to my old sites are indeed sending visitors and spambots here. You should not need to update your links. However, you probably do need to change the RSS feed if you use one. You now have a choice of feeds, available at the bottom of the sidebar at right. “All Topics” includes everything I post; “Anime” covers posts on animation and Japan; “Not anime” encompasses everything except posts on Japanese animation; and, “Photo gallery” gathers posts featuring pictures I’ve taken.

Welcome

Welcome to the successor of The Kawaii Menace and Scuffulans hirsutus. There’s still a lot of fussing and tweaking to do, and I may well change the name and template yet again, but the place is organized enough now that visitors shouldn’t get too lost.

Don’t hurry to update your links. Once I have everything in place, I’ll redirect my other domain names (tancos.net and tancos2.net) so that old links will take you here.

I decided to merge my two weblogs. I don’t post enough these days to warrant maintaining more than one. I know that few people share my range of interests. If you are not interested in animation, skip those posts; if that is all you care about, skip the rest.

The WordPress export/import process worked fairly well, but there were some glitches. Most of the music and many of the pictures that I’ve posted in the past didn’t make the transfer. Unless one of the missing pieces is of particular importance, I’m not going to worry about it. There will be plenty more new things here.

*****

If you didn’t vote in the poll at right at The Kawaii Menace, please do so here. It’s not necessary to have seen every single nominated character to vote. (I’ve transferred the results from the poll at the old site, so if you did vote there, please don’t vote again. (If none of the characters are familiar, then you probably shouldn’t vote.))