Author: Don

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.

Kilt optional

Today is Tartan Day. Here are a few Scottish tunes: The Barren Rocks o’ Aden / Munro’s Rant (Angus Cumming, 1782) / Stirling Castle / Miss Kitty Gordon of Earlston’s Reel (Robert Riddell, 1787).

Wilhelm Reich does mecha

The accumulators are going to be overloaded

From episode one of Captain Earth, yet another ridiculous adolescents and mecha show that I made the mistake of sampling.

The Al Gore effect intensifies

From episode one of The Irregular at Magic High School, which looks like it will involve class warfare of a sort in one more damned high school story.

I might watch more of the latter show, or I might not. The only shows this spring that interest me are Ping Pong, because of Masaaki Yuasa, and Mushishi, because it’s Mushishi.

Update: Ubu has read the books on which The Irregular at Magic High School is based and found them “really good, fairly deep.” I probably will watch more.

Unbooked

No more fox

So Mozilla is cracking down on thoughtcrime. I need to find an alternative to Firefox that runs on my Mac. ((Safari remains my primary browser, but there are some operations that Firefox does better, and I’ve kept both handy.)) I experimented with several yesterday, and while they mostly worked tolerably well for my purposes, none were astonishing — except for Opera. WTF? Am I missing something? What kind of browser doesn’t allow you to use bookmarks?! ((Yeah, there is a “bookmark bar,” but it’s useless for storing more than half a dozen sites.)) I have a large, organized and frequently edited collection of bookmarks, which I need. Why the hell is this joke is being recommended as a replacement for Firefox?

For what it’s worth, Chrome seems to be the least annoying. However, it’s part of Google, and I don’t want to have anything more to do with that particular borg than absolutely necessary.

Update: Show Mozilla your frowny face.

Ken the Brickmuppet recommends Epic.

Question

Does anyone have any experience with Rakuten Global Market? I found a musical toy there I’ve had in mind for a while at a significantly better price than I’ve seen elsewhere, with free shipping. I wonder if it’s too good to be true.

Sprung

Eranthis

For a while yesterday it seemed that spring had finally arrived, with temperatures around 70°F. There even were thunderstorms in the later afternoon and evening, with hail. All that was missing was the tornado warning. It couldn’t last, of course. It’s back to winter this morning, with north winds and temperatures down in the lower 30°s.

While it was pleasant out yesterday, I made a trip to the botanical garden with my toy camera. Very little was in bloom, but I did find some color.

Continue reading “Sprung”

One kind of efficiency

I’ve been skipping around in The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse recently. Here’s a bit of practical advice from Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Earth, crowded, cries: “Too many men!”
My counsel is, kill nine in ten,
And bestow the shares of all
On the remnant decimal.

Most of the verse is subtler than that — if an encomium to the London sewer system, for example, can be called “subtle.” If you all are very good, I won’t quote any more of it.

A hot cup of heresy

The truth about coffee:

  • Decaf is Docetic because it only appears to be coffee.
  • Instant is Apollinarian because it’s had its soul removed and replaced.
  • Frappuccinos are essentially a form of Monophysitism, having their coffee nature swallowed up in milkshake.
  • Chicory is Arian, not truly coffee at all but a separate creation….

(Via First Things.)