Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

off-topics

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See what happens? I get too much facial hair and then I don’t blog for a month because I’m too busy sneaking around everywhere incognito.

Yesterday I missed work not because I was too sick to go in, but because I had a headache. That’s the sort of ridiculous SEL reason I usually mock my middle-aged co-workers about but, let me assure you, this was a seriously bad noise-hurts, light-hurts, moving-hurts, breathing-hurts headache. Initially I thought that I could take my typical 4x suggested dose of Ibprofin and merrily skip to work a mere hour late. Boy was I wrong.

(I should point out that I have to take 4x the suggested dose because the suggested dose really doesn’t register at all to me. I could just as easily eat one m&m to try to solve my aches and pains. It could also have to do with the fact that I spent my entire childhood surrounded by women who would take, like 1600mg of Motrin and a glass of wine for cramps, which might also explain why I always found Karen Walker to be so lovably familiar.)

Today was blustery and spring-like, and I headed out for work. I’m certainly not using two SEL days for a headache, was my thinking. Again, boy was I wrong. (Sense a trend?) I could not focus on the screen, could not carry a work-related conversation for longer than two minutes, and was generally a Motrin-gobbling miserable excuse for a human being.

So, that’s life in my world, at the moment – headache that makes me reconsider existence, leading to major grumpiness.

https://crushingkrisis.com/2006/03/114204628084179292/

Housekeeping

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Doing some bloggy housekeeping today, so if you should happen to visit and witness things blinking in and out of existence, that’s why.

The most visible change i’ve made so far is the much better implementation of the “hearing” section of the sidebar, which is powered by Brandon Fuller‘s fantastic Now Playing plug-in. The iTunes plug-in, which was a reasonable $10, FTPs your recent plays as a RSS to your website, where you can manipulate just about any information iTunes passes along (number of plays, album, stars, link to your Amazon referred ID, et cetera).

I had been meaning to get album covers up and running, and with only an hour or two of extra work i have it inserted tiny stars and more intelligent play counts. If you buy it and already use a little PHP on your site i’d be happy to help you get it to do what you want it to do.

For a while now i’ve been wanting to include a sidebar RSS feed from an integrated wishlisting website – i.e. one that you’d use for an online Baby Registry if you planned to draw from multiple different stores. Yesterday i found the best implementation of the idea i’ve ever seen, the very smart The Things I Want. After subscribing to the site you create a bookmark(let) in your browser, and whenever you view something you want you just load the bookmark – which guesses the item’s title, price, and image. You can add buy-priority, comments, and tags. So far the only downside is that any RSS feed is of your WHOLE LIST, which is a little cumbersome, but for a relatively new site it already gets a hardy recommendation from this blogger.

Also, some new incoming links! Heart be still. Age Old Songs is a very nifty blog that will find its way onto the sidebar later today. Also, perennial hot favorite from across the country Min Jung Kim apparently still knows i’m alive. Plus, the usual highly appreciated love from good friend Rabi @ Wockerjabby, and the continually nifty Philly-blog collective Philly Futures.

In a world of people reading me via RSS feeds in an integrated reader, or on a site like Livejournal, i often forget that some people (like me) still have good ol’fashioned domain blogs and give good ol’fashioned links to other people they read.

If you’re one of those ol’fashioned folks and i’ve recently missed you link, feel free to let me know, as i’m not the obsessive statistic whore that i was in olden days.

Speaker Quandary

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My very friendly and generous South-Philly co-worker AnnaMaria bought herself a surround sound system for Christmas. It didn’t work out in her living, so she returned it, but she was unable to return the assembled stands she bought for her speakers.

Our system came with front stands that we co-opted for rear stands; our front speakers have always sat on our front window sills. However, due to the recent parlor-reorg, the speakers are now being a bit obscured.

I volunteered to take the stands off of AnnaMaria’s hands, thinking that we’d use them for our fronts (and maybe the rears too). However, once she brought them over i realized that their system of being screwed on isn’t compatible with the screw-holes on the back of my speakers (thumb included for sense of dimension).

Now, you might have never done a shop-call with me, so let me explain to you that i’m hardly shy about doing things with tools and powered drills and custom-cut bits of wood. However, i am mightily shy when it comes to doing such things to things i own and rent.

So the question i pose is – how would you mount my speakers onto AnnaMaria’s stands? If it isn’t possible i am going to put the stands on Craigslist on her behalf, but i’d prefer to keep them.

So far the only idea i have is that they can be held on by a single screw through the top hole on the speaker through the top hole on the flat side post, which would be the only way that would provide stability. Not ideal, but at least they’d be used.

If you figure something out, please email me at uprush dot org, to the address krisis (or, if reading on LJ, just comment on the CK-feed).

Mmm, Zeitgeist

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As someone who has been doing this for more than half a decade, the only thing that amazes me more than the utter ubiquity of blogging is the utter proliferation of blogging trends and tools.

A newer trend in blogging (at least to me, anyhow) is the use of a blog to assemble a well researched academic text. There are two excellent examples i’ve been keeping up with daily. The first, The Long Tail, is (in short) about the 80/20 rule, based on a Wired Article i very much enjoyed. On the second, The Music of Rufus Wainwright, composer and professor Roger Bourland invites discussion of topics ranging from form and phrase structure to the challenges of accurate transcription – all from his forthcoming book examining Rufus’s music in a classical light.

In the tools category, Blogger now fluently accepts phone-posts directly from your cell with no setup required. You simply email a text message or picture mail from your phone to go@blogger.com – blogger sets up a randomly named blogspot page to receive your messages (identified via your phone # and/or phone email) until you claim it and (potentially) assign further messages to another blog. As you’ve seen from my recent posts, it can even upload your pictures via FTP. Read more at Go Blogger. Currently supports posts from Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, Sprint, or T-Mobile.

In a blogging world of academic tomes and phone posts and the dreaded LJ-meets-Facebook bohemeth that is Myspace it boggles my mind to think that five years ago i was the only boy on the internet singing songs specifically to be published on my blog.