Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

bloggish

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.

Blank States and Blank Slates

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Days keep fading into one another the way they did in high school, with nothing to mark the progress. Do you know why i can’t remember high school? Because i only have songs as signposts – no conveniently cryptic blog to inform me of my feelings.

That’s how i feel about the last year and a half. Yes, the blog is here, and it does its job of marking some of the months that have passed. Others? I can’t even tell how i got to here from September. In September it was my birthday and i was in New York and seeing everyone i know and drinking way too much wine, and here i am two months to the day.

It might have to do with my cell phone. I “lost” it just after my birthday weekend, taking with it connections to friends old and newly acquired. For a few days it was liberating – no vibrating outreach to be beholden to. The newness wore off shortly, and suddenly i felt trapped, as if i couldn’t speak to anyone outside of my co-workers or Elise. I watched their emails pass by with me on carbon copy as if on the seeing-through side of a one-way mirror, ever observing and never responding.

Or maybe it doesn’t have to do with my cell phone. Maybe it has to do with my stupid resolution a year and a half ago to spend a year only caring about work and staying happy with Elise and monitoring my budget and playing City of Heroes, and now that i’ve quit the latter and achieved equillibrium on the middle two i find that all i know how to do is first thing first thing first thing. Even when i am at home. Sometimes when i am asleep.

It’s not such a bad thing to know how to do at the age of twenty-four. I draw a melange of amaze/amuse -ment from my co-workers and superiors in my zeal for things, my “cools!” and “sounds funs!”

If only they knew; the things in that building really are the cools and sounds funs right now. And, that is how you lose two months of time without really trying.

Note to Self, Apparently Unread

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Note to Self: Stop having sex dreams about other bloggers; it’s kindof creepy.

PS: Definitely don’t post about this.

PPS: Well, if you have to post about it, definitely don’t allude to which one. Better not to post about it at all, though.

PPPS: If this should occur again in the future, definitely don’t get drunk with your girlfriend and tell her which one.

PPPPS: Furthermore, if this should occur again in the future and you get drunk with your girlfriend, subsequently telling her which one don’t answer any of her prying questions about the details, but do not phrase said reply as “Get your own sex dreams!”

PPPPPS: Re: Details – You whore!

PPPPPPS: Revise the margueritas ratio; it should not be 2:1 … Yes, you’re a boy, but she holds her tequila better than you do.

PPPPPPPS: You know, if you feel the need to be more risque you could just go back to posting webcam shots of your ass.

PPPPPPPPS: Fine, make the damn post, see if I give you any more advice.

If I’m the only one to survive, they should triple my pay.

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Good lord.

If I call technology support with a simple question – say, that my QuickLaunch bar disappeared and I can’t get it back because I’m not an administrator on my machine – why don’t I have it back after three days and seven phones calls? Why? Why is it that they can’t figure out what to do even after calling in their co-workers on conference for assistance? Why, after I research the answer and subsequently TELL THEM HOW TO DO IT because I know more about computers than they do, can’t they can’t figure it out still? What am I supposed to do?

Maybe if I were to unplug my network connection after they remotely logged into my machine I could surreptitiously fix my settings and then plug back in before they’re any the wiser? Hmm.

(I’ll never understand why IT people make so much money. Good IT people deserve it, but the only good ones I’ve ever met have been my friends at Drexel.)

In other news, it seems as though Blogger altered the longstanding variable “BlogItemUrl” to display a full domain url rather than just a file name with a target attached, thus breaking every single permalink from the past four years. That’s 2500+ permalinks. I had to have an emergency template-editing session in the middle of the day so that you can obsessively link all of my highly entertaining writing from your own pages. So, yeah.

Meanwhile, my department is dropping like flies. One of my coworkers left the office in the middle of the day yesterday so suddenly sick that she literally had to bring a trash bag for her cab ride home. Then, this morning, two more people had to go home before our morning meeting was even underway, with a third turned a color so yellow that I think he may have developed jaundice overnight.

That’s a fifth of our entire department! I refuse to catch their sickness; I haven’t involuntarily thrown up for a reason other than alcohol consumption since middle school. Rest assured, my OCD is in high gear today – I typically treat every surface in the office as if it was thinly coated in poop anyhow, but today I have expanded that distinction to include fellow associates and added the additional precaution of wearing an imaginary fencing mask, so that I am unable to touch my hands or any office supply to any area near me face. And I still feel queasy; damn placebo effect.

Maybe it’s ebola or something, and I’ll prove to be resistant due to my iron-clad stomach, and after everyone dies I can sneak down to tech support and fix my damned Start bar.