WordPress 2.5

Sunday, 30 March, 2008 at 11:54 pm

Bran’ Spankin’ New version of WordPress … I’m not a big fan of it. Hah. I hate to complain. I’m not against change. But I am against changing my workflow!

I just don’t like how much scrolling I have to do on the Write Post page. (I have to go all the way down there to add a password?! Or even to categorize my post? Which also involves much more scrolling…) It seems to me like there’s so much wasted space to the right … because I don’t use a lot of the stuff there, haha.

And the tags thing … maybe it’s just me. I’m used to Simple Tags. WP’s tag guessing thing is so slow. boo. Then again, Simple Tags could slow down my system a fraction of a second. But … at least the reaction to my typing, say, “bu” (completely random letters, yes), wouldn’t take a whole second (more?) to show up.

Also, why can’t I customize this page? I was able to change the last version’s around. Well, sorta. Going from one WordPress blog panel on this domain to another, the position of those things (widgets?) changed back to default. mrrr. But … theoretical customization, come on, people!

I dunno. I suppose I’ll get used to it. I have to, don’t I? *grin*

the jester and the monk went out one night

Sunday, 16 March, 2008 at 10:52 pm

New layout. Yay! After I complained in some previous post that I had no inspiration for a new layout I went out to a scrapbooking store (for class supplies) and saw a paper design that I liked (the diamond pattern) so I matched it up with this image I’d found earlier while on the lookout for old woodcuts (for class). I like it all right at the moment. Will probably tire of it soon. But I think I can wrangle the layout into a non-overflow one once that happens.

I still have to work on style for the text. It’s what kept me from making this post yesterday when the layout went up, but since I spent most of today working on my book (for the same class mentioned previously), I never got around to finishing it, and would rather say yay new layout before it’s done than a few days after it first went up.

I’ll probably split the “sidebar” into three sections instead of two. I’ll probably toss in the RSS feed from LibraryThing and Last.fm. I feel somehow like I’m following the latest trend by doing that, but oh well. It’ll make this blog look less abandoned in between posts. XD;

I also want to add a colophon. Why? I’m a dork I guess. I love the idea of it. I first read one in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I had no idea what it was, but I liked knowing what typeface they used. It edged me a little bit deeper into loving book design. *grin*

mileage speed-wise

Sunday, 9 March, 2008 at 10:13 pm

I thought this was a pretty good reason to drive 65 mph instead of 75 or even 70, going from home (L.A.) to school (SLO) and back (about 400 miles roundtrip).

gas mileage and speed chart “Peak Performance: A U.S. Department of Transportation study averaged the fuel-efficiency curve for eight cars and light trucks.”

It’s one thing for my brother to tell me the highway mileage stat on cars is obtained while driving 47.5 mph and somewhere above that speed the mileage starts to go down. It’s another to see that at 70 mph I get the same mileage as at 15? And the sharp decline as the speed rises…

The rest of the page:

Teutonic Shift: Freedom to speed is an inalienable right in Germany—at least on those portions of the nearly 8,000 miles of autobahn that have no posted limit. Some drivers well exceed 450 mph. So there was an uproar when a European Union official suggested last year that Germany cut greenhouse emissions by imposing a limit of 75 mph or so on the entire expressway.

The idea has merit. Cars burn fuel to overcome friction, air resistance, and other forces allied against them. The more fuel a car burns, the more CO2 it produces. Every car has a peak fuel-efficient speed that gains the greatest distance per unit of energy spent. That speed varies by make and model, but according to David L. Greene, a corporate research fellow at Tennessee’s National Transportation Research Center, “there would be very few cars with an optimal speed above 70 mph.” Still, an autobahn limit might not be a huge help. Even now, its drivers average around 80 mph.
—Tom Zeller, Jr., National Geographic, October 2007

Madeleine L’Engle’s Chronos and Kairos

Thursday, 6 March, 2008 at 1:23 am

I really have to work on posting entries when I first think of them. I’ve got a few ideas waiting to be written. This is the first one! (Chronologically speaking in order of when I thought of them, as well. Funny.)

I read through my Madeleine L’Engle books over the past couple months, seeing which ones I really didn’t have an interest in any longer. (Of course I read through them chronologically: A Wrinkle in Time, A Wind in the Door, Many Waters, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, A Ring of Endless Light, Troubling a Star, A House Like a Lotus, and An Acceptable Time. I don’t have Meet the Austins or Dragons in the Waters.)

It turns out this is harder than I expected. If I were to go solely by story, I would get rid of The Moon by Night, The Young Unicorns, Arm of the Starfish, and Troubling a Star. But if I were to consider the whole book, the only title I’m still willing to give away is The Young Unicorns. It’s because the other titles have characters connected to the books I’m not giving away. Argh! Me and my sentimentality!

A bit of likely unnecessary backstory: the books I’m considering disposing of I’ve read only once or twice before this winter (except Troubling a Star, which I’ve read a few times), and probably bought only to read more about Ms. L’Engle’s characters. For the most part, I find them somewhat dry and dragging. Possibly because of the printing. If it looks like it came from the ’90s, I tend to read the story as dry.

Seriously, newspaper-quality paper and thick type? Come on! How much money were these publishers trying to save here? How much money did they really make in the long run? Especially A House Like a Lotus. I don’t know what typeface was used, but it looks like a modern typeface. In a book? Yuck.

Back to the original topic. If I take into account the characters in the books, I really want to keep Arm of the Starfish because it has Polly (Poly?) O’Keefe in it. Don’t really care for the story (never liked mysteries; once I read it the first time, the re-read value goes down by about 95%), but I like seeing how different she is from in AHLaL. I see growth, change, damage from your average high school setting.

Since I’m keeping Adam Eddington’s story before ARoEL, I feel like I should keep TMbN for Vicky. Zachary Gray is also in TMbN, who’s also in ARoEL and AAT. (Ooh, even longer period of development!) After that, I begin to think I should keep TaS just to wrap up the whole Adam/Vicky story, although I figure I can just remember that they stay connected. (One time I tried reading TaS again and I couldn’t even finish it. Do you know how rare an occurance that is?)

So I end up giving away only TYU and TaS. TaS is a fairly thick book; I’ll gain lots of bookshelf space giving that book away. Which is the main reason I’m reading through the books. (Mum made me a new bookshelf last summer for the foot of my bed where I can put my comics and some DVDs and CDs, and already I’ve got a stack of books about two feet tall with no place to go!)

AotS and TMbN are thin books, they won’t take up much shelf space. But it bugs me that these books are sitting on my shelf that I never ever ever plan to read ever again! Unless I’m really bored with whatever else I have. *twitch*

A comment about the two later Polly books: I know the two fit into two different series (does AHLaL go in with the Chronos books? it does have Zachary … but then he shows up in a Kairos book as well…), one is more grounded in reality and the other is more of a fantasy. But still. Does Polly feel like a completely different character in each book? Or is it just my mind yet again getting influenced by appearances (this time the covers), so AHLaL feels more dry (the type doesn’t help either :P) and AAT is rich and fun?

I know in AHLaL she’s recovering from a deep hurt, and she’s around people who aren’t her grandparents (everyone cleans up for their loving grandparents, right?), but still. The AAT Polly seems younger. And some other stuff that would come to mind better if I weren’t writing this at 1:30 in the morning. Wow, I typed a lot. Why do I always do that? And writing school papers just sucks hardcore! I’m lucky if I come up with the bare minimum required.

heard you say

Friday, 22 February, 2008 at 11:39 pm

I feel like writing here. I’m not really saying anything, but this is stuff I have on my mind. (A brain dump, I suppose.)

The Fanlistings.org has a listing for “Tommy February6 / Tommy Heavenly6 (Kawase, Tomoko)” but when I go to that site the website says it’s a fanlisting for Tommy February6 only. (Okay it doesn’t use the word ‘only,’ but seriously there’s no mention of Tommy Heavenly6 on the site.) I don’t know who to be more annoyed with, the site owner for not including Tommy Heavenly6, or TFL.org for including her! (…That phrasing is awkward, seeing as it’s the same person….)

To be honest, I don’t really care as much as it seems. I don’t pay much heed to the list itself. (As evidenced by all the buttons on my joined page that don’t have a fanlisting. XD) I just feel really really … weird … when I think of joining the fanlisting that TFL.org says is for Tommy Heavenly6 and using a button with Tommy Heavenly6 on it to link to a site that mentions only Tommy February6. Maybe I should just stick up a button and not link to any site. XD That works for me. Now I just need to get unlazy and do it…

(Note to self: don’t ever write a post about Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6 both. I’m tired of typing Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6. Which makes me wonder why I keep typing Tommy Heavenly6 and Tommy February6. It’s not for SEO, honest.)

Oh, a point I forgot to include and am feeling entirely too lazy to try and work in now: The ridiculousness of TFL.org expecting, because it’s the same physical person, that everyone will be a fan of both her personas/recording personalities. I mean, from the fanlisting itself, “Tommy February6 is all about 80’s style cutesy pop music; so sugary sweet that you’ll grow cavities!” And Tommy Heavenly6 has a rockier edge. I like the rock and am willing to pay the price for imported CDs, but the ’80s pop … not so much.

On to the next topic! Hopefully it will be as short as it was in my mind, unlike the previous portion of this entry. Okay, so I’d been thinking of writing this post about paper or plastic bags and which to get at the store, which to line trash cans with, but I may have built it up too much in my mind to essay proportions, and you should know how much I can’t stand writing. Basically, I heard recently that paper bags are getting banned in certain cities and that only 1% of plastic shopping bags get recycled and about 17% of paper bags are recycled. (These numbers are off the top of my head from my somewhat faulty memory, so don’t go citing me as a source or anything.) (Also someone in GPC said plastic films can’t be recycled, period. Ziploc bags, shopping bags, all those little baggies they use to package children’s toys and then warn that plastic bags and kids Do Not Mix Well, they all can’t be recycled. boo.)

So that just made me feel worse about using plastic bags to bag my trash. But I still can’t bring myself to use paper bags for trash. Why? Paper always gets recycled with me, no matter what. It’s been instilled in me since grade school. (I was reminiscing earlier that my city used to not recycle colored paper. And now they’ve moved up to recycled shredded paper! *sniff* They grow up so fast…)

I looked up biodegradeable trash bags, but I can’t find any. At least not any in stores around here. I am really not interested in going online to search for trash bags. Seriously? Have something shipped to me that I’m just going to toss out? Besides, another person in GPC said biodegradable plastics don’t degrade in landfills, because of lack of sun or too much pressure from other waste or something, I don’t know. Basically, biodegradable potato starch=not for landfills.

Yeah. That was a little longer than I’d hoped. Am cutting it short here, no more thoughts on that, except to say that I am still stuck in this moral conundrum.

Third and final topic, this blog needs a new layout. x.x I was planning one I think it was last September, but uhh stupid research paper (that I don’t think I talked about on here … I like to keep my blog clean and PG-rated) got in the way. But it’s sort of ugly anyway. I like the idea, but I don’t know how to carry it off in a pleasant way. Hey! Much the same way I designed my tea box project for Advanced Digital Typography! I love my idea (mommy and baby gorilla, awwww), but … I don’t like designing packaging. Do I make it look similar to other products out there so it’s recognizable as that type of product, or do I go waay out to left field and make something eye-catching that people might pass by because they don’t know what it is?

*cough* Uh, anyway. Yeah. After that idea in September (I did draw what I had in my head out on Illustrator, but I didn’t move beyond that ’cause I don’t know how to lay it out), I have no other ideas really. blegh. I’ve had ideas for images to use, but then the layout would just be a variation of the current one. And I thought, if it’s just basically this layout, then what’s the point of doing all that work? I’ve had plenty of schoolwork to occupy time outside class, thanks. Also, the green fits in with my posting a lot lately about environmental stuff. (Hah, that’s the only thing I can make myself care about enough outside of classes to write something.)

But then, I’m getting really really really tired of the huuuuge margins/padding around all my text. (Margins: typography; padding: code.) And my Twitter box is stuck all the way down there, hidden and inconspicuous. (I want more conspicuous! More!)

I just don’t know what to do. Even my Livejournal has been sitting all blah and boring and grey for probably over a year. (Yes, grey. I have nothing against grey, but seriously, that’s how drab the layout is. Nothing but shades of grey.)

I think I’m tired of the basic layout. Header, text below like a magazine or book or anything, and links somewhere. I was considering a horizontal layout but I either can’t be arsed or am tired of that as well. (My touchpad doesn’t scroll horizontally like my brothers’ do … oooold laptop.) Right now I like Noelle’s layout she made for me a long while ago. (Layout 14 under Flimsy Silence at [Shadows they fall (link to stf)] if anyone wants to see. Man, I need to restructure my layout archive. I can’t even reference layouts. Maybe that was part of the reason I stuck to frames so long for that site. No one link to anything on that site! Not even me! XO ) But I dunno what to do with it. I wonder if div auto overflows are out…

This is a very long post, when I meant to write only a handful of paragraphs…