April 2005 Archives

Hmm. I don't like WordPress at all. I don't like that I don't have a linky blog. I hate that I have to add a plug in to be able to do something as simple as upload images. I have to click around so much, my pen tool's worn out. And most of all I hate having 1000+ 'draft' posts and no way to either publish or delete them in one go. I'm not keen on its GUI either.I like the design of my site, though, even if the bulk of it isn't mine. I just made it prettier. But WordPress has to go. Soon. Maybe I'll go back to MT for a while, until I figure out how to port this design (with the 'first post - different look') to Pivot.Elsewhere, Tom Coates minimalises even more -- up front, in your face, lovely.

It's the season of giving! No it's not, but I'm feeling generous. No, I'm not, but Flickr just awarded me a couple of free Flickr Pro accounts to give away. Want one?

You probably have to be/know Irish/Ireland to appreciate this, but Mr
Hg sent me the best birthday card ever. I'll scan it when I get back
home tonight.It's a Daniel O'Donnell sings 'Happy birthday' card.(Here's an image of it, on Flickr)

Huh? What? Eachman who?

You are looking at the new prolific.org, now known as eachman.com (as in 'Each man kills the thing he loves'.) It isn't ideal yet (there's a lot of stuff just plain wrong behind the scene), the design is a reworking of someone else's template and WordPress is a little, well, let's say 'primitive' compared to MT, but I'm going to go with it for now. Maybe I'll switch back, maybe I won't.

I suppose this is my birthday present to myself. Turning 42 is different from turning 41 or 43. I've been looking forward to it with some trepidation, for some time now. Having had some health scares, though none too seriously, in recent months, didn't help. (And, do, I, like, the, comma, just, a, little, too, much?)

(Here's where I thought I'd do a 'read more' thingy, but there seems to be no obvious way to do that in WordPress.)

My mum died when she was 42 (in 1975... 30 years ago) and so reaching this age is somewhat of a milestone. I'm not sure what to think. Maybe I want some answers, but I'm not sure what the questions are. All I know is, I'm not half as grown up as she was at the time. At least I think I'm not, but how I remember her is not necessarily the way she really was.

Enough gloom. Time for a nice cup of tea and a hearty: 'happy birthday to me'.

Update 1: Trust Dreamhost to 'plan' downtime the day I move my site. (Had to move at least one of my sites away from Pair, since we're bursting at the seams there.)
Update 2: My laptop arrived this morning, and yes, Dutch OS. Grr.
Update 3: So, has anyone ever moved their WordPress site to Pivot?

I ordered a laptop from Dell yesterday. Two hours after I ordered, I was reading the specs again and realised I'd foolishly got the Dutch version of XP.

It annoys me no end that these sellers assume that since you're ordering through their Dutch site, you'll want Dutch software too. (There was no option to tick ´'UK')

So I rang customer service and a very nice gentleman (who preferred an English OS himself) traced the order and changed the details.

Tracking my order on the Dell site now, the specs still say the computer will have a Dutch OS.

Who wants to bet I'll get the wrong laptop?

(And yeah, I blame Hg for the order in the first place. Apart from the usual gadget envy, I probably wouldn't have seen Dell's offer if I hadn't had checked out his on the site.)

Movable Type has never worked well on prolific.org. Whether it is the 7000+ entries, or its long history of Blogger/MT exports and imports, it's just always been a sluggish installation. U2log.com runs on the same server (eite.pair.com), is almost as large and has few problems. I've run MT on other pair.com servers (peswar and wokkil) and they felt a lot faster. Maybe it's prolific.org's database that's not working properly. I'm not tech-savvy enough to figure that out.

I've been toying with Wordpress on another account and am impressed. Very easy installation (duh, one click install, a Dreamhost feature) and painless import. And that 'no rebuilding' thing is a cracker. I don't think I'd run a site like U2log.com on it, but for a personal blog it should do.

Switch? Quite possibly. Maybe even on a new domain. After 5 years I am finally weary of being prolific.

"A permanent contract? My god, Prol, how bourgeois you've become!", said the actor at the party.

Bour-bloody-geois yourself, Mr Double-Income-Two-Kids House-In-Swanky-Part-Of-Town.

Deborah Curtis on her late husband Ian:

"I saw a review on Amazon once, somebody had written, 'She doesn't understand her subject'. And I thought, 'Well, surely that's the point?'"

Maria McKee, on the release of her new album Peddlin' Dreams (which is lovely, by the way):

"In the past I haven't been the most prolific artist," she admits. "It's taken me as much as six years to go from one album to the next. I've had to sit with songs and ideas a long time until I've felt satisfied with them. I want to make better use of my talent now. If I'm honest with my songs, I can put albums out more frequently; that's become important to me because of how incredible my fans have been and how important it is for me to connect with them as often as I can."

Oh Maria, if you can imprint some of this on your good friend...

Husband Jim on his role as producer:
"With this album, I wanted a more open, almost stark recording. It's all about emotion in the vocal. Where the voice cracks and reveals something that's almost beyond what the artist intends."

Getting married to the love of your life, thirty years after you first met, that's the real fairytale, innit?

Since my bedroom has no heating, I slept in the front room last night. It was -20 in some parts of the country and apparently the coldest March night ever measured. Traffic on the roads and rails is hindered by ice and fog. I'm working from home today. There's only one landing strip available at Schiphol Airport. I'm worried about my flight to Dublin this evening.

Update: Aer Lingus is optimistic. But then they're Irish.

Like, wow, you can record voice on your iPod and use it for interviews. If you buy an iTalk voice recorder, that is. Big fucking deal. I can just picture Jobs' faithful audience clapping like seals for this 'amazing' new feature.

Hello. Why can't I just stick the (better) microphones I already own in the machine? Superior, feature rich players like the iRiver H-series can do just that. Apple, if you want me to buy your gear, make it do what it should be able to do. It takes a lot more than pretty design to win over this (power) user. I'm not a big fan of the white look anyway. And I really don't need games on it. Seriously. I'll take serious features over games, any day.

Oh well, at least those Photo iPods (359 €'s not a bad price, actually) will soon (March, software update) be able to connect directly to digital cameras. Something they should have been able to do from the start if you ask me.

Mine's Lynette.

I'm asking, because 'everybody' hates Lynette, especially after the lastest episode. Bree seems 'everybody's favourite. She comes second with me. (Susan, Gabrielle, Edie are next.)

People hate Lynette mainly because she can't cope with / doesn't like her kids and regrets having had to give up her career in favour of motherhood. Same reason why I think she's fabulous. She's the only person on the show who is 'real'. If I were a housewife, and desperate, I'd be Lynette and I'd be putting those horrible boys up for adoption. So there.

Sometimes I feel like a mother, a secretary, a P.A., a roadie, an unqualified Apple Mac helpdesk, a promotor, designer, publicist, agony aunt, career advisor, friend, doormat and confidante.

All in a day's work.

Utrechtsestraat, Saturday afternoon. I'm in search of pork belly but the luxury butcher is all out of pig.

'We had to send it back, it wasn't right.'

Poor piggie. Murdered to death and then discarded.

I try my luck at the butcher on the other side of the road. Inside, it's like going back to the very early 70s. Knorr products on the shelves, the packaging bleached by the sun, sparse cuts of pale meat on show. A little dusty. Very open air museum. This is the Holland you want to forget.

The butcher looks more like a penny-saving grocer. Protestant and painfully repressed. One manky eye looks sideways, while the other stares straight ahead. He helps another client, taking his time. I'm in no hurry, so I wait while he makes their cut meat sandwiches. Finally, they're done.

"Do you have any pork belly?" I ask.

"I do," he says and makes for the storage room, then returns. "You're going to make babi pangang, aren't you?"

Balls. He's cut the skin off. I'm not making the chinese roast pork dish he's referring too, but I do need the meat uncut for my epaisse tranche de lard dans son jus. Should I slap his wrist for assuming an Asian-looking woman must be cooking Chinese food?

"I've cut the skin off, you see."

I see.

"I cut the skin off the minute I get it in, before I store it," he says in a way that there's no mistaking... cutting the skin off is. the. right. thing. to do.

Oh.

"You have a better chance finding some at the Albert Cuyp market. The butchers there..." he sniffs, "I call them dirty butchers."

I smile thinly and thank him. He's sorry I had to wait so long. I'm sorry I ever met him.