OMG I’m in love with Todd Rundgren’s wife, OF ALL PEOPLE. Her blog is fucking wonderful. She’s a riot. She’s a soft touch. She’s, like, inspiring and shit!

Honestly, I have understood quite clearly for years that Todd is Godd – but I didn’t know shit about his personal life. Didn’t even know if he was married or had kids or what. (I just buy the albums, ma’am.) I didn’t even know that Liv Tyler though he was her dad until she was like 13, until yesterday when I read it on an album review.

So how’d I find Todd’s wife’s adorable blog? Well, it’s like this. I was innocently trolling over at forum.trconnection.com to see what there was to see (there are ways to buy tickets before they’re fully on sale, and I intend to learn them). At some point I clicked a link that took me to a page where I clicked a link and somehow I ended up at http://www.michelerundgren.com.

And, while looking at a stacked blonde upside down in a chair, I thought, “Holy shit, Todd, you’re married to a woman half your fucking age! Eewh! Gross!”

But then I looked at her still photos and discovered she’s of a Proper Decade, and I decided I approved after all. Whatever.

But then I started reading her blog.

She’s fucking fantastic! She’s humble, smart, funny, busy, and cleans her own toilets. She’s a grandma and she’s in a band! She loves her children, and her FOUR DOGS bring dead things into their house!!! Best of all, she never refers to her husband by his name, but always with some descriptive personality, like ‘Alan Greenspan’ (when talking about money) or ‘Liberace’ (when trying to get him to take her on tour) so that her sentences read “…blah blah blah MY HUSBAND, ALAN GREENSPAN, blah blah blah” and it’s just funny as SHIT. (I think I might adopt it myself, except I’d always end up referring to Brett as “that sidekick guy from Braveheart,” which might possibly cease to be funny… after about TEN YEARS.)

Talking about trying to take their youngest out to a movie, she says, “We try to regain our cool status by reminding him that Team America is NC-17 and that he can’t see it without us. Even after we tell him that there is naked puppet sex in it, he still doesn’t want to hang with us… The little bastard! Oh, I forgot, we got married so he’s not a bastard anymore.”

Hah!

She’s also totally zoned in on the idea that women make or break men. A loving woman helps create and nurture a loving man. A good woman raises good sons. I dig that. While she doesn’t seem to go as far as I do and say that bad women are what fucked up half of today’s men, I’m cool with that because very few do.

AND she’s from Oregon! How cool is that?!
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This ad makes it sound like an iPod is a hideous portable music solution, but you *never* own the tracks you get through Napster – their licensing is even more hideously restrictive than the solution Apple’s iTunes store came up with.

As long as you pay the monthly fee, sure sure you can carry around all the music you want. But the day you cancel, well… Napster said it themselves in their own small print: “It is necessary to maintain a Napster subscription in order to continue access to songs downloaded through the Napster service.” (Emphasis mine.)

Don’t believe this marketing crap, folks. Do the research. And don’t forget to go buy yourself a delicious little iPod.

THE ID3-Tag-Editor for MP3s, ID3-TagIT. Fix all those orphaned MP3s on your HDD.

Yesterday I got my Sumajin Smartwrap earphone cord manager and matching Funky earphone pads all the way from Singapore.

I love ’em. They’re adorable. The earphone pads are actually of better quality than the ones that came with my Apple earphones, and the Smartwrap is soft and flexible and I don’t think it will do any damage to the cord.

These products would work equally well for a cellphone headset, btw. Adorable, colorful, functional. Worth the time to order yourself a few sets!

On the old server, comments spam was a nightmare. I had MT-Blacklist installed, but it ran pretty slow and it took forever to remove comments spam if I didn’t do it every couple of days or so. Now I can go a long time without even getting any comments spam.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Move to a server with MySQL.
2. Install MT-Blacklist.
3. Install MTCloseComments and set it to automatically close comments on all posts older than 14 days.

Voil?! Spam-free blogging heaven! By the time the damn bots find your pages, they’re already closed for comments. And the best part is you didn’t even have to do it by hand!

I’m so happy.

I like wine.

I enjoy good wines, wines that cost more than four dollars a bottle. I like an expensive, musty, ashy-tasting cabernet as much as the next girl.

But I drink bottom-shelf crap. Yesterday I bought a bottle of the tackiest “wine” ever: Arbor Mist Blackberry Merlot. And I loved it.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do come from a long line of indentured servants! Snort!

Try as I might, I can’t make Iowa Chicks Knitting work. It needs a new home. (It’s still stuck back on the old server that killed Goblinbox.) So I broke down and added a Donate button; hopefully the girls will come through and I’ll be able to move I.C.K. to a new, stable home.

This is what happened.

An event occurred on enterprise.lisco.com and it broke my MT installation and my DBM database.

Any entry that was rebuilt lost it’s comments. Other comments were lost at random. All of the content for Iowa Chicks Knitting was destroyed; I suspect a user rebuilt the database out of ignorance.

I tried to save I.C.K. by moving it. I’d already registered iowachicksknitting.com and it was ready to go with its own IP on the same server. I installed MT under iowachicksknitting.com and made a few entries and comments. It worked just fine.

I backed up what I could salvage from goblinbox.com.

MT-comments.cgi went absolutely nuts and was using 91.5% of the server’s CPU. I deleted mt-comments.cgi from the offending site: goblinbox.com.

The MT installation over at iowachicksknitting.com quit working, and hasn’t worked since even though I’ve reinstalled it from scratch.

I moved goblinbox.com to some space Keef hooked me up with. I installed MT and iB. Then I had Buzz and Keef finish up the DNS.

The loss of the temp IP I’d used to connect to the new server fucked up MT yet again, so I had to uninstall and reinstall MT for the fifth time in less than a week.

I got so pissed off I downloaded and installed WordPress, but although it’s pretty cute it will let you fatally murder it by changing a setting in the Options, so it’s hardly stable. I went back to massaging MT again.

And it’s working now. I imported what I’d managed to save from the old server. Today I’ve been deleting duplicate imports and adding categories to comments.

Rants 7 is up and running and stable, and even though I imported Rants 6 into it with no errors I don’t know where that data is.

I made some art today and massaged badly-imported data more. In the final analysis, I’ve installed MT six times total. I’ve upgraded, backed up, installed, and imported Ikonboard. I’ve backed up and imported MT entries. I’ve moved tons and tons and tons of files and images. And my site is still full of broken links and missing images, and iowachicksknitting.com is still totally non-functional.

Eventually, goblinbox will again be functional and beautiful, and iowachicksknitting.com will also be up and running. I’ve learned that I am that attached to my site, and I definitely need to be makin’ decent backups, and that if you don’t clean up your server Murphy will damn well do it for you.

I just had the most remarkable cup of coffee:

I have a stove-top espresso maker, and in its filter basket I placed some finely ground Starbucks dark roast and an equal amount of this amazing South Indian coffee called Bhoomi that I bought at an Amma auction of a dollar. (It’s been living in my freezer in a zip-loc baggie for months.)

As the expresso was brewing, I heated a cup of Radiance Dairy whole milk with a modest amount of sugar and a few cardamom seeds.

I added the brewed espresso to the milk and frothed it with a wire whip, then poured it into a cup.

OMG, people. Caffienated delight, I’m telling you!
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