Category Archives: Work

Junk mail for a laptop?

If you go here and sign up to be inundated with spam and print ads and agree to, say, join BMG and buy some Frontline from some competing-with-PetMeds.com-website, they’ll send you a Sony Vaio. And/or they’ll send you things like DVD players and coffee makers to “test” and keep.

I’m so on the verge of trying it – I really want a laptop.

And it’s not like I don’t already get six pounds of junk mail every week… and THANK GOD. We use it for kindling in the winter.

The question is: is $1200 worth of laptop reasonable compensation for my name, email, and shipping address? What’s my marketing information REALLY worth?

ammaiowa.org

My latest webmistress gig is now up and running:

ammaiowa.org

I used MT in a new way – more as a layout management app than a content management app… I took out a lot of MT’s built-in stuff. It seems to have worked out pretty well.

Driveway: FIXED

Brett rented a tractor this weekend and fixed the driveway. Turns out the culvert itself was totally fine; it was just that Nature had decided not to use it and instead had made a new path under the driveway… a much lower path, which is why the pond’s been so low for the past two years. Brett filled the hole in and hopefully the pond level will be higher after we get more rain.

He also graded most of the driveway, and did a bunch of earthwork in front of the porch. (In this area, basically.) He’s hoping to get that picnic table finished this summer. I am so excited!

I’m glad the driveway fix only required some of Mr. Brett’s time, and not thousands of dollars. Whew. And the whole driveway looks great now, and verges on being smooth!

(Yes, I took pictures. But they’re still on my camera. I’M BAD. I KNOW.)

My lawyer’s sent off a letter to the hospital’s lawyers, telling them what I’ve done to ‘hide’ the offending blog entry. I hope it satisfies them; I can’t express how pissed off I’ll be if they decide they want to go to court to get the whole entry removed. It’s so utterly out of line to demand I remove a post simply because they don’t like it. And no, of course they didn’t literally try to kill me, but it’s a diary post – people know the title isn’t literal.

I tell you three times I tell you three times I tell you three times: this is so fucking stupid. At first I was amused that my site was generating, you know, craziness, but now that I’m actually paying someone to write letters it’s not quite so funny any more. They’re being bullies, and it aggravates me.

Saturday night I went on my first blind date. I’d never been on one personally, so I sort of vicariously lived one through Erin and Dave… I have a friend from work who’s looking for a nice guy, and Brett’s friend Dave’s been looking for a nice girl forever, so we hooked them up.

We joined them for pizza at Torino’s. Dave was tense, Erin was nervous, but I had a great time! After pizza we walked up to that new bar, Deja Vu. (Boy was THAT a strange place.) After a couple of drinks there, we went to the bowling alley and played pool, and after that Brett and I went home. I think Erin dropped Dave off at his car and went home herself; I have no idea yet if they liked each other or not. Dave told Brett he’d had a good time, but I haven’t talked to Erin yet.

Conclusion: blind dates are fun, but only if you’re the double-date part. Snort!

Hit Counter

Today I re-installed LevelTen Hit Counter. I’d run this app on the site before, but when it broke I’d never bothered to fix it.

I love this stat tracker – it’s robust, free, and easy to install. The graphic you have to run is a little annoying, but free is free.

The downside is that I can’t view the stats in Firefox, and have to boot an instance of Internet Exploder if I want to view my stats. Hopefully this will be resolved in later versions of Firefox.

This site consists of several hundred pages; using MT is so trick! I had to paste the L10 counter code eight times and then rebuild the site – that’s it! And the counter code is now on every single page! How cool is that!

MT's 'nofollow' Plugin

Today I finally got around to installing the ‘nofollow’ plugin on all the sites I administer that are running MT: goblinbox.com, iowachicksknitting.com, amma-fairfield.org, and edensharvest.net. This means that I have done my part in making comments-spam less lucrative. Now all those comments won’t increase search engine standings! TAKE THAT, YOU RAT BASTARDS.

Gallery Is Grumpy

Gallery is pissing me off. There’s only so much you can do to the layout using CSS – some of the stuff’s done with HTML and I can’t figure out how to edit it. There aren’t any obvious templates in the app’s files, and all I can find are fairly gay skins that I don’t like.

But it does work well, I have to give it that. Gallery does rock in terms of functionality. I’ll just have to find some layout hacks.