I moved more stuff today: my brother’s old band’s site, 2012, is now here on the new server. I moved an old WAV file of me singing. I moved some more gallery stuff. I cleaned up a few broken links.
It’ll take awhile before goblinbox.com is fully functional again, but it’s getting closer all the time.
Got another $10 donation for iowachicksknitting.com today, which makes a total so far of $70. I’ll be signing up for hosting tomorrow and beginning to get that little venture back up off the ground. I’ll probably end up paying for the fucking hosting myself in future years, but it’s a cheaper habit than cocaine so who am I to bitch?
I got a box from Amazon.com! FOUR CDS! (Actually, the Mule album had 4 CDs in it, so it was actually seven new CDs!) Boy am I thrilled! I’ve already fed two albums to my iPod; hopefully I’ll have the restraint to drive home with only one earphone in my head, so I can at least hear if a cop tries to pull me over. Snort! I can’t express how very horny I am to get the FM transmitter for the iPod so I can listen to iPodage thru the Jeep stereo.
Speaking of iPod love, I’m going to be interviewed for a lifestyles piece on Iowans and their iPods in the Des Moines Register. How cute is that? I hope I remember to actually read the article this time.
If you read dooce.com, you probably read the Times article about ‘mommy blogs’ (the phenom of meticulously documenting the perils of parenthood on the Internet) in which she was interviewed.
There are thousands upon thousands of blogs on the web, and I can tell you that most of them (including this one) aren’t worth reading. But in spite of the fact that it’s considered cosmopolitan to believe that everyone (but you and the ten people you dig best) is an idiot, the fact is that I have found a lot of amusement, reassurance, enjoyment, and yea, even solace in many of the blog entries I’ve googled over the past few years.
If you’re going through something, you can damn well bet there’s someone else out there who has got it worse. Depression? Anxiety? Broken heart? Morbidly obese? Pissed off at your husband? Someone out there is battling your demon along with you, and every once in awhile they’re a lot funnier at it than you are.
But the Times article made mommy blogging sound so… petty. So horridly egocentric. So awful. While there was a nod toward the idea that parenting is not one moment of pure joy strung on a string after another, the underlying mood of the article was that mommy blogging is nothing but a symptom of vanity, self-centeredness, and exhibitionism.
The Times article was so negatively blase about human expression that it made me feel… sour. About blogging.
I’ve been doing this for several years, myself. Since before I even knew people were developing software for it. Since I did it in HTML every day. I started at liscoplus.com/mush (defunct) and eventually bought goblinbox.com, and I’m now on my fifth server. I blog because I like to, because people read it, and because I can. (And also to use the web skills I’d taught myself, to make the whole effort of doing that worth the time it took.) I blog because I, like every other human being in the world, want to be heard. I want a chance to say what I have to say. I want to express myself in a medium that doesn’t require me to respond to input as I go.
I want a fucking hobby.
I like that my mother-in-law lurks on my site, and vicariously keeps an eye on her son and his wife. I like having friends drop goblinboxisms into their conversations at bowling alleys and restaurants. I like seeing where my traffic comes from every morning.
Most of the time, my life isn’t blog-worthy. It isn’t interesting, it isn’t intense, and it’s not even particularly amusing to anyone who isn’t me or a member of my clique. But sometimes, the shit does hit the fan, and I do have something worthy of expression. I’m not a professional writer, but I do know that when I get comments from people saying my post has made them cry, I know my expression of the human condition wasn’t fluff.
Most of life is fluff, if you’re lucky, oh New York Times writer. Most of life is nothing but tedious, no-one-cares-but-me details. Maybe putting that stuff on the web is tacky, but if ya don’t like it, don’t read it. And better yet, don’t write condescending articles about it.
I take the point that those heavily-blogged-about kids are gonna grow up, google themselves, and promply puke their guts out. But hell – wouldn’t you rather raise children in a society so rich that you can afford a computer, monitor, keyboard, mouse, electricity, DSL, and enough leisure time to sit down and keep a running journal, and run the risk of (*gasp!*) freakin’ your kid out when s/he reads about the first time they pooped on grandpa’s lap… versus living in a world where “being freaked out” by something you read on the Internet is a LUXURY?!
Fuck it. If I didn’t keep my journal on a web server, I probably wouldn’t keep one at all. I think I’m over my reaction to the insipid nature of blogging even when your life isn’t ‘interesting enough’.
…stuck up Times writer, anyway…
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!
I’ve got 4 new CDs coming from Amazon.com, and an FM transmitter coming from Apple. Soon I’ll be feeding my iPod, and shortly after that I’ll be feeding my iPod to my car stereo. I will be so very rockin’ out during my commutes!
Iowa radio, if you’re not aware, is DISMAL. I never listen to Iowa radio stations any more. I AM SO SICK OF CLASSIC ROCK, OH. MY. GOD. Generally, I listen to NPR. When that gets to be too damned much (Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq Iraq IRAQ), I either drive in silence or maybe listen to KHOE (if they’re not playing something completely horrible – I like a little Gandharva Ved every now and again; it is soothing). Sometimes I try a tape, but tapes are sketchy at best. You don’t know if they’re even gonna play, it’s neigh on impossible to drive and locate a specific song at the same time, there’s that horrible dead space at the end of one side, and I don’t want to listen to any of the tapes I have anyway!
I mean, while I do have about 25 cassettes in the console of the Jeep, Brett chose the vast majority of them at various truck stops. While I do dig Johnny Cash, you can only listen to At San Quentin SO MANY TIMES. In my opinion.
Obviously I have a cassette player in the Jeep, not a CD player. I never bothered to install a CD player because many if not most of my CDs are either lost, or in the wrong case (which is pretty much the same as “lost” when you’ve got a couple thousand CD cases – and WHERE IN THE HELL is disc 1 of Back To The Bars already?!??!!), or scratched all to shit from being in Brett’s posession for far too long. He keeps a multitude of CDs in one of those book-style zippered cases in his truck, but his life is unimaginably dusty and dirty. All the CDs in that case are basically frosted, they’re so completely scratched.
But the iPod, oh, the iPod. It’s filling up so nicely. I’m still obsessed with Liars, and I’ve been collecting classic R&B standards with extreme prejudice (Does It Go Round In Circles! It’s Your Thing! Marvin Gaye! The Spinners!), and I’ve got myself a nice disco section, including neo-disco like Jamiroquai, which I dig, and of course all the Earth, Wind, and Fire I can get my hands on (I LITERALLY WORSHIP THE TOWER OF POWER HORN LINE, people. THE LENNY PICKET COCAINE SOLO on Knock Yourself out from Live & In Living Color. Circular fucking breathing! Need I say more?). I’ve even started collecting bootleg MP3s off of the Internet, because while most of them sound pretty shitty, it’s still pretty cool to have them.
I’ve been so non-music for so long that I’m really over-geeking now that I have my own private little universe to fill. The iPod is so trick! I love that I don’t have to take other people’s tastes into consideration; I can totally cheese out to some disco while doing the dishes and no one’s the wiser. I can listen to shit whenever I want, and Brett can still have the TV. I’d probably prefer tunes to TV most of the time, if I had my druthers, but he’s always got control of the TV and by proxy the entertainment center. And if we were spinning a CD rather than watching telly, it would probably NOT be Todd, or disco, or jazz, or funk, or swing, or classical, or baroque, or fusion, or an audio book. It would be, 99.9% of the time, blues. And you know how I feel about the blues.
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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.
Does anybody have any desire to go see Todd Rundgren and Joe Jackson in 2005 at any of these places?
I haven’t seen Todd in forever and I really doubt my husband would be interested enough to travel all the way to Ohio or Illinois or any of the other rather far Midwestern dates! SOMEONE GO WITH ME, GODDAMMIT!
Guess who’s goin’ to see Gov’t Mule at The Blue Note in Columbia, MO on February 17th?
Me! And my beloved redhead, of course. I just bought us tix and reserved a cheap-ass motel online.
Yay! It’s a trip! A trip to… well, a trip to Missouri, *gag*, but still! To see Government Mule! (I love their cover of Cortez The Killer. Other than that I think they’re solidly adequate. But it’s always fun to go do something!) A good jam band in a small venue! Whee!
Brett and I don’t agree on much of anything, really, especially musical – the man can listen to 30 year old British “blues” until my fucking HEAD falls off – but we do agree that Mule’s a band we’ll both go see and we emphatically prefer small venues to massive ones. Ah, marital bliss!
Today I ordered a little iTrip FM transmitter for my iPod, so I can listen to it while driving the Jeep.
Like a dork, I bought it from the Apple Store, then later I noticed the self-same item at Amazon.com is a whole dollar cheaper, and more likely to ship sooner.
Doh!
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!
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Instagram has become unusable crap, so please click the icon below to see my latest pics.
4 random books from my Library!
