As a child, I remember the yearly ritual of my stepmother re-writing, longhand, several of the pages in the family address book. She’d get a blank page from the back and copy any page that was less than flawless, keeping all names in alphabetical order (leaving one opening per two-page spread for new additions or corrections). She’d start at the beginning of November so that everything would be…
Recently, on a facebook post where I was whinging about my allergy to coconut and specifically not asking for advice (which, FB being FB, I managed to get a lot of anyway), I got a comment that contained the following text. … “allergy” is a highly specific type of immune reaction that releases histamine. Most people who claim to be “allergic” to everything under the sun have either aversions,…
My family were always hugely into visiting mountains: hiking, skiing, and so on. We spent a good chunk of our weekends in the mountains. Catch is, at age 11, I had sudden onset altitude sickness. I would sometimes throw up. I always felt nauseated when we got above about 4,000 feet. I gasped for air before other people did. In physical education class in ninth grade, we had to do a six-minute run…
A few weeks ago, Rick asked something of Google Bard: Hey, Bard, what can you tell me about Deirdre Saoirse Moen? Of all the software companies in the world, it’s possible that Google knows more about me than almost any other company in the world, save Apple. So you’d expect, given that, that the results would be reasonably accurate, right? Wrong.
When I migrated my site, one of the things I very carefully generated—and forgot to put in the right place—were the redirects. Before, I’d used the WordPress common default of year-month-day-title, which, for a blog that’s been as inactive as this one has been, is frankly hilarious.
Website migration. Some years ago, WordPress started changing its format to their GUI editor, which I hated. And then I discovered that WordPress claimed to store Markdown (plain text) files, but actually they were absolutely not even remotely plain Markdown. Because of these issues, I didn’t want to add to an already large blog problem by making it bigger. So I stopped blogging altogether.
Coronavirus playlist of songs from my Apple Music library that are among my favorites, in no particular order except for the first song. I love the social distancing and, of course, the two goofballs (Ringo Starr and Harry Nilsson) in the video.
In 2014, I signed up as an artist with Zazzle. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve never really put in a lot of elbow grease onto that site as I vastly prefer Redbubble and Society6. One of Zazzle’s terms is that they won’t pay royalties if the amount’s under $50. New rule: if a company accepts orders for smaller than they will pay in royalties, they are looking to make bank off the artists, not their…
I know a lot of you know I love my volcanoes, though I don’t love the human trauma they cause. Lately, I’ve been watching the developments in Fissure 8, which first took over half of Leilani Estates and then pressed onward to the sea, taking out several hundred more homes in the process.
Ellora’s Cave has rebranded as EC for Books, so I’ll be using that in my headers from now on. I will keep the header graphic as it was, though. I’m torn about the rebranding for two reasons: often, a rebranding for a troubled company signals a new direction that only hastens its demise, especially in the tech world. On the flipside, the Ellora Caves are a sacred site in India, and it would be nice…