preraphaelitepunk.com

The newest widget I’m experimenting with is TagCloud, which (if you’re actually here rather than reading this post on an aggregator) you’ll find in the sidebar, down a bit, just above the Flickr banner. It’s supposed to create a cloud of keywords used in posts, which sounds rather interesting, but as I write this it’s still just saying “This cloud currently has no data. If you have just added new feeds, please allow several minutes for this cloud to be updated.” It’s been saying that for the last 10 minutes, so I’m beginning to lose hope that it’ll ever be updated. Oh well. I’ll give it a few days, I suppose.

RSS Readers. Despite its flaws, Bloglines continues to be my favorite aggregator. Being able to mark items as unread and hold them as long as you need to, and keeping everything organized by its source, more than make up for its occasional two- to three-day lags. Pluck’s plugin tool seems to have a grudge against RSS2 feeds and completely ignores them; their Web-based reader may be better, but it seems you’re only allowed one account per e-mail address and I can’t find the way to switch from plugin to Web-based. Feh. Kinja was highlighted a while ago on that source of all that is good and geeky, Lifehacker,* but personally I find its digest format to be distracting. Articles from different blogs should not touch; it leads to cross contamination. (Also, images don’t seem to come through on my feeds, which defeats much of the purpose.)

One thing I do dislike about Bloglines, though, it the repeated posts. Turning off the “treat updates as new” option helps, though it means that I miss out on any revisions or corrections. However, that’s really worth it for some of the worst offenders; Gizmodo* and Vegan Freaks,* in particular, are very bad about either repeatedly posting or making some invisible change without clearly marking it, so you wind up getting the same basic article up to 10 or 12 times. Maddening. It would be nice if Bloglines automatically compared updates to the previous versions, and provided a redlined update that clearly indicated which bits were revised. Oh well.

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*See blogroll for links.

For those of you who may not read Neil Gaiman’s fabulous journal,* I thought I’d pass along the fact that there are some lovely free TrueType fonts here. I snagged three of them: the Jane Austen, Xiparos Lombard, and Francisco Lucas Lana. They play nicely with OpenOffice, of course, and seem to be readable as well as just amazingly pretty.

You can never have too many pretty fonts. :)

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*Though you really should. Go read it now. Then go buy his books. All of them. Now.

I think I should create a graphic novel series called The Editorial Avenger: a mild-mannered editor pushed beyond her tolerance by sloppy writing, uncooperative authors, and the proliferating typos and rogue punctuation rampant in society. Her outfit would be black, of course, maybe with a nice cloak and some really cool boots, and her identity obscured by a mask in the shape of an ink smudge. Weapons would of course be red pens, blue pencils, razor-edged index cards, and, for those really formal fights, deadly fountain pens. For electronic crusades, she could use a formidable strikethrough font and vicious comment balloons. She could go after recalcitrant writers who copy things off the Web and submit them as their own work, people who don’t use spellcheck — or those who think Microsoft’s spellcheck is always right and absolutely perfect and thus accept changes without looking at them, the people who are responsible for the atrocities perpetrated on the Burger King sign at Toco Hills (really, a “vaule meal”? honestly!), and whoever is in charge of closed captioning television programs. People who don’t follow manuscript submission processes, or who fill out forms incorrectly or incompletely, would have the URLs for the pages with proper instructions tattooed on their foreheads in reverse, so they could read them in the mirror, using a lovely flowing Elvish-like script. People who don’t track changes as requested would be given really wicked paper cuts. Attempted plagiarists would be forced to watch as their ill-gotten manuscripts were fed into the shredder, and the remnants mercilessly recycled. Repeat offenders would live in fear of being dunked into her industrial-sized bottle of correcting fluid.

Wherever people are pluralizing improperly by using apostrophes, she would be there to whack them across the knuckles with a pica stick. Wherever people attempt to use quotation marks for emphasis, or use more than one exclamation point in a row, she would be there to break their keyboards into shards or confiscate their markers. Wherever people use random capitalization in a nonfacetious manner and are not imitating Age of Enlightenment-type writing, she would be there to pry the SHIFT key off their keyboards.

It would be a hit, really. Or at least cathartic. Well, for me.

In celebration of autumnal weather finally arriving, and in an attempt to get away from the madness that is the staff activities committee (particularly virulent this time of year), I actually took today off. I need to conserve my vacation days to some extent, but after doing a little math I realized that I did actually have a couple of days to spare, and any extra time available to recover from the weirdness that is Clutter Buster Day can only be good.*

My main project for today is clearing out my accumulated Lifehacker articles, which is quite a task: I had nearly 65 articles marked to keep new until I had time to deal with them. Slogging through the accumulation and bookmarking or otherwise implementing the ones that turned out to be of potential interest took several hours.

Some, of course, turned out to be more successful than others: so far, Pandora’s Internet radio seems possibly the most promising (you enter the name of an artist or song that you like, and it finds similar works that you can listen to and then rate; I always have trouble finding artists I like, so this is kind of cool), though after the first 10 hours you have to pay for the service. It’s not terribly expensive, though ($12 for three months, or $36 for a year), and might be something I’ll actually continue. They link to the songs on iTunes and Amazon, so you can download copies (it would be cool if they offered discounts on purchasing songs once you’ve paid for a subscription), and provide yea/nay/WTF responses to fine-tune your suggestions. You can e-mail stations to others, but I haven’t been able to find a way to export just your playlists, though; I’ll have to dig around more. So far, though, it’s been pretty decent, though variable: I entered “Loreena McKennitt” as my artist, and wound up getting some very interesting songs by Autour De Lucie, Mary Black, the Wailin’ Jennies, Secret Garden — none of whom I’d known previously. Searches for Dead Can Dance and Pet Shop Boys were also successful. Unfortunately, searches for Sisters of Mercy and Rasputina were dreadful, and London After Midnight wasn’t even recognized at all.

If nothing else, though, reading their descriptions of the musical qualities for each list is amusing. Apparently I like music with a lot of heavy vamping, whatever that might mean. o.O

Other notable goodies I finally got around to investigating are the screenshot utility Snippy, ReminderFox (FireFox-only reminder plugin), FavIcon (which may kick in sometime soon to make my URL icon a tiny version of my banner image — assuming I stuck the code in the header in the right CSS page, of course), and the unfortunately named reminder service Remember the Milk, which offers SMS reminders but I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to use.

Lifehacker backlog is now all cleared out. Happy now.

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*This year they spiced things up in the way only they can, by holding hourly contests to award company-logo goods to whoever brought a specific item to the committee member who requested it. I can only assume that someone on SAC has been watching too many episodes of “The Price Is Right.” By midafternoon, they had abandoned their plan of e-mailing contest announcements, and instead used the PA system, so that no one could escape their mandatory merriment. I mean, I know they’re trying to make things fun, but honestly, it just grates on me. I enjoy my job, I like what I do, and I just want to be left alone to do it without being pressured to participate in childish morale-building activities better suited to kindergarten classes than the office. True, their antics provide some amusement, though not really in the way they’d intended, and some people seem to enjoy the ::cough:: fun and games, so who am I to judge? I just wish they’d be quieter about it, and not bother the people who’d rather not participate. Obviously, subtlety is not their strong point.

I got my stuff from Lush! This was so exciting, I actually capered around my flat for a while chanting in a sing-song voice, “I got my stuff from Lu-ush! I got my stuff from Lu-ush!” Amazingly, it only took a week for the stuff to get here, despite the fact that I only shelled out for ground shipping (at nearly $12, that’s all I could stand) and the goodies had to come here from Vancouver.

It’s a wee little box indeed, but jammed with Lushy goodness. I got Angels on Bare Skin cleanser, Big shampoo, Rock Star soap, a Hot Milk? bubble bar, and a Creamy Candy bath melt. All vegan, of course. The only bad thing is resisting the urge to open everything immediately and use it all at once. Must ration myself.

Extravagant? Not really. Not cheap, but you’ve got to wash, so you might as well have fun doing it.

Survey Fun, and an Opportunity to Expand Our Knowledge. One of my mom’s colleagues is doing a survey on people’s attitudes toward religion and marriage, and particularly polygamy. If you’d be interested in taking part, or you think someone you know might be interested, the survey is here. The professor doing the survey, Michael Nielsen, would like to get responses from as wide a selection of the population as possible, so it doesn’t really matter whether you feel strongly for or against any of the issues, or are just sort of “meh.” It’s a survey, and surveys are fun. Click and be counted!

Needless to say, the questionnaire is anonymous and all that. If you’d like to know a little bit more about Dr. Nielsen before committing, his blog is here.

[brrrrrring]

Thank you for calling Stultifying Credit. If you’re bored enough, you’ll buy anything. Please enter the account number for the card you wish to activate.

[beep beep beep beep beep]

To verify your identity, please enter the first three letters of your mother’s maiden name, using the keypad on your phone.

[beep beep beep]

Please enter your PIN number.

“Okay, first, that’s redundant: it’s ‘personal identification number,’ so the second ‘number’ is pointless and stupid, much like you, you stupid automated answering service. Secondly, I don’t have a PIN. Don’t want one, don’t have one.”

Please enter your PIN number.

“Oh, whatever. I’ll just make something up.” [beep beep beep beep]

For additional security, please enter the President’s niece’s second cousin’s dog’s blood type, using the keypad on your phone.

“Um . . .” [beep beep?]

Just so we can be sure it is really you, please play the first three bars of “The Wells Fargo Wagon Is a-Comin’ Down the Street” using the keypad on your phone.

“What the hell?”

Close enough. Your card will be activated in just a moment. In the meantime, please listen to this important announcement from Stultifying Credit. Identity theft is bad. I mean, really bad. No, seriously — it happened to this guy my brother knows, and he’s still trying to sort out the whole mess. The good news is that Stultifying Credit is willing to offer you their special Secret Identity program, which will try to find a pattern in your purchases and will call you every time something looks a little weird, like if you live in Atlanta and suddenly there’s a charge on your card from London, because no one ever shops internationally through the Internet or travels or anything; or if you always buy books and clothes and suddenly there’s this charge for something weird like food, because no one ever buys gifts for other people that you’d never want for yourself and everyone buys exactly what they always have in the past. Anyway, it’s free for the first two months and you can cancel with no obligation, but you’ll forget to do that so we’ll slap you with a service charge of six bucks a month for the rest of your natural life, and probably for your descendants’ lives as well because they won’t know how to cancel the service, either.

Press 1 if you would like to sign up for this very important protection for your account. Press 2 if you are foolish enough to reject this generous offer.

“Two. Definitely two. Now shut up.” [beep]

You have foolishly chosen to reject this important credit protection offer. On your own head be it.

If you would like to reward yourself with this exciting new program, press 1. If you have no culture or taste, and are probably a Communist, press 2.

“Oh, Christly Christ. Just activate my card, will you?” [beep]

You have chosen to reject our generous offer to reward you for running up huge debts quickly. You really are a Communist, aren’t you?

Stultifying Credit would like to offer you the opportunity to participate in an exciting death protection program. In the event of your death, your credit rating will still be protected — but only if you enroll today in our Afterlife Protection Program.

“Shut up.”

All major afterlifes are covered. Rest in peace assured that you can afford that split-level ranch on the seaside in Valhalla; if you have Stultifying Credit’s Afterlife Protection Program, you won’t have to worry.

“No, seriously, shut up. This is ridiculous.”

Looking for the very latest in shroudwear? You can afford it, even in Limbo’s trendiest boutiques. With our Afterlife Protection Program, there are no preset spending limits, which means that you can take the Almighty of your choice out to dinner at the swankiest bistro, without having to worry that your card will be rejected. (Offer not valid in case of eternal damnation, agnosticism, or bodily assumption into the heavens.)

Press 1 if you would like to guarantee your good credit now and in the hereafter. Press 2 if you are a godless heathen.

“I cannot fricking believe this.” [beep]

Thank you. Your card has been activated, you uncultured commie pinko godless heathen. Have a nice day.

*** ***

Seriously, activating my new card took over seven minutes. Seven. I had to listen to three separate, long-winded spiels about promotions that all but promised rains of toads and blood if you declined to participate. Absolutely maddening.