Sillybean

June 30, 2008

Buy n Large

Buy n Large — a link for people who have seen WALL-E

June 28, 2008

Snow Leopard cannot get here fast enough

As if the hosting disaster weren’t bad enough, my laptop is increasingly unstable. For months, it’s been refusing to shut all the way down, failing on Time Machine backups, and generally being flaky. Today it’s suddenly much worse. It has stopped recognizing my USB hub, and now Numbers and Excel are both crashing on startup. (I CAN’T HAZ SPREDSHEET.)

Also crashing on startup? SuperDuper, which I need to make a good backup since Time Machine isn’t working. And I need at least one good backup before I can wipe this thing and reinstall from scratch, which appears to be needed. I’ve tried repairing the disk and permissions, archive & installing… nothing’s working.

I want to curl up and cry. Because it’s not like this happened in the middle of a big freelance job or anything.

My machines were always so reliable before Leopard…

June 27, 2008

Hobbling

So my host had a rather catastrophic disk failure on Wednesday. After much thrashing around, they’ve restored us using an old file backup. The databases are fine (otherwise you wouldn’t be seeing this), but files and email were restored from May 15. They might be able to recover the rest, but they might not.

For this site, that means not much lost — some of our trip photos, and the Utilikilt one, but I can restore those when I get some spare time. More troubling is the fact that if you’ve emailed me since May 15, I no longer have a copy. (Update: lost mail recovered.) And if it was in the last 48 hours, I didn’t see it at all. (Update: this mail still lost.)

Most of the other sites I host are fine. The less-used ones hadn’t been touched since before the backup, and are fine apart from some possibly lost email.

Seekrit Project #1… well, this is a setback.

My online writing group is inexplicably dead in the water, even though it should be running with just the recent file attachments missing. That one gets priority.

June 23, 2008

Text Prefs

Text Prefs — a UK design firm is conducting a survey on web users’ text preferences. Tell them how you like it! They promise to publish the results when they’re done.

June 19, 2008

June 17, 2008

Status

Major work project #1: 90% done.
Major work project #2: ... yeah, I should get started on that.

Seekrit project #1: 99% done. Waiting on other people1 and, predictably, a bugfix for IE6.
Seekrit project #2: 80% done.
Seekrit project #3: at best 5% done, but got a jump start this week.

Steph: 100% tired.

1 While I’m waiting on others, if you have PHP on your web server and would like to beta test a little something — it won’t take long — leave a comment and I’ll email you the details.

June 16, 2008

Fizzy Geography

Fizzy Geography — should your character call it “soda,” “pop,” “Coke,” or something else? Depends which county they live in (or came from).

June 15, 2008

iPhone 3G’s True Price Compared

If you’re thinking of getting a new iPhone, this price comparison might be useful.

June 13, 2008

In the Garden of Iden

This week’s free Tor ebook is In the Garden of Iden, by Kage Baker. I love this book. If you haven’t read the Company series, here’s your opportunity for a free sample. Tor’s wallpapers this week are pretty great, too.

June 12, 2008

The Sock Obama

The Sock Obama — 100% pure hand-knitted offensiveness! And in breaking news elsewhere, Fox News is staffed entirely by racist morons. Oh, wait, we knew that.

June 10, 2008

June 9, 2008

Kucinich introducing articles of impeachment

Kucinich introducing articles of impeachment — he’s got 35 of ‘em, and he’s reading them all. Iraq, Iran, Valerie Plame, the attorney firings — it’s all there. I don’t think this is going to fly, but I love Kucinich to pieces for doing it. (Care to write your rep?)

June 7, 2008

Versions

Versions — Subversion client for Macs. I love it.

'round here

Writing & Publishing 101

Paged Media: Web Design for Authors

elsewhere

Talking Points Caribou Barbie — rape kit sold separately.

Comment on this

Being the Book Lady — this made my day.

Comment on this

A fanfic writer goes to Clarion. “...all the sandcastle skills you learned over in Sandbox Someone Else’s Canon are a lot harder to use when you’re not given sand to start with.” Great post.

Comment on this

Tina Fey and Sarah Palin Side by Side on CNN. “That was the first time I’ve ever heard the parody on SNL actually use exactly what was said…”

Comment on this

The Texas voter registration deadline is October 6. See if you’re registered. If not, find your county registrar to fix it.

Comment on this

Have you created your 5 Second Test? — a nifty little test for web designers.

Comment on this

Aaron Sorkin Conjures a Meeting of Obama and Bartlet — How much do I love Maureen Dowd right now? LOTS and LOTS.

Comment on this

Download ‘Boojum,’ by Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette — in honor of Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Comment on this

TwitterKeys — “TwitterKeys is a browser bookmarket that pulls up expressive characters for easy copy & paste of all those crazy unicode symbols that people love to include in their emails and blog posts.” Very handy. See also: ⌘C ⌘V Character.

Comment on this

The great Before & After Magazine talks about designing business cards for arts and crafts sales, including tips on photographing the items.

Comment on this

If you have not yet seen Firefly (infidel!), it’s now streaming for free on IMDB, via Hulu. The episodes are out of order, though, so you might want to refer to the Firefly wiki’s episode list rather than IMDB or TV.com, both of which list the massively incorrect original airing order.

Comment on this