I’m not leaving the house today. In fact, I’m going to lock upself up here in the computer room all day and spend some quality time with my computer.
I’m not much of a “do stuff” person, and lately we’ve been doing tons of (great!) stuff. Each month I say “things will calm down by $next_month” and they don’t. It’s been weeks since I was able to sit down with a computer book and hack away at something. And how long have I been saying I was going to overhaul the back end of princessleia.com? Over a YEAR? All my computer time lately has been spent doing community things – email, wallace and gromit stuff, IRC – and even these have not gotten the attention I want to give them. Plus, with so much on my mind I haven’t been sleeping well this week. Wednesday night I was woken up by a nightmare that ruined my night.
This all leaves me feeling very tired and ungrounded. I need to get back to my roots! That’s what the “plan” was for this whole weekend.
Then Michael emailed me friday afternoon and asked if I wanted to see Harold Smith, Steve Turre, and Badal Roy at the Glencairn Museum. How could I pass up seeing a didgeridoo player and a tabla player, being hosted in one of those huge, stone buildings I love so much? I couldn’t of course. I got home from work Friday night and we drove to Willow Grove to have dinner at Natural Village (best chinese and vegan chinese in the area, sucks that it’s so far from home) and then arrived for the concert at 8. It was an amazing concert, the room it was in (picture here, but this picture does it no justice, the room is very much like a cathedral and the design on that arch is all done in little tiles) was specifically designed with having concerts in mind, so the sound is great. I’d never seen a tabla player in person before – besides Michael! – so that was pretty neat. Unfortunately as 10PM crept up I was feeling exhausted and crankie. It was close to 11 when we got home, I immediately went to bed.
Saturday morning I had to get up to take the Rav4 into the shop. The passenger’s side headlight had gone out and the orange light on that same side was acting funny (wouldn’t turn on when I started the car, but would come on eventually). I was hoping it wasn’t some electrical problem, those can be stupidly expensive to diagnose and fix. The appointment was at 8AM, so I got up like I would on a normal work day. It was rainy and dark out, and me with my single headlight decided to just take the main roads that I knew rather than the shortcut that Michael had suggested. I was at the dealership from 8-9:30 – how long does it take to change a lightbulb? I hope nothing is wrong! Luckily nothing was wrong, the blub in the headlight had just gone out and the orange one was loose or something so they replaced the bulb ($2 for that, phew!).
I wanted to go to bed when I got home around 10, but we had things to do. I did some cleaning and Michael went down in the basement to do some concrete work. Then we needed to go grocery shopping and run a few other errands. Grocery shopping was successful, but I was too tired and not in the mood to get my haircut, and I didn’t get to make digital prints for my grandfather’s sweat lodge because some woman was using the digital photo machine to scan and print a pile of 32432 pictures.
We went home and I had a beer.
I was able to get a few minutes to analyze the access logs for princessleia.com. I think the real reason I hate myspace is that 2% of the hits are from people hotlinking my images to display on their pages. I guess it’s because it’s so popular, but saying that the users of myspace are a bunch of evil, bandwidth leeching idiots is more fun (Oh crap, I’m being mean again!). So I started reading up on apache rewrite rules to ban certain sites from linking. I’m pretty sure I got it all sorted out now to display a simple “hotlinking is prohibited” image on myspace, but I need to grab Michael so he can enable rewrite
stuff for my site in the global apache config.
I also did a tree(1) of the princessleia.com root directory. The result?
250 directories, 5104 files
Egads!
A vast majority are images, and most of those are images I want to keep on the site because I use them. But there is a lot of work to be done to sort out how the site is organized and what pages use what CSS sheets, etc etc etc. What I’d like to do is change all .html to .php and use PHP to write includes so every page looks the same and changing the style is easy, but that isn’t going to happen. Too many of my pages (including my mplayer how-to) are .html and they’re linked all over the internet. Breaking those links would suck and redirects to the new site would make more clutter. I haven’t decided if more clutter is worth it. But I can spend the time to redo the CSS. And I know I’ll spend a bunch of time deleting stuff on the site I don’t use anymore.
This post has degenerated into me thinking aloud. I need to just stop typing and get to work.