fine whine

Last week I wrote about writing more. Until today, though, nothing new appeared.

Well, it's not entirely my fault.

Sometime last week a number of my files disappeared, and tech support took a little while to restore them and give me a vague explanation as to where they'd gone and why.

Basically, they don't know, and I don't really care - I'm happy as long as they're back. I did, however, lose two days*, and I'm slowly patching things back together. My "I've watched" list was probably hit the hardest.

So scroll down - there's more to read, finally.

* I am, of course, backing everything up today for the first time in a few months. If you don't already make regular backups of your data, whatever it may be, well, you're in for a surprise someday. An unpleasant one.

There has been no update on this site since last month.

I have no excuse. Not once did I even attempt to create a draft of a post (I have almost 200 posts I've never completed, and likely never will) other than putting words together in my head.

I even missed mentioning a Threadless sale, though it would've seemed pretty crass to have that be the only interim post, wouldn't you say?

You may notice I uploaded some new pictures* to my Flickr account, none so significant to warrant a mention here, I suppose.

By my incomplete count, I have watched twenty-nine movies and five TV shows on DVD. They weren't all noteworthy, but a few of them (almost wrote "not none") were. Perhaps I'll mention them in the coming days.

I do intend to return to writing, and at least once a week. Even if all I can do is complain about work, or what I think could be better about using my mp3 player.

There's just something about not writing one day that makes it easier to not write the next, and so on and so forth. Nothing necessarily noteworthy happened in the last month, but having nothing to write about never stopped me in the past. Hopefully it won't block me again.

* From home. Scott gave me some pointers on a way I might be able to circumvent our security and use the site from my desk at work, but the complexity of the site (and its many servers) stymies the tunnels. I suppose I'll just stick to doing work at work.

So the Threadless ten dollar sale has ended. My shirt order has already arrived (and probably everybody else's* too) and, well, that's about it for the week. I inteded to write at least one thing, but I guess I'll parlay it into an entry for this week. I don't feel like backdating any this time around; I just don't have anything timely to mention (in retrospect, as it would be).

* Thank you to everyone who used my referral link. I earned a good portion of the next shirt I'll order during the next sale. There'll be another one in the next few months, I suspect. Thanks again.

Once again I have changed the layout and design on these pages. Firefox viewers will see more or less what I want them to see, and windows users of Internet Explorer will find their experience more or less okay, depending on the version* used. I haven't fired up the ol' Mac to see what Safari and IE5/Mac do with it, but I'm not too worried about it.

I've tried to make everything a little more functional, with easy-to-use archives by month and category and much cleaner code. That latter bit matters more for me, since I've already started working on another variant of all of this that isn't so, well, dull.

Anyway, this is just as temporary as any other layout I've used for any length of time. Maybe now that I've finished this I can get back to writing posts, not code, again. You'll just need to wait and see, I guess.

* Higher versions, such as 6 and up, will probably end up showing more or less what I intend to show. Lower versions, 5.5 and below, won't do so well. Such is life. I've given up writing broken code and counterintuitive hacks just to get a bunch of ugly blocks to line up correctly.

I've updated (finally) to WordPress version 2.0, mere months after its launch and weeks after I began testing it. Please let me know if you find anything broken or out of place.

How am I supposed to follow up a eulogy for a dead cat? With flippant commentary about movies and television shows and books? Though that's about the extent of my writings here lately, it just didn't seem worth it. For a few days I was only reading anyway, and then I couldn't seem to commit to any one given book. I haven't finished reading a book in over a week, not one of the six I've started.

I have finished something else, though. Though I had nothing I wanted to write, I felt the need to do some work on these pages somehow, and finally wrapped up my longtime project of categorizing all of the entries. Back in the beginning I didn't think categories would be necessary, and relied on Google searches to find anything I'd missed amongst all of my posts. Adding categories seemed to be needless work, pigeonholing a neverending bunch of ever-expanding categories.

Or maybe I was just lazy.

Now that it's thirty-four months hence, I find myself unable to find everything I want to recall, at least not easily. Remember thus, these posts and pages are primarily present for my memory and benefit, and only secondarily for anyone else interested. So when I can't easily look back and find, say, all of the books I've read and mentioned, something isn't working to its potential.

So I've gone back and categorized the six or seven hundred posts* I've amassed, and now they are all grouped in a more or less slightly-not-arbitrary manner, and I can once again more easily find things, say, that I've written about music with far fewer clicks. Or license plates.

I still have more work to do. I need to create, for you, not me, easier ways to navigate these categories. For that matter, I need to finish my theme. This colorful mess was meant only to be a temporary thing.

* The exact number is difficult to determine for many reasons. One being that as soon as I post another, the count will be off, unless I use some PHP hackery to pull the real number out of the database. Moreover, Wordpress seems to count all of my drafts, the number of which is too embarrassing to mention.

Or I'm just too lazy to count them.