Author: Heather Meadows

There’s a neat article on the Louisville Courier-Journal’s website.

Weird Kentucky: Here’s where to find the intriguing, the unusual and the just plain odd

A snippet, detailing two oddities listed in the Unusual Kentucky Compendium:

The Blue Grass Army Depot: This Madison County storage facility houses nerve gas and is a popular site for UFO sightings. Rumor has it an alien spacecraft was once stored here. The Nameless Grocery Store in Wildie, which doesn’t sell much of anything, and is very “Children of the Corn,” the site says — only “without the children. Or, the corn.”

Also mentioned in the article is Kentucky author Vince Staten, author of Unauthorized America: A Travel Guide to the Places the Chamber of Commerce Won’t Tell You About (1990).

…but I am working. Sort of.

I apparently left my key to the office at work on Thursday. I didn’t realize this until Saturday, and then I forgot to go get it. This morning, as I was tugging on my extra pairs of pants for the 33° bike ride, I suddenly realized that I would have no way of getting into the office, and I would have to bike all the way back.

So I took off the two extra pairs of pants, and settled in to work from home.

I’ve done pretty much everything I can do from here; now I’m just logged in to catch any phone calls that might come through. Robert should be up soon; hopefully he’ll get my email or head into the office within an hour or so and I can go in then. I suppose I’ll drive, though I haven’t really decided yet.

It’s been kind of neat to be at home for the sunrise. When I first got up it was completely dark, as usual. Slowly, the sky outside the curtains got lighter and lighter. I opened the blinds in the living room and shut off the lamp. In the office, I pulled the curtain up and hooked it over the rod, then stood for a moment gazing out at the new morning. A school bus coasted past the pond, yellow lights flashing. Out in the middle of the water, I saw a duckling submerge. I watched the area where he’d gone under for a long time, and he never resurfaced. When I started to wonder whether I’d really seen him go underwater or not, suddenly he popped back up again, a few feet away. I smiled.

It’s so nice here. Though we’re right next to Bobby Jones Expressway, you can’t hear too much of the highway noise because of the screen of trees. Right now I’m listening to quiet dappled with faint quacking. Ripples are moving lazily across the pond. The sky is frosted with flat clouds, and the trees, bent and broken from Saturday’s ice, hold their barren remaining limbs up into that mix of blue and white and pale grey. On the bank, ducks flap out of the water; a few yards away, other ducks plop back in, paddling across in lines.

Sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and appreciate the beauty you’ve been gifted with.

I rather suddenly just remembered what I dreamed last night. There was a weapon (probably an HPM ray, because I had just seen one in an episode of Lois & Clark) that was going to be used on cities in the world, and I was looking at some sort of screen that showed the primary possible targets.

#1 was Lexington, Kentucky. #2 was Louisville.

The screen zoomed in on a map of Kentucky and showed Lexington, then cut to live feed of a building that in my dream I recognized as being a tourist information building near the UK campus (but which actually doesn’t exist). The camera just stayed on the front of that building, as if it was the reason the city was targeted.

A voice-over was saying that while there are plenty of bigger targets to choose from, Lexington was the best choice because it was in the heartland, and because it was where the weapon was originally conceived.

I was just terrified.

I’ve had several strange dreams lately. The other day, I dreamed my period started up again (it just ended on Thursday), and it was too heavy to stop by normal means, so I was just bleeding all over the place. It was really upsetting; I actually woke up from that one.

I imagine these dreams are products of my subconscious nervousness. I’m waiting to hear word about something that’s very important to me (again, that thing I’ll tell you all about in due time). I want it so badly. The waiting is affecting every aspect of my life.

While the dreams are morbidly fascinating, I’ll be glad when my nights are peaceful again.

He’s ba-ack…!

I MADE IT WORK!!!!!

I yelled “Woo hoo!” so loudly that it scared Sean :>

I’ve got the comments attached to the proper posts, and the little delete thingy works wonders on the empty comments.

Of course, it’s never over…now I’ve noticed that it seems to be omitting some of the HTML in the comments (like <br /> tags). Now to figure out why it’s doing that…

When I finally get the kinks worked out of the system, I will still need to edit the export file so that I can have people’s posts be submitted under their actual names. Shouldn’t be too big of a problem, but I wanted to mention that it’s not over yet.

I now have it porting the correct information into the correct columns in the columns table. There are just two problems.

1. It is putting null information in as comments for posts that don’t have comments.
2. It still isn’t passing the post ID to comment_post_ID, so the comments are still floating in limbo instead of being associated with posts.

I’m trying to fix the second problem first, because it’s the most serious. I think I can solve the first problem with a workaround that already exists for deleting empty posts. Besides, that’s not really as big an issue to me as making the comments actually appear!

Okay, so I have it dumping the Blogger export into the comments table, and I even figured out how to strip out the hyperlink to the Blogger profile…

…but it’s dumping everything into the comments table, not just the comments, and it’s completely ignoring the post IDs I tried to force-feed it. There seems to be no rhyme or reason. The upshot is that my comments table gets filled with rows and rows of data, but none of it is actually connected to a post.

I’m getting closer, little by little. But this really underscores my complete lack of true coding ability. I’m pretty sure that if I had a basic idea of how to work with PHP and MySQL, I wouldn’t be having these issues.

Okay, I’ve discovered that comment_post_ID has the same value as the post_ID of the post it goes with. Makes things easier, doesn’t it? So, if I can assign comment_post_ID the same value as post_ID (by keeping it within the “for” loop, I think), I should be able to get the comments. Somehow. I can’t run it as two separate processes like I mentioned in the previous post, because it’s not guaranteed when I start the process what post numbers the posts will get. You’d think that the first post would get 1, the second would get 2, and so on down the line, and that is superficially how it’s supposed to work, but the importer has a bug that causes blank posts to show up here and there, and I can’t predict where those will occur. If I just ran the separate importer and crossed my fingers, I would probably end up with some comments assigned to posts that don’t exist.

Fun, huh?

Time to mess with the importer code some more…

I got tired of seeing this post sitting in Drafts, so here it is.

Yesterday [I’ve had this post sitting in Drafts for a very long time, so I’m not actually sure when “yesterday” was. -Ed.], I decided to test WordPress and see how it works on my server. I was under the impression (due to this) that I wouldn’t be able to run it. However, I went through the setup process and messed around with settings for awhile without ever seeing the “Database Error: Too Many Connections” message that I got when testing Mambo. I’m not sure if that means it’ll be okay, or if I just put Mambo through more rigorous changes (although I’m thinking it’s the second one).

The other problem is porting my Blogger stuff over into WordPress. They have a utility for importing Blogger posts, but they haven’t updated it to include Blogger comments. All we see on the support forum are people asking whether or not there’s a way to do it; one guy suggests exporting to Moveable Type format and then importing that to WordPress, but I hate that idea. It’s too messy.

Looking at their tutorial and then examining the file in question, I got it into my head that maybe I could import the comments by modifying the file so that it would parse the comments and put them into the proper database fields. However, I was rather daunted by this task, and so I put it off for weeks.

Today [The real today. -Ed.], I started actually messing with it, just to see what would happen. At first I worked under the assumption that I would have to grab each comment while I was still within the “for” loop of the corresponding post. However, this didn’t work. Finally, I remembered how to telnet into the database, so I took a look at how WordPress does its comments table. It contains the following columns:

comment_ID

comment_post_ID

comment_author

comment_author_email

comment_author_url

comment_author_IP

comment_date

comment_date_gmt

comment_content

comment_karma

comment_approved

user_id

I assume that comment_post_ID tells the software which post the comment goes with. This makes things easier and harder at the same time. I think that to get the raw comments data, all I need to do is create a separate dump from Blogger that contains the comments only…but I’m not sure how to indicate which posts the comments go with, nor what value comment_post_ID should then be assigned.

Kind of stumped, but at least I have an idea of the direction I need to go.

Jeff at Sushicam linked today to a really cool Japan blog, A Year or so in Japan by a woman named Joanne. She is clever, insightful, and funny, and I’ve been enjoying perusing her archives today. Needless to say, she has been blogrolled.

Here is a link to the laugh-out-loud post Jeff refers to. It is absolutely fabulous. A quote:

I saw that my interest was not infactuation but fascination. The way a woman looks at a beautiful drag queen. Half in amazement and half in jealousy for such a outlandish sense of style and the confidence to carry it off. But even that has worn off for me. The coolness, the look that they woke up in their penthouse apartment, threw on a suit and loafers and I only happened to catch sight of them on the street or subway because they were between a rock and roll board meeting, a dinner date and a manicure appointment. The reality is different. They are kept men. Kept by their mothers.

This is not the best part. You have to read it.

On the other end of the spectrum (or, rather, on a completely different spectrum), here’s a post about typical work life for men and women in Japan.

Everything here is prim and proper, especially on the outside. A laugh, a smile and apologizing are all done at appropriate times. People don’t complain, they endure. Unless they are men. Men here, for some reason, function comfortably outside all the rules of etiquette.

I highly recommend this one, too. Eye-opening, insightful, and clever.

Webcomic fans rock.

At some point, Willis posted the following:

January 23, 2005 – Okay, here’s the skinny. I’ve got a lot of emails. You guys like the IW! strip that went up yesterday. You guys want more. Okay.

Well, here’s the deal. Shortpacked! runs 3 times a week, and Roomies! runs twice a week — that’s a full-time job in itself. I’ve consciously cut down the number of strips I do a week so I can dedicate time to actual work that pays the bills. And so tossing another full-page strip a week onto my pile is not going to work, especially since that time spent will displace time needed to work on things that pay my bills. (And get me to California regularly.)

However.

I’ve got an idea. I like pleasing you peeps, ‘cuz you’re my peeps, so I’ll cut y’all a deal. Every $100 donated to me through Paypal, I’ll draw up an IW! strip to run that following Saturday. So if 20 people donate 5 bucks each, that’s a new strip. That makes it worth my while, and it makes it possible for you folks to get what you want. In the meantime, Shortpacked! and Roomies! will continue to run for free.

Does that sound cool?

And then, later:

January 23, 2005 – Well, that was quick.

I wish he’d time-stamped it. :D (I also wish webcomic authors would use blog software for their rants, so I could get permalinks to the text…;P)

Anyway, new IW! on Saturdays. Yay!

I stuck Duane Keiser’s painting blog in my blogroll awhile back, and since then I’ve enjoyed a fresh new still life every day.

Today’s painting is very simple, yet somehow it really touches me. I don’t know…I get the feeling of loneliness (the pushpins, solitary and surrounded by empty holes), and yet a soft sense of hope (the filtered rays of sunlight).

He sells these things for $100. They are postcard-sized. Like I said to Brooke the other day, as I rejected a painting about seven times that size for the same price, “Well, if I had money to spend on art…”

Of course, I think Mr. Keiser is more talented than whoever painted the blue-grey seaside piece that caught my eye at the mall. But that doesn’t change the fact that I’m broke!

(Plus, the ones I really like are either far more expensive, or already sold.)

From Yahoo!:

An auto mechanic used a customer’s sport utility vehicle to run an errand, left it in a parking lot with the motor running, then mistakenly took another running vehicle and returned to the garage, police said.

The car he took back wasn’t even the same kind of car!

I was poking around the intarweb today and came across a blog by a gentleman named Peter Huddleston who lives in Hamamatsu, Shizuoka, Japan. This post, about his first job in Japan, was the first one I read.

Its funny (not really) there was safety equipment (goggles, harnesses, gloves etc.) but if you used them it was not cool and others would smirk at you. It was crazy. Cutting steel duct with a grinder and red hot steel sparks shooting into your face because almost all of the grinders had the safety shield removed (it’s easier to use them that way, but dangerous) without safety glasses. I was so damn lucky not to get an eye put out. I saw many whom did.

Since I love anecdotes and I love Japan, I’ve decided to blogroll him.

Better rush to the grocery stores now to get supplies! After all, that ice won’t melt until–maybe–Sunday afternoon!