Category: general

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!

I went to the endocrinologist today, for a followup. I had the usual measurements taken: pulse, blood pressure, weight. Weight is down (obviously, though apparently my clothes and breakfast weigh 4 pounds), pulse is also down (70-something, I just remember being amazed that it wasn’t 90), but blood pressure is still icky at 130/90. I’m going to be checking it in the mornings and evenings again to see how it goes…maybe it’s just high because I’m nervous about that thing I refuse to blog about. I also made an appointment for later today with a regular physician, because the endocrinologist was really on my case about it today. She wants to know what the deal is with my blood pressure–can’t really blame her for that.

I’m going to continue with my hormone treatments through February and March. In February I will have a blood test on day 2 or 3 of my period. At the end of March, based on the blood test results, we will decide whether or not to continue treatment. After stopping the hormones, we’d wait 4-6 months to see if my body returns to having periods normally. The doctor is optimistic about it.

She was proud of me for losing weight, but she was unhappy with my blood pressure, so along with strongarming me into going to a regular doctor, she told me to cut down on my sodium intake.

This is going to be really hard. For example, the bowl of Campbell’s Chunky Soup I’m eating right now has 1740 grams of sodium in it…290 more than DietPower recommends. With one meal, I’ve grossly overblown my daily allowance.

I’m going to have to give up on boxed and canned meals, and try to make things naturally, and avoid salting things. I can only assume that eating out isn’t a good idea either.

If anyone has any tips on limiting sodium (Mari, I know you went through this), please comment!

From Japan Today:

A record 28,364 people registered as bone marrow donors in 2004, due mainly to blockbuster movies released last year depicting characters dying of leukemia, the Japan Marrow Donor Program said Friday.

I was lucky. My brother Ben was a 6 out of 6 match for my bone marrow. AJ was a 4 out of 6.

Not everyone is going to have that great a selection.

I won’t kid you, it hurts to donate bone marrow. They drill into your pelvis and suck it out. I only went through a fraction of what Ben went through when I had my bone marrow biopsy. First there was an extraordinarily uncomfortable pressure on the bone, kind of a gritty feeling. But the vacuuming of the marrow was the worst part. It’s hard to describe how that feels. The closest I can come is that it’s like having your soul jerked from your body. I know that seems overdramatic, but what is more inner than your marrow, from which springs your lifeblood?

I had this procedure done a couple of times, each time with only one hole drilled. Ben had his marrow taken all at once, with far more taken out, and with multiple drillings. He was in so much pain that he was in tears, and Mom had to yell at the nurses to give him more morphine.

Ben was sore, unable to really move, for about a week afterwards. He sacrificed a lot to do that for me. But because of his suffering, I’m alive today.

It takes a very strong person to give bone marrow, in other words. It is, literally, the gift of life.

Here’s how you can donate, if you’re interested.

Sid has finally posted again. He doesn’t post often, and when he posts it’s not always interesting, but there are enough gems in his archives that I know I should wait for the next one. Today, he doesn’t disappoint. Any post that begins with the phrase “Tokyo is an expensive-ass city” is bound to be good.

The conclusion makes the entire piece. Enjoy.

Miss Em links to a great post by Jeff Jarvis about the VW ad, and advertising in general.

If I were you, VW, I would hold a contest to get people to create the best damned VW commercial anywhere and promise to spend big bucks to air it on, say, the Oscars. You don’t have to pick the terrorist commercial. You’ll be making clear that the thing was not made by you. At the same time, you will learn a lot about new messages that truly resonate and reverberate from your customers — because your customers are creating them. How’s that for market research?

This is the Cluetrain economy, guys: Markets are conversations. Join in the conversation, don’t try to muzzle it.

I may have to start reading this guy regularly.

I thought somebody (somewhere) might be interested in the methodology I use when crafting my timely and well-reasoned posts.

;P

So, here’s what I do: I visit links.

My Favorites are always open on the left side of my IE window. (Yes, IE. Creature of habit, I suppose.) Of the literally dozens of folders, I visit a mere few with alarming frequency: “AMRN Links”, which contains a link to the main board; “Anime”, which I really only use to get to my AnimeSuki bookmark, “Blitzkrieg Web Portals”, which takes me to My Yahoo!, MSN, CNN (occasionally), and (most importantly) Bloglines; “Blogs”, which takes me here and to Blogger to post, as well as to my del.icio.us bookmarks, smugmug, and to my friend’s joural sites; “Blogs – Interesting People”, which takes me to blogs of people I don’t know personally; and “Friends and Family”, which contains links to Box of Bunnies and das brunogekritzel (a message board for fans of Chris Baldwin’s Bruno, and the only webcomic messageboard I frequent. I go there for the discussion, not because Bruno is my favorite comic).

Now, everything in the “Blogs” folder is a subscription in Bloglines, so I actually don’t go to those sites very much unless I’m checking for new comments. Bloglines is what I am typically using when I make a post here.

What I do is this. I’ll go to my Bloglines (click here to see how my [public] feeds look) and start with the “News Aggregates” folder, which currently contains Slashdot and BoingBoing. (MetaFilter used to be in there, but I was getting overwhelmed with news.) I click on anything that sounds interesting, opening a new window, but I stay in Bloglines to finish reading the entire folder. At that point, if I have a lot of new windows open, I’ll go and read the full articles one by one, and one by one decide if I want to make a blog post about them.

After “News Aggregates”, I go to “Odd/Weird”, “Local News”, “Japan News”, “Japanese”, and “Food”. I save “Language” (which currently only contains the Language Log feed) for the end of my more informative reading, because it’s my favorite, and because I always save the best for last.

Once I’m done with my more educational reading, I move to blogs. I don’t necessarily expect to find anything newsworthy here, though it has happened. First I’ll visit “Interesting People”, to see what, for example, Jeff Laitila has to say about life in Japan. And lastly (saving the very best for last, you see), I visit “Friends”.

This is my typical methodology. If I’m in a rush when I’m reading my feeds, often I’ll save the news for later instead, so I’ll have time to think about whether or not I want to post about it. Also, sometimes I’m not in the mood to plow through a Language Log post (they are awesome, but they typically require more “processing power”), so I’ll leave those for later too. But in general, this is how I work.

Oh shit, I was going to put a zillion links in this post, but I have lost track of time and now I’m going to be late for my doctor’s appointment!