The Invisible Library

The cats were boring and refused to do anythig cute within reach of a camera this week, so no new pictures. But there are plenty of classic pics in the archives.

if you tried to view the blog in the last few hours and were prompted to enter a password, don’t worry, I haven’t gone that exclusive. I was playing around with some website settings and accidentally password protected the blog. oops. All fixed now.

Been a long week, what with training the new worker and having my sister-in-law in town and her hell raising ways to contend with. Cat pictures will appear next week.

We were in Raleigh most of last week, visiting friends with a four year old so, of course I come home with a kid kontamination. Head full of cotton. Blogging will resume shortly.

Your Author at the Lincoln Memorial back in March

I know it isn’t easy right now to have super-patriotic thoughts about our country, what with tales of Haditha the like but we need to try to be happy and remember that the monument there means more than just American supremacy, greed, gluttony and disinterist in the affairs of others but stands for ideas like Liberty and Justice for all.

Elvira and I are going on vacation for a week, so no bloggy til the 11th or so. feel free to peruse the archives though, or check out the regular reads over there on the sidebar, like Bryan’s place, or the other members of the LC.

I’m in Atlanta for Work for the next three days so posting will be light, as all I have is a work related Internet access (And you know how they are about blogging). I guess I can’t complain, as the school’s putting me and Elvira up for two nights for free. But still, a dorm with no wireless? That’s so… 20th century.

Long-time reader, Lisa wrote me an email that I thought I should share with the class:

I noticed that you post at all hours of the day, how do you manage to blog at work?

The short answer is: I don’t blog at work. That would get me fired. The long answer, for Lisa (and the IT folks at work, hiya boys!) is a little technical. It involves UTC timecodes and PHP programming language but the short answer: I can preset posts to publish whenever I want, simply by changing the timestamp. I can publish things a week in advance or three years in the past (though, that would just be silly).

Basically, I write posts at night and set the time stamp to publish throughout the day so that fresh content appears on the blog while I’m at work (hint: these posts have timecodes that are nice round numbers, usually on the hour or half hour. Look at the timestamp on this post: it says I published it exactly at 1 PM, while I was actually eating lunch. In reality, I published it at about nine minutes to 7 this evening). Mostly, I do this for the Friday Cat Pictures. I publish them on Thursday night and program the blog to post the pictures Friday morning. Otherwise, I’d be a nocturnal blogger which means being half a day behind everyone else. And who wants to read stale commentary? This way, you, the loyal reader get fresh content on a regular basis, and I get to keep my job. Everybody wins!

I’m headed off to Atlanta for a couple of days on Double Super Top Secret Library Business,* so now posting until at least Thursday night. in the meantime, here are a few fun links to hold you over til then:

Belle Warring has a great little post over at Crooked Timber regarding our iminant train wreck with Iran. You’l laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll drink yourself into a stupor just to have respite from the cringe inducing shenannigans of the Bush Administration. It’s fun!

Amanda Marcot over at Pandagon talks about why all us pissed off Lefties are so pissed off and how that’s a good thing, contrary to popular belief (and by popular belief, I mean Right blogosphere disgruntlement over the fact that we haven’t all submitted naughty-puppy-like to their stern rolled up newspaper of fascism).

And there’s always Boing Boing.

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* The Atlanta Campus of my Unnamed Southern Art School is tripling the size of the library due to the recent acquisition of an entire other, smaller Art School, including their library of 30K volumes. The Executive Librarian and I are going to check out the space, confer with colleagues and meet my Atlanta campus doppleganger.

Regular readers will remember my ill-fated Wordpress blog from a few months back and what a mysterious end it met; one day there, the next gone. See, what happened was this: I almost lost my job from blogging. I panicked, accidentally deleted the blog and lost six months of posts. Luckily, I kept my job.

But for six weeks I was demoralized. One of my best-loved hobbies was gone and I felt like I was missing something, something I had, over the previous three years come to really enjoy. It relieved stress, kept me in touch with the world and other like minded and not so like-minded individuals. It allowed me to keep touch with friends in far away places (hay Kevin! Hay Jenny!). And generally made feel like I was part of a larger world, one I took active part in rather than just watched unfold on TV or news sites.

so, after six weeks of pulling out my hair, I went back online, starting up with my old Blogger site. I still had the archives from the previous two and half years and it was something.

Well, as you can see, I quickly became constrained by Blogspot (again) and decided to recreate the old-new blog. This time, it’s even better, as I’ve been able to inport my archives form the old site, so no more goofs, no more lost posts. It’s all here. All three years of it (minus some change).

So, just in time for my third anniversary online, her eit is: my new home. Blogging has been better and weirder than I ever thought it could be and it’s only going to get better from here. we’ve got an election coming up, a war to stop and anothe rpossible war to prevent. I have a novel to finish and books to read and movies to see. And I can’t wait to tell you all about every single thing that pops in my head.

And I promise, no more moving.

Cat pictures and even some thoughtful content are on the way– I’ve been getting over a cold and busy at work, as if that’s an excuse.

Meanwhile, I’ve been geeking out over the new Doctor Who series, which is now my number two favorite show on TV, after Battlestar Galactica. I don’t think it’s at all too early to declare a new golden age of TV sci-fi at hand. That both these shows are re-imaginings of classic series grown stale under their own weight probably has something to do with it.

I noticed this with Batman Begins; after years languishing in the hands of people who didn’t get the source material to begin with and produced rudimentary derivatives based on their own agendas, studio execs have wised up and decided to let the fans who grew up on these series have a go. And it’s paying off because the best work is done out of love for the ideas.

I’m an addict. I admit it. Six weeks without blogging and I’m itching to snark about nothing in particular, post pictures of my cats (forthcoming) and generally waste time on the internet. But, what else am I going to do?

So, I’m officially back but things are a little different this time. For one, I’m back on blogspot. Administrating the Wordpress blog was way too much like work. I liked the look and feel of it better but getting it up and running is way too technical for my needs, at least for now. Perhaps I’ll go back there but not any time soon: I accidentally deleted everything when I went on Hiatus.

So, hay there blogspot. It’s been a while. Just pretend the gap in Archives is due to gremlins or monkeys or whathaveyou.

The other thing that will change is the frequency of m posting. Don’t expect new posts on the hour about everything under the sun. I’m not that bad and frankly, I don’t care about a lot of things. I’ll be posting on a weekly schedule, mostly cat pictures and a lot of original content, like what’s going on in me wee little head. Which is not to say that there won’t be political rants, geekery of a bookish nature and general tomfoolery. This is a blog after all. I have to put something here, right?