You know those tone-deaf ads for Leno returning to 11:35 set to the Beatles’ “Get Back”? Someone put together a version with a much more apt song choice:

Genius. As the Onion AV Club said, Great Job, Internet!

A little job came through – two and a half weeks of work on a pilot presentation (basically, a dirt-cheap pilot), starting Monday. Normally this wouldn’t be terribly exciting, but it’s actually union work for once, so this job means a couple of things.

Most importantly, because it’s union and because of the way the health insurance works in my union, it’s just enough hours to let me keep my union health insurance through the end of the year, which will save me a whole pile of money over COBRA.

Almost as importantly, it’s getting me the hell out of the house. I needed something to forcibly break me out of my current cycle of reading everything on the internet then watching everything on television and then going back and reading whatever got posted on the internet while I was watching TV, and this should do nicely.

If I intended to stay in showbiz, I’d be excited for a chance at making a good impression on a new set of contacts, but at this point I’m just happy to be able to have in-person conversations with other humans that do not include the words “Thanks for coming to 24 Hour Fitness!” more than a couple times a week.

And hey, it’s more money than unemployment. Woo!

Warning to regular readers of this blog: SEVERE Nerd Alert.

A lot of folks I know who started their blogs out on Blogger have used HaloScan for commenting since before Blogger implemented comments. Since HaloScan is shutting down in the next few days, you’d think you might want to move all your old comments to Blogger.

Good luck.

There’s really no practical reason why someone at Blogger can’t write some sort of comments parser to handle the XML files that HaloScan spits out, but so far, they haven’t. If you want to get it done right now, the only way I found to make it work is a ridiculously cumbersome process.

Basically, that process is to import everything into a WordPress blog where it can all be properly combined, then re-export it, run it through python script, and upload it back into Blogger.

I’ve decided to write up the entire procedure I went through both as an exercise in writing documentation and in order to help anyone else who’s crazy enough to want to try this. If you think you have the patience for this (or would just like to see exactly how insane I am), hit the “read the rest” link that follows.

Read the rest…

Thanks to Haloscan’s decision to shut down, I’ve finally been able to get all my comments out of their system for free. Took a lot of tweaking my old Blogger stuff and a bunch of help from this awesome Haloscan on Blogger > WordPress script and its author, but I managed to get 1413 of 1420 comments transferred.

And frankly, I’m not going looking for the seven comments that didn’t make it. I feel like a 99.5% success rate on something this complicated is good enough, particularly given how much time I already sank into getting it this far.

But the good news is there are now comments going back to 2003, about a year after I started this blog. It’s kind of amazing to realize that although posting has fallen off substantially over time, I’ve been writing this blog for almost eight years.

I went for a bike ride this afternoon, partly because my cheapo necklace finally broke and I needed to buy a replacement. Fortunately replacements are 2 for $10 at Venice Beach.

I actually dragged my giant camera with me this time because it’s been pouring rain and a lot of the usual pollution and gunk has been washed away, and things are much, much clearer than they usually are.

Anyway, some of the better pictures from this little excursion are up on my Flickr, which you can access via this link or this lovely slideshow:

I will say, days like today make me wish I had a working point-and-shoot camera. The small-ish one that I carried around Europe with me (and which compared to today’s point-and-shoot cameras, is freakishly huge) died some time ago, and sometimes the iPhone’s camera just isn’t enough.

I love the pictures my D50 takes and the level of control it gives me, but there’s no getting around the fact that lugging a giant DSLR around with me on a bike ride is a humongous pain in the ass.

I’ve gotten into something of a winter funk. It started out with the aforementioned really awesome stomach bug that left my innards out of sorts and me curled up in pain for a week, and continued into a solid week of pouring rain in LA.

Rain in L.A. somehow seems much more depressing and draining than rain anywhere else, probably because it’s always sunny here and the change of pace is so much more severe.

So between the illness and the rain, I’ve been tempted many times these last few weeks to just curl up on my couch and sleep the day away. Some days, I manage to fight the urge and actually get up and get a load or two of laundry done.

But more often than not the last couple of weeks, Chaplin will jump up on me, and either curl up between my feet or on my chest. The power of a sleeping cat is utterly ridiculous when it comes to draining me of any ability to stay awake. He’s like a purring hot water bottle.

I can sleep 10 hours a night and if I don’t snap myself out of it, I’ll still nap another two hours with the kitty. Which is exactly what happened last night and this afternoon.

I’ve mostly only been getting out to go to the gym recently, and I think I need to make sure I keep changing things up a bit more in order to prevent myself from literally sleeping my life away.

The first thing I need to do is get back to dragging myself to the gym in the morning rather than the afternoon – I always have way more energy after the gym, and am consequently way better at fighting off cat-induced sleepiness.

I also think I need to increase the time I spend away from my apartment, even though it may increase the danger of me spending money. That’s been my primary unemployment excuse for never leaving the house: Staying in is almost always cheaper than doing anything other than bike riding outside.

I’m at the point where I’m so averse to spending money that I can’t really bring myself to go to the local coffeehouse or sandwich shop and gank their wifi just for a change of scenery, because I’ll be tempted to at least order a hideously overpriced beverage if not a sandwich that costs more than I have budgeted for my entire day’s worth of meals.

So I think it’s time for me to hit up my friendly local parks and maybe go sit and get my reading-learning done out by the ocean when it’s a smidge less windy than it has been. Maybe I’ll even break down and go to a library.

The fact that it’s supposed to pour again all day tomorrow (well, today at this point) means that at least the “go outside more” part of this plan won’t start until Wednesday, but I think putting my finger on the problem will at least help me address it.

I’ve come down with a truly delightful stomach bug, so my ability to do pretty much anything beyond what I absolutely have to do is somewhat restrained.

Normally I’d have something much longer about the whole Jaypocalypse/Conandrum fiasco playing out in slow motion on NBC, but to be frank, I really don’t have the energy to write up my feelings on what is, at its heart, a battle for the future of television.

Instead, please enjoy this embed of last night’s Jimmy Kimmel show (no, really, it is quite funny). It’s an absolutely savage parody of Leno’s show, particularly in the way that he relies on the band to prop up every single limp joke.

Hopefully more to come when I feel a bit less like I’m in certain scenes from Parasites Lost.

When I took the GRE, I signed up for the “search service” that allows the testing board to send my info to various graduate schools so they can attempt to recruit me and/or offer me scholarships. Which is fine with me, since if someone wants to offer me free grad school, I’m all ears.

I got a basic “Check out our program!” email this evening from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. It might have been intriguing had I not thought to take a look at the weather forecast for Lincoln for the next few days:

I realize I’ve been spoiled by living in Southern California for six years, but I think even when I lived in Chicago I would have looked at that forecast and thought, “Perhaps they should have waited until spring to send out recruiting emails.”

Since I clearly don’t already have enough outlets for my one-liners on the internet between this creaky old blog and Facebook, I broke down and started posting on Twitter.

Like most internet things I eventually get into, I resisted for quite a while, not quite seeing the point of it until some of my friends who seemed to get it faster really got into it.

But I think after following a few people for a bit, I see where a fun space for it lies between a blog and Facebook and a direct line from my brain to the internet.

Plus, I’ve been functionally unemployed since March. There’s really only so long you can resist a complete time-killer like Twitter when you’re unemployed for months at a time.

We’ll see how I get the hang of it over the next few weeks, but the good news is that the limits of the format dictate that even when what I post is not amusing, it’ll at least be short.