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.
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.