Been meaning to post this xkcd somewhere because it rings so true, but hadn’t gotten around to it because I’m so damn tired.
Between Chaplin being doped up on painkillers for a kidney issue and me being massively sleep-deprived, I’m not sure which one of us is going to become convinced he can talk first.
I’ve been trying to figure out how the hell the next 2-3 years of my life as an academic are going to work. The process has led to the creation of this ridiculous flowchart:
Click to enlarge. Or really, don’t. Even shrinky-dinked, you get a nice little taste of the clusterfuckyness.
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.
It’s always fun to play the game, “Do I feel blah because…?” This week’s candidates:
I’m at least trying to do something about #1 and #3 – I decided to take a couple computer science classes in the fall at my friendly local community college to prevent my brain from turning completely to mush, and to do so online so I can keep going even if I do get a job.
I also decided it’s time to break down and crack into some super-on-ice-pretend-they-don’t-exist funds and get a new mattress, just to be able to get a decent night’s sleep for once.
I’m just going to have to cross my fingers it’s not #2.
Work is completely batshit crazy right now – we premiere in two weeks (Monday January 26th at 10pm, 9pm central after the return of The Closer) so we’ve got all kinds of publicity things on top of the usual insanity, and it’s driving my hours into the range of Completely Loony instead of just the regular Somewhat Nutty.
Anyway, Chaplin is back and doing much, much better after having his abscess drained. I get to try to toss an antibiotic pill down his throat twice a day now. This is an addition to our routine that he is decidedly not in favor of, but which will hopefully prevent a recurrence of the abscess.
And now, just for giggles, a picture of him in the bed I bought him – technically a dog bed since he’s so huge he wouldn’t fit in a normal cat bed:
He resolutely ignored the bed until the night before I would have been able to return it, and now is sleeping in it all the time. He does have a sense of humor about these things.
I went for a looooooong bike ride today. I wanted to do the entire Marvin Braude trail, but I came up a little short.
The entire trail is 22 miles each way, and I have to bike 2 miles each way to get to the trail. If I’d done the whole thing, I would have gone 48 miles.
Instead, I went all the way to the South end, about two miles south of the Redondo Beach pier. This was about 5 miles South of where I stopped the last time I rode the trail, which was a significantly larger gap than I had realized, so I was a lot more tired by the time I reached the South end when I thought.
The wind was whipping pretty good coming back North, so I think that’s part of what tired me out so much. I think I also need to bring more than a granola bar along to refuel.
I wasn’t really hungry per se, but I noticed I got a lot more tired than I did during my last ride that far South, during which my friends and I stopped for brunch. Pancakes and Guinness are apparently a far more efficient fuel than one wee granola bar.
But I managed to get all the way back to the Santa Monica pier, which is just over 18 miles north of Redondo (and about 3/4 of a mile north of where I got on) before my the combination of the setting sun and my body saying “GET OFF THE BIKE!” determined that I should probably head home.
I wound up breaking down and buying a comically overpriced 20oz Gatorade at the S.M. pier, and I felt WAY better after that, so perhaps I shall invest in some for my next ride.
However, I did 39 miles total, which is nothing to sneeze at, and about 80% of the entire way. We’ll see how many of my limbs I can actually move tomorrow, but for right now, I’m pretty happy I managed to go as far as I did.
I went horseback riding today with my camera, the pictures that were not completely blurry are now up on Flickr. Western-style riding is ideal for this, since you only need to keep one hand on the reins at all times, instead of both (as you do when you ride English-style).
However, it is not ideal when your horse randomly decides to break into a trot coming down a hill and you have to try and pull hard enough to stop him with just one hand because the other holds your very expensive camera. That was fun.
By the way, remember how I said I was going out with the Old Fart Bike Brigade 2: Electric Jewgaloo? They’re in way better shape than the Atlanta crowd. I got totally dusted by four guys over the age of seventy biking up a looooong but gentle incline.
They even managed to go up one hell of a steep hill at the end. I took one look at the hill and said, “This is No Country For Young Whippersnappers.” My dad and one other guy agreed with me, and all three of us felt really old.
Noted: 35 miles is kind of a long way to bike.
Also, I need a better seat. Ow.
First, your distance calculator decides that I’m running a thirteen minute mile.
If I could run on a treadmill without incurring extreme pain, I feel like it would be maybe an eight or nine minute mile. Nothing to write home about, but certainly not as horrifyingly slow as a 13 minute mile.
Then, you arbitrarily reset sometime after I’ve gone a mile and a half into the 3.1 miles I need to finish my gym triathlon, and I have no idea how much further I have to go.
I wound up doing another mile and a half after I noticed it had reset and still coming in at 1:59, but I probably could have made it to 1:55 if I had actually known how far I’d gone in the few minutes between when I saw I’d crossed 1.5 miles and when I noticed it had reset.
Bah. I’ll probably do one more of these before I try my Batshit Crazy Plan of doing a full Olympic-length gym triathlon during the Olympics. That’ll be double the distance I’ve been doing, and will therefore probably take about four hours.
At least I was able to verify that I’ve dropped my swim time to just over 15 minutes to do 15 laps from just over 18 minutes to do 15 laps. Yay, progress!
You work a fourteen-and-a-half hour day and as you blearily walk to you car, you think, “Man, that could have been a LOT worse.”