© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Calorie Intake, Iphone, iPhone app, Suggestion, Track Thanks

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Hi folks. As you may have noticed, I’ve been tinkering with the design of my site. I got tired of the fact that my blog had become dominated by links from my Delicious account and embedded videos, so I decided to revamp the structure of things around here. I also felt like freshening things up with a new theme choice. I hope you like it.

Some of the changes were more drastic than others. First off, I deleted all of the posts that were nothing but digests listing my Delicious activity. Although it was nice to have some of those links front-and-center, you can get the same effect by viewing my page on the Delicious website. I decided it was a bit redundant to continually post those links to the front page here. However, they are included in the sidebar in the Lifestream section, along with events from a number of other social websites.

As for the video posts, they’re still here, but I’ve decided to treat them more like a sideblog instead of the major source of content they had become. The most recent video I’ve come across will always be at the top of my sidebar, and any older posts are available on the Watching page.

Part of what this new version of my site means is that the front page may not be updated as often, but when it does get an update, I’m hoping that the posts will be more full of content instead of the shorter posts that have become the norm around here.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: blog, Delicious Website, Front Page, Hi Folks, Norm, Sidebar, Sideblog, Video Posts

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© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2008. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: duplex, Photos, tallwood

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For right now, the site seems to have stopped melting, and as for places to live, Tim and I came up with a good top 5 list. Roommate #3, Trey, hasn’t had a chance to look at the places yet, but if he doesn’t manage to do it tomorrow, he’s just going to have to trust us, because we need to get our applications in pronto.

Other than that, I’d like to share the following two music videos I just came across:

Goldfrapp – A&E

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds – Dig, Lazarus, Dig!

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2008. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Digg, Goldfrapp, house hunting, music videos, Nick Cave, server meltdown, The Leet World

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Anyways, on Wednesday night I came home to a note on my door letting me know it was time to renew my lease. Their offer? $685 a month, which is $85 more than I’m currently paying. The kicker? They only gave me until DECEMBER 1ST to decide if I want to renew at that rate. Otherwise I’d probably have to pay whatever the “market rate” of the apartment is… god knows how much that would be. The note also says that if I am going to move out, I have to give notice by the 1st. So, basically… they decided to give me the shaft.

Needless to say, I was pretty ticked off, and began frantically calling around to see if anyone was in the market for a roommate. The problem with living by yourself is that you can’t really save that much money by moving to another one-bedroom apartment of a similar size and quality. Saving money can’t really be your goal unless you’re willing to go from a large apartment (like mine) to an efficiency, which doesn’t sound attractive to me.

If I could find a roommate, though, I’d be set… I knew I could definitely save money with a roommate to help me split the bills. The problem was that when I asked around a few months back, it seemed like everyone I talked to already had a lease or plans to move in with someone. I wasn’t holding out much hope, really… January/February is kind of an odd time of year to move. The other problem with finding a roommate is that I’m not willing to move in with a complete stranger. It had to be someone I knew at least a little bit.

Well, long story short, through what I guess is a good amount of luck and random timing, I found myself a roommate who needs a place right around the same time: Tim Given (another Sig, for those of you who don’t know him). He actually already has a place in mind – a 2/1 duplex that works out to $450 a person, which more than justifies me getting the hell out of Martha’s Vineyard. He just so happens to know all of the great deals in town because he works for the place renting the property.

Although the actual process of moving is kind of hideous, I’m pretty excited about the idea of this particular move. I think it’ll be nice to live somewhere new. There’s also something really great about having a roommate around to promote human interaction.

If I work it right, this could be a good opportunity for me to get rid of some of my many possessions, including my (broken) leather couch, the armchair that has stuffing falling out, the millions of pots and pans and pieces of Tupperware I’ve got sitting in my shelves, and maybe a few of my 50 million books… if I can part with them.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2007. | Permalink | 4 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: apartment living, rent hikes, roommates, u-hauls

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I have, however, just watched a trailer for a new movie from the director of Thank You For Smoking. The movie is called Juno. Watch for yourself:

This film has been much-buzzed-about on the various filmic blogs I follow. It was, I believe, a must-see must-acquire film at the Toronto Film Festival, which is always a good thing. The trailer projects memories of such films as Little Miss Sunshine, Junebug, and Thumbsucker, so to a certain degree it’ll surely be cinematic comfort food, simply because I like movies in that vein. Hopefully it’ll also have some of the unique bite of “Smoking” along with all of the quirkiness.

Now, I can’t promise I’ll blog more any time soon. That’s practically the digital equivalent of crying wolf. Just be assured that I’m here, and I’m reading constantly, always working towards my goal of reading 52 books in a year. Along those lines, I’ve discovered several new favorite authors recently… John Scalzi, for example, as well as fully confirming William Gibson’s place on the list.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 52 Books, 52 Weeks, Juno, movie trailers, Thank You For Smoking, Trailers

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It was also something like 79 degrees in here because it turns out Texas winter was just teasing us all once more…

…Then when I got up to have a glass of water so that I could wash the desert out of my mouth, I remembered that they turned the water off in my complex tonight because they’re doing work on the pipes.

Fun!

Needless to say, I hate trying to wash my hands with that hand disinfectant stuff… good thing I had some water in my Brita pitcher so I could improvise a hand-washing.

I had some What-a-Burger for a belated dinner, and then I sat around digesting while watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica from a few weeks ago. I’m behind on all of my shows lately, it seems…

Anyways, I think I’m going to try for bed again now.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2006. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
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My “constant readers” have probably noticed that I keep changing the look-and-feel of this blog about once every two weeks. It’s mostly because I get tired of looking at the same theme all the time, and there are plenty of free themes out there to choose from. A bigger change has happened this time, however, but it is (hopefully) fairly seamless and shouldn’t affect how people use this blog – basically I’ve changed blogging software again. I’ve used several different tools over the years – Blogger, Livejournal, Movable Type, and now WordPress. I had considered switching to WordPress before. Where Movable Type is closed-source and based on a payment model (if you want full support), WordPress is free and open source. I mostly didn’t switch for a long time because of inertia. Despite any issues I might have occasionally had with Movable Type, it was pretty stable, and got the job done. Changing things around would have been too much effort, especially since I had configured Movable Type the way I liked it – I wasn’t sure if I could recreate the same features in WordPress.

Then, about a month or so ago, the newest version of Movable Type starting behaving pretty strangely, throwing up weird errors and generally taking forever to build new entries. I also noticed from looking at Beau’s site that my copy of Movable Type was actually missing some of the features I was supposed to have, despite the fact that I had installed the same version on both of our sites. The biggest problem was that the “save post” button had stopped working, and it was driving me crazy.

I finally decided at that point to just do a complete clean install of Movable Type to see if that would fix my problems. I had to export all of my old entries and import them back into a new installation of MT. I also had to track down all of the helpful plugins I was using and re-install them. The whole effort took a good night’s work sitting in front of a computer, but when I was done, MT was running better than ever, and it looked like all of the kinks had been ironed out… except that it still took forever to “rebuild” posts, and every once in a while I’d get a weird server error and have to rebuild again and again. I dealt with it, though, because I had invested too much time into MT and didn’t want to make the change… until this week.

I recently set up a blog for my friend Tony. I installed WordPress on the site because I thought it’d be easier to set up and use for someone non-technical. Movable Type is great, but it’s got quite the learning curve. Part of setting the site up meant that I had to go into the WordPress dashboard and play around with the options, and as I spent more time in there trying to figure out how to configure the blog to Tony’s liking, I found more and more features that seemed really great/useful. The biggest draw is the WYSIWYG editor built into WordPress – on Movable Type, I had been working with a plugin based on Textile for a long time to make it so that I didn’t have to write complicated HTML just to post an image, but WordPress makes thing much easier right out of the box.

So, earlier this week I sat down one night and started looking into what it’d take to make the switch. I tracked down all of the plugins I’d need, I exported all of my entries, and I got cracking. You see the results before you now. There were a few hiccups along the way, and I am still finding the occasional entry that didn’t format correctly, but for the most part, things look pretty good. I’d recommend WordPress to others. It’s a much more elegant blogging system, and It’s much easier to change things around.

The plugins are great, but the best part is that when I needed to reconfigure a few things, I could just jump in and edit the PHP code, no problem – this is one of the biggest differences between WordPress and Movable Type. MT is written in a language that I have no familiarity with, and it’s much more difficult to dive in and start tinkering with the MT code. MT also uses proprietary tags to make the template files, where WordPress just uses PHP code and function calls.

As you can tell, I’m pretty happy with the switch so far, although I’m still working on changing around a few things.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2006. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
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!/images/appy.jpg!

She weighs 17.7. pounds. She has gained an entire pound since the last time she went to the vet. Needless to say, she gets to go on a diet. At least she didn’t pee or shit in her box, thank you very much.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2006. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
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I took Jackson to the vet today – he was waaaaaaaay overdue. Part of the reason I put it off for so long is because the vet is damnably expensive, and if your pet seems pretty healthy… it’s kind hard to pony up the cash for the whole thing. I had a recent conversation with someone who had a cat that got pretty sick very suddenly, however… and I instantly felt guilty, so I set up both cats with appointments.

The whole thing was extra-special fun, of course, because _Jackson Does Not Like Riding in The Car_.

He demonstrated his anger/fear by peeing in his box before I even made it on the freeway, and proceeded to take a shit about 2 minutes later. I was barely in the car five minutes before he had made a complete mess of himself and stunk up the whole place. When we finally made it to the vet’s office, he sat in his box howling like he was being murdered, and the other customers in the office just looked at me like I was a terrible kitty-daddy.

All the other kitties were sitting quietly in their carriers looking thoroughly calm and well-behaved, while Jackson was moaning up a storm and trying to push his head through a 1-inch hole he found in the side of the box.

When we finally made it to a room and I pulled him out, he had soaked himself and had shed about half his weight in fur. He was completely well-behaved once he was out of the box, though… maybe I just have a claustrophobic cat, I dunno.

Appollonia has her appointment two weeks from now… luckily she’s a complete angel in the car.

© Jeff for Unsquare Dance, 2006. | Permalink | No comments | Add to del.icio.us
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