Cool, and Cyrillic

This is very cool. It’s an explanation of how Russian written on Western keyboards leads to new words for things. From the ever-marvellous Language Log.

PeBloWriMo is over but I won’t stop blogging entirely; however, it felt like too many of my posts were lytdybrs (see link in previous paragraph) and I won’t write unless I have some germ of an inkling of what to say. Or fun links to post.

Failure and atonement

Yes, yes, I failed. I didn’t manage to blog every day during PeBloWriMo. I guess I got fed up with writing pointless posts just for the sake of writing, and also I got home much later from choir practice last night than I’d intended. But still, I wasn’t supposed to fail, and definitely not with only two days left to go.

I did write a lot yesterday, though, and ended up submitting a chapter to my supervisor, plus an updated and corrected version of the chapter I sent her last week. So that’s some writing done. And then I had a – not sleepless, but insufficiently sleepful, night, so am not doing much of anything today. The “not much” includes watching some episode commentaries on Buffy the Vampire Slayer; we’re re-watching the series, and are currently just started on season 3, so I’m watching a couple of Season 2 episodes, which unfortunately are commented (commentaried??) by one of the series’ staff who says the most inane and frankly rather stupid things. This bothers me. I may have some more specific comments to make later, after I’ve watched the whole episode.

Batter in, water out

Our new bed arrived! At least three weeks earlier than we thought it would! So now the waterbed era is over. Because we get attached to inanimate things in our family, we are going to miss it, but I am very much looking forward to trying out the new one. However, we first have to empty the water mattress – quite possibly we won’t be able to do that tonight.

Also, I am halfway through the Personal Blog Writing Month, and have so far written every day. Some days there hasn’t been much to say really, but most days I have had things I wanted to say; when I’m in the non-blogging state I always feel too selfconscious to get with the writing even when there has been something on my mind to blog about, so this having to write every day is in fact very good for me. I have even had pingbacks 🙂
PeBloWriMo was Jukka’s own initiative, by the way, and a thumping good one it is too. He, too, has kept it up. Go us!

Phony post

One of the things I’ll write about soon is my new phone. Which I’m posting this from. Which is unbelievably geeky given that I am sitting by the computer. Go me!

PeBloWriMo

It is Personal Blog Writing Month. I don’t know who proclaimed it, I’ve only seen it in Jukka’s LiveJournal, but that’s good enough for me. I will try to keep it, just because.

And it had been so long since I last blogged that I’d forgotten my password. But WordPress.com were very efficientl about allowing me to reset it; in this way they are the exact opposite of Blogger/Google, where if you forget your password you won’t get any assistance in getting a new one.

Anyway. It is February 2008, and That Thesis is nowhere near finished. I have spent the last two weeks working really hard and accomplishing nothing at all, until I got sick with stress, yesterday. And that’s all I am going to say about that.

At least it’s finally been snowing a little. Nothing like enough, and it’s probably going away again really soon, but at least there is some snow. And I have tea and two Jarre albums, which Johan bought for me yesterday at Emusic. Nostalgia galore!

Hans^*, there is now a comments RSS feed – check the bottom right corner.

Comments moderation is automatic on the wordpress.com site, presumably for good reason, socomments won’t show up until I’ve had a chance to moderate them. Most days I’m at the computer all day, of course, and there are very few comments anyway so it’s not really a problem.

^*CMC address alert

My first post using WordPress – all the previous posts are imported from Blogger. (Although over 200 posts were not imported, so I’ll have to do that by hand, yay. I will do it, though, even if those posts are five years old – I want the complete thing to be here.)

It feels nice to be here though. Clean, somehow.

[added later: And things work!]

Kudos to the Google/Blogger people. A few hours ago I reported a problem with the archiving of Néablog, and now I suddenly notice that they’ve fixed it. I have been whinging about Blogger’s various misbehaviours so much, I thought I’d mention some positive stuff as well 🙂

I have grumbled about Blogger, repeatedly, in the five years and a bit that Néablog has (intermittently) existed, but I believe I am approaching the point where I’ll do something about moving to another platform. I’m tired of having all non-English characters in my older postings mangled, I’m tired of the archiving system only sort of working, and above all I’m tired of the time it takes to do the simplest update. One of the defining characteristics of a weblog is that it’s a rapid medium; slower than chat but much faster than offline writing. And ever since Google bought Blogger, posting to the blog, updating the template, adding tags to postings and everything else that involves writing to the blog takes at least several minutes every time. One of my recent posts took over a quarter of an hour to publish. In the olden days before Google, it was possible to publish just the index page of the blog; now, however, the entire blog is re-published, all 630-something posts each time I do an update, however small. Which means, of course, that the non-English chars in my older posts stay mangled, for I don’t have the hours it would take to update the posts (and in any case there is no guarantee they won’t be mangled again, even though I use ASCII codes these days.) Of course one is not supposed to publish to another domain than blogspot, and we who do so are punished for it. It just isn’t funny any longer.

Besides, I am tired of the washed-out look of this thing, but there is no way I’d start playing around with templates given how long an update takes.

So. WordPress, I think. It is possible to install it on the server – I’d have to check with Walter if it’s possible – or I could just import this whole blog to wordpress.com. I have already registered an account there.

I’m thinking of moving this here blog to wordpress.com. Is that a good or a bad idea? Am not too bothered about changing the URL (and obviously there will be links and redirects and things), but is WordPress as good as it looks? Comments welcome.