music 1 Comment

Mmm… Free iPod…

iPod As opposed to Aaron‘s idea of getting an iPod and paying it off over one interest-free year, thanks to credit from Musician’s Friend, I got sucked into the Get a Free iPod craze.

Yes, there’s always a catch, and this offer is no exception. First, you have to complete an offer—I chose to sign up for BMG, which was pretty painless. I didn’t really expect even this much of the process to work… but, lo and behold, I received an e-mail from the nice FreeiPods.com people today, saying that I’d completed my offer.

Well, hot damn.

Now all I have to do is shill my friends.

See, that’s Step 2: I have to refer five friends to the site and get them to complete offers, too. The best offers listed are the BMG signup that I did, maybe the Blockbuster Online deal (sounds like NetFlix to me), or join the Columbia House DVD Club, or subscribe to USA Today (that wouldn’t be bad). Of course, if you don’t have enough credit cards in your wallet, there’s over half a dozen of those to try out for, too.

Soooo… if you’re so inclined, please consider yourself invited to check out the Free iPods scheme. If not… well… Aaron’s probably going to buy himself one, anyway. I’m sure he’ll share.

Right, honey-muffin…?

the ongoing saga of my job

Blogging at Work?!

Here’s a revolution in technology: Not-Really-Realtime Blogging. This bleeding-edge technique allows for employees in a network-monitored work environment to write blog entries during the day, and post them with a backdated timestamp as soon as they return home to a blog-safe network.

It’s called e-mail. 😛

So, here I sit, at the reception desk, taking my required turn manning the desk. Sure, I still have my normal work to do (loan changes this week), but it gets awful boring out here with no music to listen to and no conversations to eavesdrop on. So, while no one is walking past the desk, I’m taking a few moments to blog to myself, for posting when I get home.

I decided to go on Induction this week, to jump-start myself back into losing weight. I haven’t gained any weight recently—in fact, I lost half a pound after Thanksgiving weekend. How I managed that, I’m not entirely sure, as I ate like… well, like normal, like everybody else. Sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes and stuffing and pie and ice cream and cupcakes… I was so full. Ugh. I couldn’t eat like that all the time. Not anymore.

Anyway, I’m currently at an even 200 lbs, in case you’ve been jonesing for a weight-loss update. I think my lowest point was 199.5, and that was about three months ago. I’ve been steady at 200.5 ever since. I’ve been fairly content up until recently, since my new weight felt so much more normal than fifty pounds ago. Now, though, I’m feeling frumpy again, and realizing that I still have another 20 or 25 pounds to go before I’ll feel REALLY normal.

Well, people are starting to trickle out of the building, and I should really get some more work done before I go in another hour. This wasn’t too bad of an afternoon out at the reception desk, though… chatting with myself (and with James, who covered my break) really helped to pass the time.

Wouldn’t want to do it every day, though.

site-related 4 Comments

Movable Type 3.1 Upgrade Successful

Well, everything seems to have gone smoothly with the MT upgrade. I tried putzing with the “dynamic page generation,” but all it seemed to do was b0rk my one category page (although it did reduce the rebuild time). So, I’m not using the dynamic page generation yet… not until I do a little more research and find out what the big hype is all about.

I do know that there’s a lot about this whole thing that I haven’t been utilizing to its fullest extent, even with the old version of MT. For instance, I’d wanted to include a different sidebar (see right) with each category index page—say, photography links for my Photography category, and low-carb links for my Atkins category, and links to concert tours and reviews and such for my Reviews category. It seems that, while MT still doesn’t support what I’d wanted to do, there is a plug-in that can do this for me. So, I’ll probably mess with that sometime tomorrow.

There’s plenty of other blog things for me to research in the future, too, like pinging for trackbacks and such. I just can’t think of any mainstream blog tracker thingy that would give a shit if little ol’ me had an update. :-/ Do people really just surf off of places like blo.gs or weblogs.com?

Since I switched to PHP, and deleted all my HTML-based individual archives, I’ve also been having some visitors get 404 Not Found messages. D’oh! So, I need to go into my HostRocket Control Panel and make a custom 404 Error page saying to try changing the .htm to a .php to view the page. Awfully ghetto of me, but… *shrug*

Anyway, fun times ahead. Prepare to see more happy categorized entries from Yours Truly. @whee!

site-related 4 Comments

Happy Thanksgiving!

Well, how about that? I managed to whip together a Thanksgiving theme just in time. The most time-consuming part was locating appropriate images online for the background. Props go out to About.com for the pumpkins and the gourd, and to the Google Image Search for finding me the other gourd image.

In other site-related news, I imported entries from April 2004 last night. Now you can read about such exciting ventures as… well… us buying home improvement supplies from Home Depot? My review of Kill Bill Volume 2? Some random couple “parking” on my street? Yeah. Hit the archives for more exciting archived goodness.

I’m also contemplating upgrading to Movable Type 3.1 sometime in the near future, mainly to see what kind of category support it has. (I’ve been assigning categories to all of my entries, but have only been actively using the photography category.) So, if the site goes all wonky sometime in the next few days, you’ll know why.

Let’s hear it for four-day weekends. Word.