A nice frog I saw when I was working in Lowbanks a couple of weeks ago.
About the same time, and in the same field, I made a recording of crickets: Lowbanks Crickets, 15 Sep 02004. In the depths of winter, I’ll really need this sound as a reminder of what it can be like.
Today’s World Carfree Day, but in Toronto and Burlington, you’d never know it.
What have they done with Wrigley’s Extra Peppermint Gum? It’s got a big Improved Flavour banner, but it tastes kinda cinnamony, kinda soapy to me.
At least it doesn’t taste like Thrills Gum, the tagline of which is “it still tastes like soap!“. But Extra Peppermint gum was one of my favourites, and now I’ll have to try something else.
Would you call the singer of If You Want To Sing Out, Sing Out
a terrorist? The US Department of Homeland Security has just deported Yusuf Islam.
What a shower of hopeless gits …
I’m not quite there yet, but I’ve got all my old MT articles with the same IDs as they had under that CMS. I basically used DrBacchus’ More about migrating from MT to WP method, but tried to integrate Scott Hanson’s Export from WordPress. It was not a complete success, but I’ll document what I did here in the hope that it’s useful.
DrBacchus was using an older version of MT, while I’m using the most recent version. I found that the file you have to edit to insert IDs is lib/MT/ImportExport.pm — not lib/MT/App/CMS.pm.
If you can avoid the temptation of adding blog entries to WP before importing from MT, do so. It’s a royal pain to add them later.
I used the WP MT-export module to export all my blog entries, then trimmed out the existing entries which had been entered in MT. I then added entry IDs to the export file (an awk one-liner: awk 'BEGIN{id=323;} {print;} /^STATUS: / {print "ID:", id; id++;}' worked for me, as my highest MT article ID was 322). I then joined the export files from MT and WP in one big ‘export.txt’ file.
If you have existing WP entries, you’ll have to get rid of them. I found that going directly into the database, and doing:
delete from wp_posts;
delete from wp_comments;
would do it.
Don’t forget to patch import-mt.php as per DrB’s instructions before importing.
Here’s where the pain comes in — WP wouldn’t import the text from the entries created in MT. It restored all the metadata, but not the content. So I had to manually patch in the entries from the export file.
I still have to work out rewrite rules for permalinks, but at least everything’s on the server where it should be. Maybe John’s Moved To WordPress rewrite rules will help me, as I think that my host (1and1) may not be doing entirely halal things with .htaccess support.
I just got my blog working pretty close to the way I want it to be again. I should be back up and posting.
Big huge apologies to Catherine, with whom I was quite unnecessarily grouchy while this was not working. Sorry, Hen!
— The above written on an IBM Wheelwriter 10 Series II, using the Thesis PS printwheel.
Please, online companies, whatever you do, don’t send users’ usernames and passwords in clear over e-mail. I’ve just ordered from Future Photo and delivery.ca, and both do this. Worse still, delivery.ca (or at least their Pizzaville service) allows you to save credit card information on their site.
As one who is just recovering from more than $8000 of fraudulent transactions on his card, this does not inspire confidence.
Judith & Steve called me again. Steve treated me to a great version of ‘Skin Game’ (from Too Much Fun!) over the phone. I think having one of the elder statesmen of psych-folk play a personal concert for me while I waited for the Bathurst streetcar to take me to the CNE must be one of the weirder episodes in my life.
… is for sale. Enquire within. Being perfectly gruntled, I have no need for it.
If you are a disgruntled former employee, or would like to start a forum for disgruntled former employees, this would be perfect.
I found we had some of the best mini traffic cones ever in the office. They’re really tough, made of a kind of squishy plastic. We also have full-sized ones of the same material. Don’t know where we got them, but if Robyn Hitchcock ever starts up his cone artwork again, these would be perfect for miniatures.
The Bruce Weiner Microcar Museum is a joy of a website. It’s the first site for a very long time that I’ve spent more than an hour at, browsing through the meticulously compiled catalogue. It shows that not all cars have to be huge SUVs; most of the engines here are under 500cc, yet they still provide mobility.
My Future Photo just arrived. I didn’t know that Canada Post could move so quickly. The quality’s great, too.
I’ve been playing too much Kingdom of Loathing, an extremely silly RPG. Its stick-man graphics are the best.
It seems that yesterday was probably our last Grocery Gateway delivery. The somewhat dejected driver said that service as we know it ends on Friday. If anything of the company remains, it won’t deliver the same range of stock, and it very probably won’t deliver in Scarborough.
Apart from their recent payment debacle (where they claimed that MasterCard had stopped a payment fully two months after the transaction — and afterwards, Grocery Gateway’s payments department was spectacularly rude to me, and gave me derisory compensation for the half day I wasted sorting out their error), we’ve found them to be useful. Most of our 40+ deliveries have been as we ordered, and on time. We’ll have to find an alternative now.
I’m disappointed that they weren’t more of a success. They didn’t seem to advertise very well, and never played their environmental card one bit. I don’t know how many car journeys a full grocery delivery van could cut out, but it’s a sane, rational way of dealing with our pollution problem.
Waitaminute — sane, rational, anti-pollution, North America? What was I thinking?
The sumachs are beginning to flame, trees are beginning to brown, and I
haven’t seen a groundhog for days. Looks like it’s doing that autumn thing.
Hey little leaf, lying on the ground
Now you’re turning slightly brown.
Why don’t you hop right back on the tree?
Turn the colour green like you’re meant to be.
— “Same Old Man”, The Holy Modal Rounders.
I’ve just ordered some digital prints from Future Photo. Their website seems to work pretty well. Let’s see how they turn out.
I do have one complaint — they send your username and password in clear
text by e-mail when you register. Bad futureshop, no FMCG!
Got two messages from the taller Holy Modal Rounder, Steve Weber,
tonight. He was jamming away, and recorded a great song for me, Blue Navigator.