things i think i think

I promise.

There’s little to say that hasn’t been already said. Let’s get started.

Our first big storm of the season and it’s a doozie: I write this as another inch of the powdery-white stuff makes its way earthward — we’ve got about five inches on the ground so far and are expecting somewhere between 10 to 12 inches all told. No matter, I’ve got warm soup and a collection of graphic novels I picked up from the library today (Persepolis, the first volume of Sin City and a graphical take on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.)

In other, unrelated news, I came across my old high school photography class film negatives and a few prints I had stashed away in a binder. Among photos of my dogs, my brother and some other uninteresting things, I found some portraits of my grandparents. I took one to the local developer to have it printed at 8×10 so I can frame it – it will be a gift to my grandmother this Christmas. We sadly lost our grandfather this year and I hope that this can serve as a kind of tribute to him and to their relationship (with each other and with us.)

I hope everyone is keeping warm!

I was recently asked what I’ve been up to since being home from New Zealand (almost 6 weeks now) and I found myself at a loss for words because, the truth is, not much. But is that such a bad thing?

To be honest, my passivity is largely the result of not having a temporary job this winter. Not that I haven’t tried: I’ve put in multiple calls to my employer during last year’s winter break (a huge clothing retailer which will remain nameless – hint: rhymes with Boredstrom) but never sealed the deal with anyone in Human Resources. But, like I’ve been saying all along, it seems unlikely that they’ll be a big market for $250 shirts considering the current economic state of affairs. Still, for a company that prides itself on customer service, they certainly don’t care about former or future employees. It’s all about the bottom line.

Therefore, jobless, I stand at the heart of suburbia: the longest drive I’ve taken in the past week was to pick up my brother from school some ten minutes away. Sure, it would be easy to get the doldrums, but I’m of the mind that being outrageously bored now will only make my return to Chicago that much more exciting. And I don’t think I’m wrong in that estimation. What’s wrong with reading graphic novels and watching television all day anyways?

Don’t judge me.

For those who are interested, I’ve recently reactivated my last.fm account and you can check out my profile page here. For those unfamiliar with last.fm, it’s basically a piece of software that tracks your iTunes listening habits and posts them online — it allows you to see what tracks you’ve listened to the most and whomever else in the last.fm community is tuning in to those tracks as well. Pretty nifty.

In a similar vein, I just registered myself on Twitter which is basically an open version of the mini-feed on Facebook: it asks the infamous question, ‘what are you doing?’ and you’re required to provide a response in 140 characters or less. Seems targeted towards an older market — basically those who can’t, or don’t care for, Facebook or (shudder) MySpace.

Welcome to the new WordPress, same as the old WordPress. Well, to all of you anyway.

I spent the better part of the last hour or so backing-up my databases and uploading the new WP files and performing the upgrade to version 2.7 and it’s really quite an improvement. There’s a completely new administrative control panel that keeps everything organized. It’s snappy and snazzy and that’s a plus — it’s a huge overhaul and a magnificent step-up from the jumbled clusterfuck that WP used to be. (And part of the reason I resisted blogging for so long.)

Obviously all of my handy-dandy plug-ins still need to catch up in their developments so that they’ll cooperate with the new version, but that’s just a matter of time. Also, the photo pages are still not working. Dammit. That’s life.

Hi all – just wanted to let you know that the photo pages are being a bit wonky and won’t give you the lightbox effect anymore. I think that this has something to do with a new WordPress update. Since my host, GoDaddy, can only ‘register’ one WordPress database — which would be my NZ blog — this one has to updated and changed manually. The only problem is that I’m having an awfully hard time figuring out how to go about updating it manually.

Anyways, bear with me while I attempt to retool th’ confounded thang.