Let's try blogspot

I'll try blogging over there at http://summa.blogspot.com for a while and see how it goes. I have 564 posts here, all done with emacs' muse-mode and pyblosxom. The problem is that pyblosxom rebuilds the entire blog every time I publish a post, which takes about 10 minutes and eats up an entire cpu's horsepower for the whole time. blogspot is quirky and often slow to respond, but it's faster than waiting 10 minutes to edit an already-published post. I may try moving my archives over there if I can find a tool to automate it.

That's "Uber Cool Nerd King" to you

The zeal of the converted

I've gone and done it. After adding a dozen more blogs and sites to my blogroll, I gave up and put them all in Google Reader. I'll still link to them from here but for daily browsing & reading, it's Google Reader.

Curley on fatherhood

Mr Curley over at Bethune Catholic has started an occasional series of posts on fatherhood; today's is very good. Here's the excerpt that struck me:

I am sure some of us are quick to praise. My Dad was. I knew when he was proud of me - and so did everyone around. If he met someone he knew while we were grocery shopping, (yes, my Dad did the grocery shopping - I think it had to do with loving his wife a lot) he made a point to tell that person how proud he was of me or whichever of his children were with him. We always knew Dad would notice our goodness.

I tell them at lot at home that I'm proud of them, but I'd never thought of doing it in public - letting them see me telling other people that I'm proud of them. Might have to do that, too.

Today's trek

Lotsa driving today. When Lisa returns from her physical therapy appointment, Sarah and I will head out across the wide flat prairie to Rantoul to make some deposits and open her first savings account. Then west over the northern reaches of the Sangamon River to the county clerk's office in downtown Decatur to get a copy of my birth certificate, which will be used on the north side of town to get a replacement Social Security card. Then Sam's Club for a few cheap bulk items and Aldi's for some other cheap stuff, then home.

Meanwhile I'll leave a large Mathematica program running at home, hoping that it will finally work. Programmers are professional optimists - "Surely it'll work this time!"

Also, I set up Haloscan comments and left a couple of test comments on the Rush in Manchester post, but the comment count is still zero. Grr.

Later. That was a long day! There were a few screwups along the way, either because we left in a rush without thinking through every detail or because I'm getting old and foggy.

There were two highlights of the trip. First was a visit to our old apartment in Rantoul (1100 Falcon Drive, Apt. 6). We lived there "in the Rantoul days", as the kids say: from July 1998, two months before Sarah was born, til January 2004 when she was about 5-1/2. She was deeply moved as she recalled how she and her brothers played in the back yard and under the tree in the front, and as we left she took some mementos: a wildflower from the yard, a stick and a brown autumnal leaf from the old tree out front, and in a last-minute impulse in the front yard she bent down and picked some blades of grass. She has a good heart.

On our way out of town we passed the Papa John's pizza joint from which we ordered many a meal in the Rantoul days. I promised her we'd look for one in Decatur and there it was on Route 51 - the second highlight of the trip! After a successful visit to the county clerk and Sam's (the SS office was already closed, the slackers) we stopped at Papa John's and ordered our old usuals. Their warm aroma filling the car brought back even more happy memories from the Rantoul days.

For the word mavens: is there a word for that quiet happy/sad reflection on personal history that hits when you visit "the old homestead" or somesuch?

Note to self: Aldi's margarine is about half the price per unit of Sam's.

Testing a new version of an old blog

A few years ago I started a blog devoted to writings about the mysteries of the Rosary, but like many of my ever-welling monomanias it didn't last all that long. Here's a new version, done in emacs and pyblosxom like this one. Pardon the dust in the corners.

Small-town news in the 21st century

This is the future of reporting - these jounalists know what to do with the internet (they could make their urls a little more friendly, though :-)

Don't miss Pauline Briney's weekly column called Methinks. She's been writing essays and poetry for decades and is one of the best essayists around. She was blogging like Lileks when Lileks was in diapers:

At my age, every day is a present and I intend to make the most of each one. Some of my friends say they hate birthdays and they hate getting older. Not me, I've never been an age that caused me to want to go back, because I've learned that every age has its own compensations. Well, I'm only 83 so I'll let you know more about more birthdays when I get old.

She has the Lileks eye for local history, too:

The Sept. 30, 1966 issue of the Findlay Enterprise included this portion of an advertisement for the Johnston’s supermarket located in Findlay. In the top left picture are Cratous and Rita Benner; in the bottom left picture is Gladys Mowry with an unidentified clerk; and Merle Minor is pictured in the photograph at right. Of interest to current-day shoppers, prices for items on sale included, for example, sirloin steak for 99 cents per pound; Del Monte tuna for 29 cents a flat; Meadow Gold ice cream for 69 cents per one-half gallon container; No. 1 Illinois Jonathan apples for 49 cents for a four-pound bag; and Banquet frozen meat pies, six eight-ounce pies for $1.

Orange and blue defined

So I'm working on a new pyblosxom version of my blog and I wondered what precise shades of orange and blue are used by the University of Illinois. Behold:

hail to the orange: #F47F24
hail to the blue: #003C7D