/karen/

Story: 6/10/08-8/10/08

Wednesday, 22 October, 2008

Monday 6/10/08

I was up at 8:30. I ate breakfast, read my Bible and prayed, then played with Wii Fit. I had a shower and then packed up the Wii. Our neighbour rang and said she was having a barbecue and could we move the car? I told her we were just about to leave, but we ended up leaving a bit later than that. It was really hard to get out because the other neighbour was parked in the turning space which meant there was very little room to manoeuvre out of there, short of reversing straight up the driveway. Jenny messaged to say she was running late and I passed the message onto my mum.

We drove to my mum and Peter's place. Ben had never been there before. We parked in the visitor's spot and, because I had keys, I took us straight upstairs. My mum wasn't happy with the current configuration of the lounge room, so we helped her turn it around 90 degrees. I set up Wii Fit and got her to try some of the games as she was thinking of buying one. Jenny arrived around then.

Peter made us lunch (antipasto, plus two courses of pasta). Then we had a break where it was back to Wii Fit. Ben demonstrated the soccer ball heading game (he's very good at it) and then Jenny and Ben got their presents.

My mum was sleepy then so had a nap. Peter gave us the grand tour before we headed off. He got my mum's luggage with wheels out of their storage area for me so I could take it to Brisbane. Then we drove home, dropping Jenny off at the station on the way.

At home, I got through the last lot of newsletters from The New York Times and actually felt up-to-date for once. Ben went to see Yeasayer at the Oxford Art Factory with his friends. They were supposed to go on Tuesday night but the Oxford Art Factory changed the date of the gig at the last minute. They claimed they emailed everyone, but neither Ben nor any of his friends received anything from them, and were rather annoyed at the date change. Fortunately they were all able to make it.

I had leftovers for dinner and started working at moving Bec's blog from Blogger to Expression Engine. I was trying to follow these instructions (instruction one being watch this video) but then realised that they were several years old and that Blogger had changed their templates since then. So I tried to reconstruct it, based on my Movable Type archives and the current Blogger template tags. This is what I used:

<Blogger>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
TITLE: <$BlogItemTitle$>
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 0
CONVERT BREAKS: xhtml
ALLOW PINGS: 0

DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
-----
EXTENDED BODY:

-----
EXCERPT:

-----
KEYWORDS:

<BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<BlogItemComments>
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: <$BlogCommentAuthor$>
EMAIL:
IP:
URL:
DATE: <$BlogCommentDateTime$>
<$BlogCommentBody$>
</BlogItemComments>
</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
--------
</Blogger>

First time around, I did the export and then import, and then realised I got the tag wrong for the post titles. I re-exported, re-imported and got it all working, though, because Blogger inserts all this stupid code around, the commenter's names, it means that none of them show up. (I am not working up the energy to do the import again, but I think what I'll do this time is cut and paste all of Bec's archive into one file by year instead of importing them month by month because silly Blogger doesn't do year archives.)

The whole process left me rather annoyed at Blogger. As a content management system, even though it's easy to use, it's not very flexible, and, to me, it seems rather tyrannical (for want of a better word) to set things up so that it's hard for users to opt out and take their content with them if they want to. (That said, I've heard WordPress is much the same in that respect.)

Anyway, despite Bec and I declaring very IM that “Sleep is for the weak!”, I ended up going to bed around midnight and felt terrible the next day.

Tuesday 7/10/08

I woke at 6:45, then was in the office by 7:30. I was working today because I was having Friday off. I brought breakfast with me and pretty much started work straight away. I sent The Briefing off to Joy (minus only one article!) and spent the rest of the day doing Sola Panel things, dealing with email and occasionally tinkering with Bec's blog (as Bec did some tinkering of her own).

Bec and I had lunch together and talked blog things (which I must set aside some time to do or they will never happen). In the afternoon, I started on Faithful Writer acceptance letters and realised I didn't have all the bits I needed.

I left around 4:15 and went home via the variety discount store in Enmore. I was trying to find one of those empty bottles that you can fill with water and use to spray water on clothes when you're ironing (I'm not sure what they're called; spray bottles?) Supermarkets don't sell them, and the only other place I've ever seen them is in variety discount stores. They had some, so I bought one, as well as a few mini shelves for the cupboard.

Ben was asleep in the lounge when I got home. I played with Wii Fit for an hour, had a shower, did three loads of laundry and handwashed the clothes that needed handwashing. Ben made coconut chili basil chicken for dinner. We watched The Simpsons and NCIS, then more Simpsons. I knitted furiously, trying to finish George's shawl. I went to bed at 12:30 which was far too late, and I still wasn't done.

Wednesday 8/10/08

I was up at 7:30. I did some work at home (Sola Panel stuff) and then went into work, arriving at 10. I dealt with email, fiddled with Briefing RSS feeds, installed the ShareThis widget on all relevant pages and created some Bookface pages for The Briefing and Matthias Media. I kept having to call Ben about the RSS feeds and it was really frustrating, but I learned a bit more about Expression Engine and conditional global variables.

Elsie came, and we ate lunch and prayed. We talked about moving and property and so on. Then in the afternoon I pushed on, doing Positions Vacant things and fiddling with Photoshop. My computer was being really really slow and annoying.

At 6:50 I left for Bible study, which was later than I should have left. I was 10 minutes late. We ate a nice dinner at Tom and Jenny's, then did a study on engaging pop culture. George was away so I was able to knit while we discussed Harry Potter, Stephenie Meyer (author of those vampire books—Twilight, Breaking Dawn, etc. The movie of Twilight will be out later this year) and so on. It was an interesting discussion, and raised for me all sorts of other questions to do with how I relate to culture—stuff to do with property, weight and health, and babies, and so on.

I drove home, had a shower and packed. I tried to do stuff online—like check in, look up the weather in Brisbane and do the redirect on Bec's blog (I failed at that one; I can't master .htaccess either). I went to bed at 12:30 once again.

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