Scuffulans hirsutus

I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days, so things here will be even quieter than usual.

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It’s going to be about two months more and another operation before I have two working legs again. This is just a wee bit frustrating. I’d like to take more pictures, but until I can get down the front steps unaided, there’s no point to getting the camera out. I suppose I could do series of photos of my books, or my vinyl, or the unwashed dishes, or the junk mail an inch deep on the front room floor, but I don’t think there’s two months worth of interesting shots there. I’m considering renting or buying a folding wheelchair and bribing friends to take me out to the botanical garden (which will shortly become a very active site) and other interesting places, but even then that’s something I can’t do every day. It looks like Project 365 will stay on hold until April.

My left ankle, early Wednesday afternoon.

Project 365 is on hold while my ankle heals. Posting here in general will probably be sporadic until I can get around more easily.

Wednesday evening.

Shamus Young is the most dangerous sort of guy, with lots of ideas and the time and energy to implement them. He first came to my attention several years ago with The Lemon. Later there was The DM of the Rings. Currently he is one of the parties responsible for Chainmail Bikini. His most recent effort is a WordPress plugin, “Wavatars,” which I’ve installed here. If you leave a comment, your name will be accompanied by an eighty-pixel-square avatar determined by your email address. (If you have a Gravatar, as I do, that’s what you will see instead.) On a weblog like mine where comments are infrequent, these are just a cute novelty, but on sites where comment threads get lengthy, these could be useful for keeping the various writers straight.

If you like the idea but want something a little more macabre for your own site, consider MonsterID. (Via Aziz.)

According to the statistics counter, nobody has visited here since Friday afternoon. Now this site only gets a small fraction of the traffic that my other weblog does, but I seriously doubt that nobody at all has been here. More likely upgrading to the most recent version of WordPress broke the counter. If you should stop by here today, I’d appreciate it you leave a comment saying so, so I will know that the plugin isn’t working. Thank you.

Update: Thank you all for commenting. The statistics plugin definitely isn’t working, so I’ve disabled it for now.

If this works, it’s goodbye to Bad Behavior.

The recent daily pictures will be posted once I have a chance to go throough them all. There are about 2,500 of them to glance at.

Later this weekend I hope to fix the other problems with this weblog. I upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress. It didn’t fix the problem, but it did break the template. Whoopee.

Later: I think I’ve got it all straightened out now, and I’ve loaded the header image folder with my own photos.

I’ve just redirected the tancos2.net domain name to point to the same nameservers as tancos.net. The change will take a few days to propagate, but soon all the links to my old sites will either be redirected here or return 404s. You will still be able to visit the old sites for a few weeks more by substituting “tancos2.pmachinehosting.com” for “tancos2.net” in the URLs. However, I am cancelling my old host before the next service renewal in October, and after that the old sites will be gone. If you’ve been coming here by way one of my old pages and you want to keep track of my obsessions, this is your cue to update your links.

New poll

By a vote of seven to four, readers here declared Dolores Umbridge to be more evil than Bellatrix Lestrange. (Readers of my other weblog declared Umbridge to be the more loathsome, eleven to zero.)

There’s a new poll up in the sidebar now: which is more evil, Microsoft or Sony?

I discovered that there is already a weblog named Days of grass, days of straw. Therefore, I’m going to look for another name. I’ll be skimming through Lafferty, Gene Wolfe and Cordwainer Smith when I have time during the next few days to see what sounds right and hasn’t been taken. (There already is an Alpha Ralpha Boulevard, grrr.) In the meantime, this will be a weblog without a name.

This is the successor to Mixolydian Mode. Expect more of the same, including the same slow tempo, for the next few months. After that, there may be some changes. Or maybe not.

I’ve got the main blogroll up. I’ll add additional links and other curiosities in coming weeks. I probably won’t be able to import the content from my old weblog, but I will see if I can at least copy all the midi files over to my new host before I cancel the old account. I spent a ridiculous amount time on them over the years, and I don’t want them to disappear without a trace.

Iin case you’re wondering, the titles of this weblog and this post are stolen from an R.A. Lafferty story. It’s included in the collection Ringing Changes, long out of print but worth tracking down.