Sometimes, Late in the Night, It's Just Me and My Insomnia

This is Ambien. It is nectar direct from the land of Morpheus himself. Nearly the perfect sleeping draught, peaceful and gradual is your descent into his arms–although I urge you to NOT do anything vital, like driving or, a few minutes after taking it, sitting up straight.

The best part about Ambien, apart from the utter effectiveness, is that there’s no hangover effect. None. Zero. Zip. It’s as though you’d gone to sleep naturally.

Gods know it’s been a long time since I’ve done that, even though these days I prefer to spend my weekends trying to sleep than do anything else.

W00t! Power just went out on the island!

Let’s hear it for UPS’s and laptops with their own batteries!

Photography: Repoort

And I don’t think there were any particularly gruesome storms. I hope that it wasn’t just my place. But then again, power is power (e.g., unreliable) on the island, so it’s likely affecting a large number of folks.

Hmmm. I hear sirens. Good sign for me, bad sign for whoever’s at the power company. I hope nobody is hurt.

Time to break out the iPod nano, and break off the internet connection.

Introducing Area-Specific Derivations! (And a WordPress Move)

Photography: that kat chick

I finally moved to WordPress, which was much painful, and got some hosting at EsoSoft–the same guys who host Smart Bitches, Trashy Books of recent “justified and amusing tearing apart of Cassie Edwards” fame.

(EsoSoft are very nice folks and got me set up in less than a day. With WordPress installed with the trimmings.)

What does this mean for you?

Ready for the weekend

The job.

It eated me.

LOLcat emergency
reserve post activated!

(yes, I’m so ready for the weekend. but for now I’ll just take 8 hours of sleep.)

Partially Clips *snerk* Book Editor

This is just SO very fitting.

The Critical Backup: A Review of BlogBackupOnline Beta

Backing up a blog can be a difficult business. Yet this is one of the most important issues for any blog–professional, amateur, or personal.

Taking care of this necessary business as cleanly as possible is important:

• Backups should be easy to make, otherwise you’ll be less inclined to spend the effort.
• Backups should be automated, otherwise you won’t be backing up regularly and might even forget.
• Backups should be stored somewhere other than where your blog is hosted, otherwise whatever disaster befalls your primary data will also likely happen to your backups. Self-hosting bloggers, this means you.
• Backups should be easily restorable.

For almost any blog, whether self-hosted or not, setting up your backup procedure is not part and parcel of your blogging software. (It’s worse in the case of non-self-hosted blogs.) And even for someone like me, who’s not inexperienced when it comes to getting nightly archives of a database running and kicked over to Amazon S3 automatically, creating a procedure that follows all of the above is extremely difficult and time-consuming. Gods help you if it breaks and you don’t notice, too.

With these concerns in mind, I spent quite a long time searching for blog backup solutions. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that someone had actually decided to try to make a business of making something as difficult as backups easy:

Spontaneous Derivation’s First Entrecard

There’s a new blogging shiny out there, called Entrecard.

Entrecard is basically a new blogging network based off the old-fashioned idea of business cards; each blog has a 125×125 “card” that they can drop off at some other target site with Entrecard. You earn credits every time you leave your business card with someone else, or someone leaves their business card with you.

If you amass enough credits, you can pay to have your card appear on someone else’s Entrecard widget on their site. The credits you pay go to them.

It’s a neat little economic system that basically generates the old-fashioned web rings in a less centralized way. When I’ve visited Entrecard sites and started clicking on all the little cards, I would see related sites (because of course that’s where people are most likely to a) drop off cards and b) accept the dropped off cards and offers of advertisement).

More information available at Problogger’s article about Entrecard.

Hopefully your Entrecard is cool-lookin’ and people won’t mind having it on their site.

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

This Entrecard business also inspired me to create logos for Spontaneous Derivation. I eventually used the symbol for a partial derivative (the thing that looks like backwards six, or a flipped nine).

And I replaced Blogger’s shortcut icon with my own:

Sort of a productive day, anyways.

Spontaneous Derivation's First Entrecard

There’s a new blogging shiny out there, called Entrecard.

Entrecard is basically a new blogging network based off the old-fashioned idea of business cards; each blog has a 125×125 “card” that they can drop off at some other target site with Entrecard. You earn credits every time you leave your business card with someone else, or someone leaves their business card with you.

If you amass enough credits, you can pay to have your card appear on someone else’s Entrecard widget on their site. The credits you pay go to them.

It’s a neat little economic system that basically generates the old-fashioned web rings in a less centralized way. When I’ve visited Entrecard sites and started clicking on all the little cards, I would see related sites (because of course that’s where people are most likely to a) drop off cards and b) accept the dropped off cards and offers of advertisement).

More information available at Problogger’s article about Entrecard.

Hopefully your Entrecard is cool-lookin’ and people won’t mind having it on their site.

I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.

This Entrecard business also inspired me to create logos for Spontaneous Derivation. I eventually used the symbol for a partial derivative (the thing that looks like backwards six, or a flipped nine).

And I replaced Blogger’s shortcut icon with my own:

Sort of a productive day, anyways.

The Hierarchy of Trees

Bainbridge Island: home of very tall trees that merge and mingle with what civilization exists, sometimes to fall in high winter winds over power lines and cause everyone to rethink priorities temporarily.

That’s my favorite part of winter.

Here are some pictures.

Aaah Books, I Could Eat You All Up

My weekend reading is here.

(No, you can’t see the three books near the bottom. Those are for my sekrit projekt.)

They are: