photographs and random miscellaney from my brain
Looks like I was able to upgrade to 2.3.3 without any major problems, of course now it’s not publishing content to any of my new posts. I deactivated FCKEditor to see if that was the source of the problem (I hope!). More potential broken-ness to come as I start mucking around with themes in the next few weeks.
I’m attempting to upgrade to the latest version of wordpress. I fully expect this to screw up my blog for some amount of time.
Those who know me know that I am a total electronics junkie. But I am also a sort-of rational consumer, so I’ve been waiting (and waiting) for this darn high-definition DVD format war to end. And it looks like it has…
Toshiba to Give Up on HD Format, Ceding Field to Sony – New York Times
Yay. Of course, now I apparently have to wait until the end of this year, when “Blu-Ray 2.0” is released…
There were a lot of reasons why I switched from a windows pc to a mac back in 2002, including obsessive amounts of time at various retailers playing with the demo, but this commercial was one of the things that pushed me over the edge. Still awesome today, even though the imac itself is now obsolete.
When the iphone was first announced, I oohed and aahed, and thought it was the prettiest thing ever, and boy did I want one.
But…
I, and everyone I know, is on Verizon. My best friend from high school actually said she wouldn’t answer her phone when I called because she uses up all of her non-"in" network minutes for work, so she relies on her verizon-verizon free minutes to speak to everyone else (she was mostly joking, but still…)
My contract didn’t end until March.
When I first moved to NY, I had AT&T, and dropped them almost immediately because of their suckage. And they were a total pain in the ass about moving from Philadelphia to NY and then cancelling my service.
Then I was thinking, wouldn’t it be cool to have the ipod aspects of the iphone without the phone? And lo and behold, the ipod touch. So now I really need one of these. But I’m also, of course, thinking about how the "next" version will have more memory….
Such problems.
For some months now, I’ve been researching buying a digital SLR camera – tomorrow I’m going to go down to B&H and get a Nikon D80 and a couple of lenses. But I was down near Union Square today, so I decided to go into Circuit City just to see if they had what I wanted and if so, at what price.
I make my way over to the cameras, where there are about 6 sales associates just standing around talking to one another. I actually had to ask one of them to move so that I could actually look at the D80. Not once, while I was testing out a camera with a price tag of over $1,000, did any of these people ask whether they could help me with anything (nevermind that B&H has the thing for over $200 less). I must have played around with the thing for a good 10 minutes as well, while they all stood around and gossiped about their co-workers.
Nice, right?
So, after clearly deciding that waiting until Sunday for B&H to be open was clearly the better idea, I figure that, as long as I’m at Circuit City, I might as well pick up some print cartridges for my printer, since I didn’t have any spare ones. I find the ones that I need and get on line. Where there are at least 20 people in front of me.
And one person at the register. Who is inspecting every single piece of merchandise as if she’s got to take a quiz before she scans the UPC code. The guy behind me in line and I actually had a good, 15 minute, conversation about the inadequacy of the service there before I got to the register.
Needless to say, I made a point of refusing to show my receipt at the door when I left. Just because I felt like making someone else’s day a little more miserable at that point.
I mean, none of these things was the worst thing to happen to me on a shopping trip (by far), but I had wandered into the store in a perfectly good mood, and by the time I left I was practically seething.
I’m not saying that I would have necessarily bought the camera there, but given the price match guarantees that they make, and the fact that I had all of the info about the camera printed out from B&H’s website in my bag, I could have easily gotten it at CC at the same price I’m going to pay tomorrow. But instead, I’m going to make a brand new trip, to a really inconvenient part of town, to a store that isn’t open on Saturdays (and that gives me a bit of claustrophobia because it’s so overwhelming with stuff) because no one could be bothered to even say hello to the girl checking out the most expensive camera in the store. Even though they were standing right next to her.
The compact disc is 25 years old today. And in the hard-learned lesson of “never let your ten year old brother buy your first CD,” The first CD I ever owned was “Pump”, by Aerosmith.
And yes, I still own it – “Janie’s Got a Gun” is an awesome song. I don’t care what anyone else says.
(To be fair to myself, I didn’t actually “let” my brother do anything – the CD player was a gift from my parents for my 16th birthday, and so they had my brother give me a CD as a gift so that I’d actually have something to listen to).
OK. So I’ve figured a few things out with the RSS feed. If you click on the link directly at the bottom of the page, you’re going to get an error message (unless you’re in an old version of IE, because it doesn’t require strict HTML formatting). The problem is that there’s something in my files that’s inserting an extra blank line at the beginning of the feed page. Unfortunately, I’ve gone through every single file and deleted all of the extraneous blank spaces I could find, and I’m still having the same problem.
However.
If you type in the feed address (or copy it) into most feed readers or aggregators (or use the "subscribe" button in a reader like Google reader), it gets picked up absolutely fine. I’ve downloaded a few different freeware RSS readers to test it out, and there aren’t any problems so far. So for now, I think I’m going to leave it alone, before I end up "tweaking" my blog files too much and accidentally creating some other, bigger problem.
The feed address, for your reference, is http://www.very-simple.com/blog/feed/
Do you know what I hate? when I actually have to start wishing for bad things to happen to my computer so that I have an excuse to buy a new one.