It’s very windy here. The power went out for a second just now, messing up my computer more than a little bit (I was in the middle of a backup).

There’s a wonderful, wonderful picture of Neva and Mary at Cindy’s wedding on this blog post from her photographer.

I have an extra (legal, paid-for) registration code for Diner Dash 2 if anyone wants it.

Things you buy from Apple have always come with the cryptic return address name “ACI.” The box I got today just says “AI.” They sure are thorough when they change the name of the company to remove “Computer.”

I bought the first two issues of the Buffy Season 8 comic book on eBay and subscribed to the rest. I’ve never bought a comics subscription in my life. I refer you to five entries ago, when I declared I’m a dork.

Lastly, and this is Big News, that box from Apple? Yes, CS3 is here, in my hands. I may be able to run Illustrator this afternoon on my actual production machine.

Just wholesale steal emails to her and put them up as blog posts, that is.

I did not, in fact, go to Ikea today. I’ll go next weekend.

Instead, I decided to stay home, and, from about 8:30 until about 10:15*, listen to one of my neighbors (or more; I couldn’t tell which direction) hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer. I can’t believe they hammered for so long without a break. They must have gone in shifts. They must have been hanging a thousand newly framed pictures of the kittens and baby seals they clubbed yesterday. I went outside, and I could still hear it. I thought about leaving, but I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I banged on the walls trying to get them to notice they could hear me. I screamed PLEASE STOP a few times. Eventually they did stop. I hope they died.

Alternate title: Yeah, I thought I must have.

Which is in answer to the question my old friends and I asked each other a lot last week: Did you ever have a class on the second floor of Norris?

This Woot-Off has had
FOUR video cards and yet
nothing for Elaine.

🙁

(I mean, all I want is a promising new zinfandel, that iPod video player for Lisa, a cheap TomTom GPS, the Salton Chocolate Treat Makers [which I missed ’cause they sold out in less than two minutes], and a 34mm Express Card SD reader. Is that so much to ask?)

Edited to add:
Make that five video cards.

I have contact lenses againnnnnnnnnnnnn

I can seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

There’s no goop in front of my eyes anymorrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre

(it’s a songggggggggggggg)

ps also they are dailies (yay) so no more math and no more storing and no more cleaning

I decided I wanted a personal wiki, for things like recipes and shopping lists and packing lists and whatnot. After I’d torn about my thirtieth page out of last month’s Real Simple, I started thinking about scanning stuff and realized it’d be fine to retype it, if only there were an appropriate repository.

I tried pbwiki.com, but one page into creating a wiki there I realized there was no Special:Whatlinkshere page, and that would just be stupid, especially for recipes. What I wanted was the ability to wikify every recipe I entered, and then have ingredient pages, so I could click on the name of an ingredient and see every recipe that uses that ingredient. I don’t even cook that much, but I want to, and god do I love sorting stuff into piles.

So I looked at a couple other free public wiki sites, even a couple that host MediaWiki (the software Wikipedia runs on), but they were all either ad-supported (Google ads keyed to the content of my own pages creeps me out, even in Gmail) or the interface didn’t look good, or I just got bad vibes. I’ve had a lot of practice at Wikipedia. I know how it works and how to use it. How hard could it be, I figured, to run it?

Turns out: medium. Medium hard.

Macs come with Apache set up already. Check. Installing PHP was a breeze, thanks to installation packages available at entropy.ch. Check. Installing mysql was a little harder, but honestly the biggest hurdle there was figuring out where the crap it was so I could put it in my path. Without the fact that Medievia taught me Unix, and (bizarrely) the instructions I found were keyed to tcsh (which I use) rather than bash (which I don’t), it might have been worse. There was some command-line stuff I had to do. I followed the excellent installation instructions on the MediaWiki site. (When I reached the bottom of that page, there was an alternate installation method I could have done, where I wouldn’t even have had to download anything ending in .tar.gz. There should probably be a link to that at the top.)

It started working. I even toyed with the CSS a bit to make it match this design (what can I say, bright fucking orange is somehow soothing to me now). And now, when I go to localhost/~elaine/wiki, lo and behold, there’s an empty orange version of Wikipedia right there, and it’s mine.
Right now it’s only accessible to me locally, but I plan to punch a hole so I can get at it from other computers. It’ll only work from other computers when my computer’s here and turned on, but when my computer’s not here and turned on, it’s a safe bet it’s with me anyway.

I’m a little nervous about opening a web port and about creating other accounts (the warnings they give you are a little scary and include words like “could upload malicious php code”), but I’ll probably get over it. Ideally, among other things I’d make it possible for my friends and I to keep a collaborative recipe database in it. That would be useful to us.
And then maybe I’ll show it to you.