Kerry Allen

1.  Angelic daughter attended her second day of school yesterday after having the best first week of school ever (go the first day, get the rest of the week off) and was given lists of rules in all her classes to be taken home and signed by student and parent to indicate understanding. My understanding is that in every class the first and foremost rule is “Be happy at all times, or you will be punished.” I envision a school filled with children, their faces contorted with huge smiles, desperately forcing the words help us through their clenched teeth.

2.  There’s a TV commercial in these parts that says God doesn’t want children to play video games. This seems counterproductive to me. In my experience, everyone who plays video games has a very intimate relationship with God, chummy enough to chat about his Son and call on him to damn things on a regular basis…

3.  Choosing a web hosting company apparently makes use of the same brain sector as choosing a line to wait in. As I will choose the wrong line at the grocery store (where a single person ahead of me with two items will invariably be joined by a partner pulling 3 carts and want to write a check for part and pay cash for the rest, despite which she will not have enough money and will want to put things back) and the bank (where a single person ahead of me will invariably be conducting 37 transactions, each individually, none of which were prepared beforehand, and most of which involve payment in pennies), so will I choose a web host that itself completely vanishes from the internet on a regular basis, taking my site along for the ride. If you try to visit and get a “no such site” page, try again later. And if you yourself are ever in the market for web hosting, don’t sign up for a multi-year deal right off the bat. Yes, extended terms often offer cheaper rates, but if your host turns out to have more downtime than a newborn baby and you have to switch to another provider, it’s not such a value anymore.

The server is undergoing some kind of ”upgrade” starting Friday night at 10. (Time zone? Don’t know. Duration? Could be negative 11 hours. You should see the email I got explaining it. Clear communication isn’t this company’s strong point.)

“Upgrades” generally result in a stinking knot of problems that takes days to straighten out, so if it comes to pass that you can’t find me here after Friday, I haven’t gotten all emo and pouty and closed up shop—just experiencing technical difficulties and will return to the regularly scheduled program as soon as my “upgrade” allows.

ETA: Okay, it wasn’t the nightmare I anticipated, so I don’t need to enact the voodoo curse or torture the virtual voodoo doll (music warning).

So… another issue that has arisen with the dead computer situation…

In Office 2007 Microsoft introduced a new file format called the Microsoft Open Office XML Format (.docx). This format is not compatible with older versions of Microsoft Word or with alternative operating systems like Linux or Mac OS X. Nor is it compatible with other word processing applications like OpenOffice, Lotus 123, or NeoOffice.

I discovered this cute little feature months ago (”Sorry, we can’t open your submission”), had a nice rant (”Why the eff would they make a program INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF? Oh, I suppose they didn’t want poor Word to feel inferior to Vista, which is INCOMPATIBLE WITH EFFING EVERYTHING!!!1!”), and didn’t think much else of it because I had that computer to deal with the .docx files if I absolutely had to.

So… yesterday I had need of one of my rescued files and, much to my everlasting joy, got heiroglyphics when I tried to open it on the laptop because the geniuses at Microsoft have made Word INCOMPATIBLE WITH ITSELF! Perusing the names of some of the .docx files I have (since, obviously, I couldn’t peek inside the files themselves), I realized this could be a rather serious problem.

All hail the mighty internet.

Docx-converter.com offers a portable solution for your compatability needs. It will convert a Microsoft Office .docx file into a simple html file. It strips out some of the formatting, but now supports bold, italic, and underlined text. Left, right, center, and justified alignment. Unicode characters. Tables. And more!

Voila! Worked like a charm on a plain old text document. My precious text is saved.

Now, to be fair, Microsoft has a “compatibility pack” you can install into your old, obsolete version of Word. If you trust Microsoft. If you want another piece of Microsoft garbage on your computer. If you don’t think Microsoft’s “hold the world’s data hostage to force them to UPGRADE—ka-ching!— to our buggy new products” policies are a disgrace.

But you can find that yourself, since I’m not sending traffic to those scumbags.

One of those standard “porn smut johnson trash viagra (two hundred random sex words with embedded porn links, basically)” comments snuck past the spam filter. It said this at the bottom:

Admin, if you read this, please do not mark as spam. Just move off topic, thanks.

Oh, he said “please” and “thank you.” I guess it’s not spam after all. I should leave it.

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Sorry, your spam is getting reported as spam so in the future the global spam filter will catch it as spam and spare others the hassle of marking your spam as spam.

But in light of your refined manners, I shall refrain from calling you a douchebag.

Oh, cool. Must activate.

Hell. WTF is my WordPress.com login? This is going to be a PITA, I can tell.

Let me check my Blog Stats.

Yay, it works.

For what possible reason would anyone search for THAT? And it brought them HERE? Am I the only person to ever use those two words in the same post? Not quite what you were looking for, was it? Sorry ’bout that. Side effect of my random rambling. I’ll be more conscious of how I use “boobs” in the future.

Mayonnaise.

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I prefer Miracle Whip. On food, not… Oh, never mind.

Let me check my Blog Stats again.

Huh. That’s more traffic than my handful of bosom friends. I really do have lurkers.

Whoa-oh-oh… I always feel like… somebody’s watching me…

If you have that song stuck in your head for the rest of the day, know I’ll be suffering right along with you.

If you’re old enough to remember that song, know I’ll be suffering right along with you.

I should make an effort to be more inviting in order to compel shy visitors to speak up.

But maybe they’re not shy. Maybe they don’t like me and are practicing “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

I should make an effort to be more likable.

I’m at a loss. I’m a WYSIWYG kinda gal.

Maybe being quietly loathed isn’t so bad.

Let me check my Blog Stats again.

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Let me hyperventilate.

Let me deactivate this frickin’ thing before morbid curiosity has me refreshing the page every three minutes when I should be doing something more productive.

To anyone at whom I have ever rolled my eyes upon your waxing obsessive about your Amazon rankings, my humblest apologies. I now understand how hypnotic numbers can be. But you can walk away. Be strong. The power is yours.

(Isn’t that a Captain Planet catchphrase? Can somebody please explain to me how he’s supposed to fight pollution when his Kryptonite is… pollution? That show made NO sense to me.)

I decided to go ahead and convert the site proper to a WordPress template, so at the moment, there’s nothing over there but a blank.

This would be a perfect time for a bunch of people to take a keen interest in me, yes?

Edited to add: Oh, how I love it when HTML actually does what I want. Too bad I have such bad retention. I know I’ve done a Table of Contents type thing (click to zoom to another section on the same page) before, but I had to look it up again and spend an hour futzing with it to get it right…

So I’m doing a little remodeling. I’ll have to come up with something spiffier for the header, but otherwise I’m liking this better.

Note in the comment section, it actually accepts a double space between paragraphs! (Honestly, that was the main thing driving me crazy.)