//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, an Editorial Designer at NYTimes.com, living in Brooklyn.
As you’ll no doubt notice, there are errors sprinkled around the site, such as:
Warning: main(): stream does not support seeking in/home/suckahs/public_html/ned/index.phpon line 974
It seems that Site5, my web host, has decided to upgrade PHP on my server… Looks like I’ll be editing stuff this weekend.
UPDATE: I found this little page, which helped me smooth things out in a matter of minutes.
We’re awaiting company for the holiday – Presley’s mom, mom’s boyfriend Marc, and sister Kelly are joining us in a proper New England Thanksgiving.
The pumpkin and corn breads smell wonderful, the turkey is still thawing, and we picked out a few nice wines to go with dinner. Ok, so maybe the Puritans didn’t drink French wine – or wine at all – but I’m sticking to the “proper New England Thanksgiving”.
The funniest part (to me) was that our 1-month old Sears Kenmore refrigerator died yesterday – luckily we were able to shuttle off various bits to neighbors’ fridges, and get a repairman to the apartment today. It’s not going to be Pieces of April (which incidentally is really quite good, and you should go see it).
A while back, Jason Kottke began tweaking his site layout, merging his “remainder” links into the daily thread of his weblog, and creating a different look for “Featured” posts such as movie and book reviews.
When I last redesigned (now more than a year ago), I thought a lot about how to use MT categories, and the importance of drawing a visual distinction between featured posts, and shorter daily posts. It was necessary to weigh certain types of posts as more relevant than others.
This not-so-creative solution was to use a styled post title & a unique icon — for music, movies, books, photos, & special posts — and leave non-featured posts unstyled (albeit bolded). Also, I try to use a small photo for each featured post. By using PHP and some MT template code, I was able to hack something together.
Jason’s method of using 5 weblogs for 5 different kinds of posts seems overly complicated and unwieldy for me, because I have other blogs on our domain. But, there is a point where PHP hacks can defeat the purpose of using “push-button publishing”.
I very much like his idea of embedding these remaindered links in the chronological thread of the weblog — Because these are timely links referencing current events or memes, why not?
I always thought Anil’s method of grouping links under a date would be almost meaningless for my site — as I only post 1 or 2 items per day. My Daily Bookmarks have no reference point — they are merely sorted descending by date. Once again, Jason gets me thinking…
Anyone in the Boston area who likes folk music, and would like to support Howard Dean, check out this fundraiser tonight:
Concert for Dean at Club Passim
11/24/2003 7:00pm
Tickets are $5, with a requested contribution of $10 for Dean… We’ll start with a short opening set by Jenny Bruce, who will be singing backup w/Rachael Sage later. There will be Dean videos in between sets.
Apparently, I have an evil twin in my office building… people keep telling me that they say “hello” to me, and I act as if I don’t know who the hell they are. Doppelganger!
Pathetic. Any quiz that expects you to know Bon Jovi and the Buggles… well, it’s just not a proper quiz.
I got Panther (OS X 10.3) this week, and finally found the time to install it on my newish 12-inch Powerbook. No problem, right? Maybe if I weren’t such a retard.
11pm. I loaded the disk, and navigated through setup without a problem. Of course, as soon as I finished, I forgot that what I really wanted was to partition my gigantic 80GB drive into a System disk, and a Scratch disk.
After Panther was up and running, I went to the disk utility, and when I clicked on “partition”, it told me that I couldn’t partition the HD because it was the “boot volume”. Oh, right. That makes some sense, I guess.
So, I inserted the Panther install CD again, and rebooted. Then I ran the disk utility in the Panther setup. This let me partition the drive as I liked — though it would erase everything, which was OK by me.
Since everything was erased, I then tried to complete the Panther install again — but it told me it couldn’t do it, because no version of OS X was found on the computer. ::huh?:: It can’t install Panther on a blank formatted drive?
So, I loaded up my Apple restore disk, installed Jaguar, (which takes about 20% longer) on the new system partition, restarted with the Panther Install disk once again inserted, and finally I was able to then erase the Jaguar install, and install Panther.
3am. I think it was worth it…
Apologies for being so clutter-minded this morning, but all of this kept me up well past my bed time!
Someone tell me why Paul Shaffer is hosting Letterman tonight? You’d think they were taping this thing out of somebody’s basement. I’m sure there was some kind of explanation at the top of the show… but I missed it. Did he do a monologue?
UPDATE: It appears as if Dave had to run to the hospital – for the birth of his first child.
Jason redesigned. Now, he’s got to start writing more regularly… as does yours truly.
//nedward.org is the personal weblog of John Niedermeyer, an Editorial Designer at NYTimes.com, living in Brooklyn.
