John Cleese, among other things.

September 9th, 2009 - 
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1. Yesterday, Abby reminded me of something brilliant, one of my favorite things in the world: The “German” episode of Fawlty Towers. If you’ve never seen it, I definitely recommend it (YouTube has the entire episode in pieces, but the best third can be seen here). We watched this clip in the “Britain in 20th Century Europe” course I took at Winchester, as a sort of commentary on Britain’s relationship with Germany and the rest of Europe during that period. I remembered thinking that it must only have seemed ridiculously funny in the context of our typical history class, which consisted of an extremely dry, monotone lecture, pre-typed and read out loud to the class, followed by uncomfortable group discussion where I was nearly always lost. A weather bulletin would have been amusing in comparison. But after re-watching, I’m convinced that this is hilarious, even when compared to other hilarious British comedies.

2. Speaking of Abby, did anybody notice she’s a blogger now? Link’s on the right with the rest now, at the very top due to her alphabetical advantage. So let’s all leave her lots of comments.

3. Speaking of links on the right, did I mention that I’m loving my new BlueHost hosting, combined with WordPress blogging? While I sort of miss the 100% creative control over layout, I’m getting to brush up on my CSS skills (I have relied on html-only for far longer than I care to admit), and simple maintenance (such as adding links to the sidebar) is actually painless. No ftp involved. I’m loving it.

4. My latest hobby / obsession is with making quiche. French baking is so fascinating, not only because of the rich flavors, but because it puts such an incredible focus on texture. Hopefully this weekend, I’m going to try playing around with some different flavor combinations (portabella pineapple quiche? No?), but let’s be honest: eventually, I’ll lose interest, as with the other baked goods I’ve obsessed over at some point or another. In other food news, I have been in a salmon mood lately, and I really like this recipe as a light, late-summer quick meal.

Listening to: Jason Mraz – The Dynamo of Volition

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Ce Jeu

September 3rd, 2009 - 
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A quick update of the technical sort:
I’ve been pretty disenchanted with Haisoft for a while; not because they’ve gotten any worse than when I first signed up for hosting years ago, but because they haven’t gotten any better. All around them, internet hosting options were rapidly blooming into much more useable things. It was the cheapest option around when I signed up, but these days, ANY amount is too much for 100 MB storage / 1 GB transfer, not to mention the extra I was paying for subdomains and forwarding. Add to that their well-intentioned but lacking customer support system, and you get one very out-of-date hosting service. So when they changed my ftp ports to the more secure FTPES protocol, without sending me the obligatory “hey, by the way” email, and Blogger then refused to publish anything (apparently Blogger only supports the standard FTP port — weird), it quickly became obvious that, well, everything had fallen apart. Considering my noticeable lack of blogging lately, I considered just moving to blogspot for a while and hanging on to my domain, but the optimist in me still wanted to host somewhere. So that brings us to where we are now:

BlueHost, which gives me unlimited space, bandwidth, and subdomains, for less than I was paying before. Nice. Additionally, they gave me a free domain for signing up, so now there’s the brand new amylockaby.com (which is currently providing content identical to superamy.com, so don’t bother clicking — you’re already there!). On top of all of this, BlueHost provides one-click WordPress install, as well as easy Blogger imports, which means I’ve managed to leave Blogger altogether for WordPress. I’m not entirely sure how I like it yet — the theme / template / widget environment still occasionally offends my primitive hand-coded html side, but I’ll be the first to admit: setup was ridiculously easy.

In other news, I bought a car — a black 2005 Pontiac Vibe. The newness of it is weird, since I like old, small cars, and also it smells funny. But it runs well, has all Toyota parts, and is a hatchback, which I am especially fond of. I am thinking of taking it to the beach one weekend and camping in the back, just because I can.

I’ve started some new projects at work this past month, and I’m honestly having a complete blast. I’m getting to go back to a lot of the basic system design stuff I learned at Lander, and for the first time in a while, I have had many days where I haven’t wanted to leave for lunch, or to go home at five. It’s pretty exciting.

The internet is pretty amazing, and I’m going to take more advantage of it one of these days. New stuff soon — posts and content included — I promise.

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