About This Website

The flicker on my computer monitor screen at work gives me headaches, as far as I can tell.

I’m going to try really hard to refrain from discussing politics here for the time being. Talking about it here really doesn’t do anything to calm my anger. So that’s it for now on world and national topics. The issue I’m having problems with lately is unfortunately money. Luckilly I have some saved up, but it just isn’t much. I’ve been hit with two large car insurance payments (almost $1,000 each) that I’ll need to make this month and next month due to having a new car and losing the multiple vehicle discount. The comparatively low salary at my job isn’t helping. It’s been about a month since I’ve brought that up, so maybe it’s time I do so again. But I’m looking for outside ways to bring in some extra funds.

If you look above, you’ll see a link called “Subscribe via BlogLines.” BlogLines is a neat little aggregator that presents the blogs your read together, making it easy to see when someone posts something new. If you want to subscribe to the FiveAndTwenty manually, you can do so by registering at BlogLines if you haven’t already and subscribing to “atom.xml” for each of the locations. (For example, http://www.fiveandtwenty.com/barb/atom.xml.)

UPDATE: Okay, this post doesn’t make much sense. I have my excuse: I’ve had a cold the last 24+ hours. What I was trying to say is that if you sign up for BlogLines, you can add any FiveAndTwenty blog easily. Just use “atom.xml” after the blog address.

Now I’ve written what I wanted to say… twice, in fact.

Also, if you’re a fan of the blur and desaturation effects in Adobe PhotoShop, you’ll love Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. That is all for now. Spike over and out.

I’ve upgraded Aaafter Effect to Movable Type 3.11, and by doing so, Synaesthesia, Barb’s Burblings, Serendipity, and Consumerism Commentary have also been upgraded. (Boredom Zone uses a separate Movable Type installation and I haven’t upgraded that, but I can if Michelle wants.)

The security code check for comments has been disabled in favor of the MT-Blacklist plugin. Any comment thought to be spam, or any comment posted on an entry more than two weeks old, will need to be moderated by the weblog owner before it is posted.

I’ve also added a link log back to the site here. You can hide it if you like by clicking “Hide Links” in the navigation bar. I’m not quite sure whether I want to keep it or not.

You may have noticed that I added a webcam to this website.

I’ve been rearranging my apartment to help me sleep more effectively. I removed by desktop computer from my bedroom and rearranged the furniture in my living room to fit everything. It’s a little tight but it’ll be fine for the remainder of my stay here.

While cleaning, I found my old webcam, so I decided to put it to some use. So there you go. It’s refreshed every few minutes. You can find it at the top of my sidebar.

On here and on Synaesthesia, I installed a plug-in for Movable Type that will alleviate future comment spam. This has grown to be a problem on some Movable Type-powered websites. Luckilly, my website has been spared while some others, including Becca’s, have been inundated. I chose to use this great, free plug-in, which asks a user to enter a security code before posting a comment, instead of other expensive solutions such as upgrading to Movable Type 3.0 or using some other weblog software. Well, there it is.

I’ve been such a bad blogger. As I noted before, I was hired as a mid-year replacement on an emergency basis. That means I have to re-apply for my teaching position for the fall. I found out yesterday that my interview will be tomorrow, and it will require me to perform a solo piece on my main instrument. That’s pretty much unheard of for a teaching interview, but I’ll do it. I decided I’d touch up the Brahms Second Sonata, a piece I worked on in college. I haven’t really had time to prepare, between drum major auditions, grading papers, percussion rehearsals, writing several weeks’ worth of lesson plans…

Then I remember I have no right to complain or feel sorry for myself. I have friends going through more difficult stuff right now. So I’m sucking up, practicing the music, getting my work done, and basically dealing. But if you’re wondering why you don’t see me much or I rarely call… this is why. And this is the “slow season.”

If for some reason I don’t get this job again (and it’s quite possible I may not, it’s a highly sought-after position with some well experienced people interested in the job) I will once again need to make a decision about which road to travel. Right now, it’s just one day at a time.

I arrived home several hours ago, but couldn’t quite get to sleep. I decided to put photos from the weekend online. So here they are: The Wedding (two pages), The Gig (four pages), and Dallas and Fort Worth (three pages). Everyone was so lovely. Thanks!

Some of my students have discovered my photo gallery website. I’m in trouble now… especially because of that high school junior prom picture.

It must be a February thing. Last year, around the same time, Dreamhost, the company where I house all of my websites, started giving its users major problems with its mail system. Here we go again. If you sent me email today, you can pretty much assume I didn’t get it. This is particularly disturbing because I’ve been expecting some important emails, and I shouldn’t have to find a new email provider for February every year. I don’t want to have to start couting ass points again.

Update: Here’s Dreamhost’s reply, and it was quick:

A spammer initiated a huge attack on the cluster of mail servers that hosts at least one of your
domains’ mail. We’ve blocked the spammer and are clearing out the tens of thousands of messages
left by the attack. It’s made mail slow on this group of machines, and has exacerbated the high
load due to MyDoom, the latest Windows virus. All mail will be delivered, just slowly. We’re
working to ensure that a similar attack won’t slow mail down so badly in the future.

Remember how I added the “Prolific Commentators” section to my sidebar? I bet you’re curious to find out where you fit in if you didn’t make the top 15. Thus, I present the top 30 commentators. For those who want to have some more fun, view that same page, but pass a different numerical value to the variable “max” through the URL.

If anyone wants the PHP code I used to produce such a list (for Movable Type using MySQL), just let me know.