spacematic.net

Oh! Will the gods show no mercy on me? I’ve had one hell of a week. As you may or may not know, the website has been undergoing some drastic code and cosmetic changes as of late. I mistakenly thought that I needed some kind of content management front end for features other than the Electro-Journal. I auditioned several PHP content management solutions, only to find them a little too demanding or a little too limiting for my taste.
After much deliberation, I decided that this, the spacematic Digital Electro-Journal should be the front page! Brilliant. Why wasn’t I happy with this solution in the first place? Probably because I got too big for my britches and thought that blogs aren’t really sites, but rather popular components of larger networks of essays, bulletin boards, movie features and on and on. Too big for my britches, indeed! SDEJ is the reason people come to this site in the first place. No need to get all complex and make people search out content in a complex manglement system. The platform I’m using, Movable Type, is plenty powerful enough to deliver the information I need. Not to mention, I’ve dolled up this template somethin’ sexy! So for once, my better judgment kicked in, only to be squished by my stupidity and impatience.
You see, I was in a big hurry to get this over with and remove the current installation from the former “spacematic.net/journal” directory and migrate it over to the domain name; no back-slashes, no “journal” to qualify its existence. All should have gone well. Eh. All didn’t. I ended up losing my entries. I had to go to Google to find cached versions of my pages just so I could copy and paste the text back into Movable Type. As you can see, some entries were saved and some weren’t. With all this woe going around, don’t allow me to mislead you. THIS WAS NOT MOVABLE TYPE’S FAULT. This was a user error issue. This was a dunce-cap moment on a grand scale. The whole class watched as Ms. Dontyaknowbetter grabbed me by the ear and twisted until I rose from out of my seat. They all laughed as I was crowned King of Duns Men and given a corner of the classroom to rule from a stool.
Which brings me to today. I finally got the saved entries back up. My profile page and the Monkeytronic Museum should be back again in short order. The only pain I now feel is a residual sting due to the loss of two very long essays of which I was very proud. I thought today wouldn’t be a day for writing. I thought I would give the Journal a rest. So I opted to brew some tea. After about ten minutes of watching tea brew, I realized that I was bored. So I took Miss Allison out for a walk. That’s her in the picture above.
Watching a small dog walk down a busy street is some real fun. Their responses to people, their apprehension of holes in the sidewalk… just what’s going on in that little head? I know one thing for sure. Pigeons are the enemy. Pigeons must be prevented from flying. Pigeons must die. And so should the four-wheeled pink and blue rolling beasts that capture babies, known to you and me as strollers.
The best thing about Allie is that she’s never met a stranger. She can reliably coax a smile from the face of a passing pedestrian. Those who do not smile obviously prevent the creeping grin consciously, and with great effort. They are the bastards; they live in a world so gray and callous that smiling at a little dog carries the penalty of castration. Brian Warner is watching you Goths, Townies, sundry Poseurs! Let’s just face it, a little dog smiles at you – you can’t help but smile back. It’s not a social faux-pas. It’s not a put-on. I think the reaction is caused somewhere in the amygdala, hard-wired. You can’t do much about it unless you choose to clench your ass cheeks until you’re in dire hemorrhoidal pain. Thankfully those who do this are few, otherwise I would start to feel like a jerk for unleashing the cause of ass-clenching epidemics on the streets of Atlanta. Vampire and Suicide Girl wannabe’s aside, walking with Allie is a hoot and a half. And so when I returned from our walk, I was in a much better mood.
And Viola! A new entry for today. That’s how I leave it for now, folks. More to report later. –mike