Month: June 2013

My Xanga Mess

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Recently a friend despaired over Xanga shutting down. I incorrectly recalled a couple years ago they had a tool for migrating content to WordPress. (I probably confused it with Vox, LiveJournal, MovableType, Friendster’s blog, or Posterous who did have such a tool which I did use to migrate my content.) So I thought I had migrated my stuff.

Instead back then I manually migrated the posts, including comments.

Now Xanga has an archives generator (XML) which is compatible with WordPress. That was much easier than post-by-post copying and pasting.

But it also means 2001 to 2004 are duplicated. And I was terribly inconsistent about titling, merging posts, comments, and private/public status.

On the plus side, reading all those old those old posts is enlightening.

    1. I write too much about work.
    2. Most of what I wrote could have been tweets as they were less than 140 characters. (Or nudged to be so.)
    3. 10-12 years changes little. Same problems.

Drinking Sweet Tea

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Amber Yellow circle ring pattern glasses
Amber Yellow circle ring pattern glasses

… from a glass which my mother gave me from my grandmother’s estate. There is nothing physically valuable about it. Just simple melted silicon with maybe sulfur. (Maybe they are something friends who collect things from the 60s and 70s would like.)

Found them on listed on Etsy as:

Amber Yellow circle ring pattern glasses: 3 Nice Amber-Yellow glasses. They have a 70s vibe, circle/ring pattern. Would make a nice large glass of tea on a hot summer day. Enjoy!

So it is funny that I am drinking tea on a hot summer day (the thing the description above says to use them for).

Their value is in reminding me of hanging out on her deck playing a game, talking about the plans for how to improve the flowers, mowing her yard, and playing with my cousins. Oh, and watching movies she recorded on her VCR.

They make me smile. 🙂

Review: Seven Viking Romances

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Seven Viking Romances
Seven Viking Romances by Hermann Pálsson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A couple girls gave me funny looks and asked about “Romance” in the title. So I explained this is romance as in heroic sagas of mighty warriors committing supernatural deeds. (Okay, so I glossed over these same warriors impregnating every woman in their path.) Not muscular men seducing women.

Until it was. Somewhere around 200 pages in one of the heroes uses an obvious euphemism for what is between his legs to seduce a girl. And then another euphemism on another girl. I could not believe it. Scandinavian romance novel in both senses.

The stories were amusing and fast. But then I like stuff about Odysseus, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh. And the fictional Conan.

P.S. It seems like everyone is related to someone named “Grim” though. Is that the John of Scandinavia?

View all my reviews

Disqus Unsubscribe from Comments

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Monday after the Game of Thrones Red Wedding reveal, I read a Rolling Stones piece where the author had no clue the song played was the Rains of Castemere, the title of the episode. So, of course, I had to point out that oversight. (Someone on the Internet was WRONG!)

The commenting system RS used is Disqus, which I am using here, so no problem. Until I get the flood of emails. I had been holding steady at 2.1GB of my 10.1GB at Gmail. All the emails to this thread bumped it up to 2.3GB.

So I went looking for how to stop it. There was no list of posts to which I am subscribed like at WordPress.com. The only relevant place to fix this seemed to be the profile editor and “Email notifications are sent when comments are posted on discussions that matter to you.” That would stop all comment notifications not just the busy one annoying me. I even deleted my comment which did not stop them.

Finally, I sucked it up and went into the help and found the Subscribe/Unsubscribe from Notifications page. It turns out, I had to go to the page and click on the “Subscribe via email” link at the bottom of the comment box. Pretty sure I never would have thought to look there on my own.