theology&geometry

Meowmania field test from Lindsey Turner on Vimeo.

Perform your own experiment here.

My friends are effing funny.

If you are coming here from PassiveAggressiveNotes.com, welcome! If you stick around, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of passive-aggressivity, but I am Southern, so it’s actually quite charming!

Do stick around, and don’t mind the cat making biscuits on your crotch.

I should really stop redesigning my blog at 4 in the morning, but I can’t help it! I was checking up on all the Memphis blogs today — clicking through, not using my reader — when I noticed the lovely Ms. Lemonslush‘s snazzy theme and got serious theme envy. It is rare that I find a WordPress theme that I really, really like. And yet Bueno seems to be a solid, well-built, FREE theme with lots of customization options. WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE. Designy bonus: These awesome Photoshop brushes.

I am considering installing new headers when the mood strikes. Kinda like Dooce does it, only amateurishly and without humor.

I’m still working out kinks, obviously. I’m not 100 percent sold on the Rockwell ChunkFive. I mean, I like it. But it’s the theme default, so I have a hard time letting it be the boss of me. ALSO, and this is a dealbreaker, it does not seem to want to let me use apostrophes or slashes in blog post titles. !!! and ???. There is a fix for this, but I can’t access it because I didn’t pay for the theme and therefore can’t get in to the Woo forum. Bollocks. Anyone know of a good fix? I am totally willing to ditch Rockwell if that is the issue. UPDATE: It was a cufon issue. And since I just learned what the hell cufon even means, I decided not to try to mess with fixing it and just disabled it.

I’ve got to give some TLC to the sidebar, which looks way more cramped than the proto version, since I expanded the main content area to be able to accommodate my HUGE FUCKING PHOTOS. I may need to take the entire content area wider since there is a lot of padding there on the left hand side. The sidebar just feels dumb when it’s this skinny.

I went through a brief but terrifying moment of panic at about 3:30 when, in the midst of FTPing the new theme via Filezilla, the blog starting giving me database errors and wouldn’t let me log in as an admin at all. Having accidentally killed my blog via Filezilla before, I was ready to vomit everything I had ever ingested. But, before I knew it, things were working again. Server reboot? Yeah, we’ll go with that.

So, sayonara, latest version of T&G with the hand-colored lettering. You were cute and quirky but you were built on a template I never could really get a handle on.

Let’s see what we can do with this one.

No, this isn’t a picture of Ralph Steadman’s pen ejaculating all over a Jackson Pollock painting.

This is what it looks like when I work.

I’ve been seeing internerd scuttlebutt (that was for you, Chris) around the web about Anatoliy Zenkov‘s awesome and awesomely weird little application that records the movement of your mouse for as long as you let it, and had to give in and do one of my own. Dots indicate a mouse pointer at rest. The longer at rest, the bigger the dot grows (my biggest dot was no doubt from my 30-minute lunch break). Lines are obviously mouse movement.

It’s good clean nerd fun to see the areas of your desktop you utilize the most. You can overlay your mousetrails with a screenshot of what you were working on and get a good idea of what it is you were clicking and dragging the most.

This overlay is a super rough estimate for me, since my job requires switching back and forth between several windows and applications. I’m not just laying out pages; I’m copy editing stories, reading e-mails, scanning local blogs, posting to The Memphis Blog, and more. So I just zoomed out on the A1 I was working on. But still. You can certainly see how often I have to select applications in the task bar and then minimize them to switch to another one, and how much I rely on the tools around the perimeter of my window in Fred, our page layout program.

Nerd out for yourself and download the program: Mac or PC.

Listening to music while in the bathroom just got a lot easier thanks to this Lifehacker tip. I don’t really know how they got an iPhone to fit like that into a pint glass, though. I have some snazzy pint glasses (thanks to Fancycwabs) and my phone barely shimmies down in them halfway. I do, however, have two of these awesome midcentury red diamond glasses, which I inherited from my great grandmother after she passed away. One was slightly cracked so I was paranoid to drink out of it. It’s got a new home now. The phone fits perfectly in there, and the red goes with my black, white, and red bathroom motif.

So, neat.

I broke my blog in a major way just now. I think I deleted a bunch of shit, including my WP install or something stupid like that. I was using Filezilla to do install a WordPress plugin that would have backed up my database and upgraded WP, when my pinkie — the most idiotic of all my fingers — hit the delete key and suddenly shit started moving and turning green and red and I kept seeing “delete delete delete” in the status window thingy and it took me a beat or twelve to realize what was happening. Well, not what was happening, but that SOME BAD SHIT WAS GOING DOWN. That’s when I hit the abort button and visited the blog and saw this screen and started crying like a little bitch. Thank God Sig knows what the hell is going on in the world. He didn’t even make fun of my dumb ass — too much — as he got me back up and running. HUGE SIGH OF RELIEF. AND he upgraded my WordPress to the current version, which I had been putting off for forevs. (It’s pretty slick.) I owe him a keg of beer. Every day. For the rest of his life.

You’ll notice that I’ve lost my lovely flocked background and my header. I can live with that for now. Those files are somewhere (my laptop maybe?). The important thing is that I didn’t lose SIX YEARS’ worth of posts. Which reminds me: It’s my six-year blogiversary! Sort of. My archives only go back to November of 2003, but I “blogged” using basic HTML on my previous (now dead) site starting in August or September of that year. I can never remember the exact date. What a wonderful way to celebrate by reminding myself that these pixels could all disappear at any given moment. I guess if those monks can be at peace with the destruction of their art, I need to get right with the impermanence of my own. (But mostly I need to learn to keep my files backed up like a moderately intelligent human being.)

Getting drunk and photographing bar bathrooms can PAY OFF!

For even more fun than should be allowed in public bathrooms, read the comments of this post, where people offered suggested titles. I think I like this one the best. Geometry jokes, hyuk.

(I’m a little disappointed that they didn’t pick this photo, but I can’t get everything I want, now can I?)

Can you please help me pinpoint Memphis-based acts at Bonnaroo this year? I know about Al Green, MGMT, and Booker T. But I’m sure I’m missing big hugely obvious ones, too.

The lineup is here.

Think of this as a scavenger hunt. A scavenger hunt with no apparent prize.