Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

The Have Its and The Not Have Its
March 02, 2006

Dropping off Abby at school, I wonder about the wealth among the people that take their kids to school there.

These days, caring for a kid is not the cheapest of endeavors. They need clothes and food at minimum. Medical care is important. And the cost of daycare can be killer. So it’s not really surprising that half of the cars in the parking lot at Abby’s daycare school are a Lexus.

The thing I was noticing in particular on this icy morning is something about the other kinds of cars in the lot. Having spent a good ten minutes scraping the ice off of my car this morning, it occurred to me that even after all of that effort, the rest of my car (the non-glass parts) my car was still covered in a thing sheen of ice.

I looked around at the other cars in the lot and noticed that even the less expensive cars didn’t exhibit this feature. The only other cars in the lot that were icy were the school’s own minivans.

Losing the Gender Wars, One Room at a Time
February 28, 2006

Flowers on the Media CabinetPrincipally, the decor of the house is left to Berta. I believe this is how it should be, because of the two of us, she is the artistically talented one, and I am the artistically void one.

That said, there must be a certain level of trust that when she goes to decorate a room, it’s going to look presentable not just to her and the people that come into our home, but to me, too.

Berta has done a wonderful job with every room she has redone in our house. We (mostly her) have repainted practically every room in the house since we moved in. She has done a lot of sanding, painting, second coats, touch-ups, and sealing in this old house, and it all looks great.

But when she and Abby returned from ACMoore the other night, she had an evil plan that was bound to ruin my comfy home decor bliss.

MicroWiki 2.0?
February 27, 2006

MicroWiki is not a plugin.

It seems like I’ve been working on MicroWiki forever. There are many complex and nuanced emotions for me surrounding MicroWiki. I use it for nearly everything that I don’t do with WordPress, so you can imagine how that might affect my feelings toward it.

At the same time, I’ve bashed the code to death. “Spindle” and “mutilate” are the words I would use to best describe the things I do routinely with MicroWiki after I get it installed somewhere. And every time I think “Hey, this is nearly ready for packaging!” I think of something else that it really should be doing better than it does, and I end up merging code from four different sites to get a revision with everything I’ve added.

In fact, I’ll lay it out for you right here and now: You will not understand this code, even though it runs.

That said, if you want a wiki, maybe this is for you, and maybe it isn’t.

Countdown 1.3 and the Plugin Version Service
February 24, 2006

On the #wordpress channel on IRC, someone had requested some adjustments to the Countdown plugin that I wrote a while back, so I took a look at that project and decided to make a few small updates.

Countdown displays a list of dates to remember. You create a list of events, and Countdown outputs those events on your blog. The events can recur, so you can put in single dates like “06-04 Owen’s Birthday (Observed)” and it will show that on the same day every year.

There are some more complex recurring settings, too, like the ever helpful:

1st sun apr Daylight Savings Starts

Note that this event recurs on the first Sunday of every April.

Previous users will recognize these settings from before, but I have added a few new little things to sweten up the plugin.