Month: March 2005

Categories
Blather

party girl

I hated you a bit this afternoon, she said, for having to give up this cool party, because I need to spend time with you, because I’ve been neglecting you.

No, go to the cool party, I said. Don’t deny yourself. Don’t resent me.

You sound, she said, like I do when I’m trying to convince someone to do something I really don’t want them to do.

Later I thought, well, she’s young and lively, and should go and enjoy herself among her peers, and I’m quoting Suzie of course.

She asked me to pick her up after the party (why hasn’t she called yet?) and I said sure, and she said that’s great, because she really hates leaving a party by herself and feeling so lonely, and I thought yeah, that’s why I hated parties, because they made me feel so lonely. It was like that when I was a kid, and it was like that when Suz was telling me that sure, she doesn’t mind if I go out and hang out with “my peers”, because those kids made me feel all old and just as lonely as when they were really my age.

So I took her to the party and felt jealous. And later, coming in to wait for her call, I realized that I hate her a bit for making me feel back in high school again, shut out of the cool kids’ party.

But I thought of dropping her off at the party, twenty minutes before, and how, in her costume ball dress and loose hair, uncut since her teens, she didn’t look like she was heading to some decadent and debauched orgy, she looked like a kid, heading for her class party, hesitant and lost as I felt inside.

Categories
Oddities short

Flesh-eating Kangaroos

Flesh-eating Kangaroos and other lost Australian monsters, because that’s the sort of thing Hezi drops casually into a conversation, sending me scrambling for Google.

Categories
Science Fiction and Fantasy

Who

Only on his second post did I realize that Andrew Rilstone was counting down the days until the British premiere of the new Doctor Who series. Unlike certain Internet-downloading, gun-jumping sorts, he’s treating this like an event.

Now as much as I anticipate a week-long Rilstone rant, culminating, I presume, with a post-premiere review, my interest flaggs somewhat when I think that I’ll probably have no idea what he’s talking about until, well, whenever I get to see the series, which, not being British or a torrenting person, is probably never.

Categories
BlogTalk short

Re-install test

Nothing to see here. I’m testing if re-installing WordPress and the LivePress plugin work properly.

Categories
Software and Programming

Javascript Textile follow-up

I got a comment from the developer of the GreaseMonkey Textile Javascript script I mentioned, which encouraged me to (a) actually try to convert a few entries and (b) once I discovered it was making a bit of a mess of it, look at the code and fix the bug that was giving me the problem.

Apparently, my use of parentheses was confusing a regular expression used to convert textile-style “links” into HTML links.

The change I made is in these lines (in bold):


// links
re = new RegExp('"\b([^"]+?)\(\b(.+?)\b\)":([^\s]+)','g');
r = r.replace(re,'<a href="$3" title="$2">$1</a>');
re = new RegExp('"\b([^"]+?)\b":([^\s]+)','g');
r = r.replace(re,'<a href="$2">$1</a>');

I replaced a match for “a run of characters between parentheses” with a match for “a run of character that aren’t parentheses between parentheses”.

Interestingly through the comments on the Textile Javascript page I found the blog of someone using Movable Type who rejected the Javascript version in favour of the server-side MT-Textile. This way makes sense – you can keep editing the textile-formatted entry, which the Javascript version simply replaces (and destroys), because it stays saved in the database, and gets converted to HTML only when you publish. Funnily enough, I find the Javascript version more useful, because I’ve moved my entries to a different content management system, and lost the meta-data about how to format them.
The point being that the best way to store blog entries is in HTML format, which is portable across CMS systems. (I know WordPress has a textile plug-in or rather two, but who knows if my next CMS will have one?)