Feaverish

Okay, it looks like I’m done with the 12-hour workdays and can finally get back to my true passion: mixing it up blog-style.

Over the last couple of weekends L and I have been busy redesigning pritchy.com. Besides giving it more of a reading-leather-bound-tomes-in-front-of-the-fire feel, I plugged in not one but two WordPress blogs. Everything is pretty much stripped out (e.g. comments, permalinks, the sidebar, etc.), but L can log into either of her admin panels and “blog” the homework for the week. I probably could have made it work with just one WordPress installation, but naming the blogs “English 1-2″ and “English 3-4″ avoids any confusion when posting.

There’s also going to be a forum ââ�¬â�� also powered by WordPress ââ�¬â�� where L will pose a question or discussion topic or whatever and the students will be able to discuss it in the comments. With Gravatars and the ability to respond to individual comments (thanks to plugins, naturally), it could turn out to be pretty cool.

Anyway, I’ve got two other web projects on front burners at the moment, so I gotta get back to work. This two-yearââ�¬â��old piece just showed up in my newsreader (over 5,000 unread items! Seriously, I’ve been away) and had me laughing, so check it out.

Less than a week after Jim put the idea in my head, I managed to show up to work without pants. I must have overlooked them when I was packing my bike bag this morning. The good news is I declared today “Woolen Swedish Army Knickers Day” which means I get to go around pinching everyone not wearing Woolen Swedish Army Knickers, i.e. everyone not me.

It’s also Freshman Orientation week here at PSU, with dozens of little groups wandering around on campus tours. So far I’ve impersonated a professor of British Literature (complete with cockney accent) and a professor of Philosophy (I’ve been growing a beard for a week to prep for that one). I’ve got a pool going with some of my coworkers to see who can give the worst directions to new students. First one to get a freshman all the way to Chinatown (it’s about as far from campus as you can get without crossing any rivers) wins. Wish me luck!

I have a personal question. When you’re wearing bike shorts, is your man bus supposed to be headed uptown or downtown? My natural inclination (ah ha!) is down, but this seems to suggest it’s a subject of some debate (although frankly I can’t tell what’s going on in half of those shorts). I know it’s the kind of thing you’d naturally pick up in a locker room, just through careful (but not too careful!) observation, but I don’t have a locker room, and the few cyclists I’ve queried seemed perturbed by my even asking. Can’t a complete stranger ask you which way your wang is listing without being treated like a jerk?

Anyway, it doesn’t have to be just bike shorts. Leotards, Elizabethan codpiecesÃ� ââ�¬â�� whatever you’re familiar with. Let me know.

Here’s me typing with bandaids on all ten fingers and loving it! I’m typing like a madman, too, with none of the soreness than usually accompanies speeds like these. Why has no one thought of this sooner?

I was originally only wearing one bandaid due to last night when I was chopping vegetables for dinner and accidentally circumcised my index finger. Did you know if you bleed into a Thai chili paste stir fry no one will notice? True story. Anyway, the bandaid provided the aforementioned pleasant sensation while typing, so I decided to give it a try on the other nine and here I am, happy as can be. Go give it a try. You’ll love it, I promise.

Some people like it, some people don’t, for some it inspires a screenplay, for others, a fix. However you feel about the new iTunes in general, you gotta love the new playlist folders. My source list was getting out of control, but now it fits easily in one window with no scrollbars.

One thing I didn’t notice right away, though, is that if you click on a playlist folder, it shows you all the songs in all the playlists in that folder, sorted however you like. I make a lot of mix CDs for my friend Peter, so I made a playlist folder to hold them all, and it was frankly shocking to see that, over the years, I’ve really leaned heavily on the Fiery Furnaces, while almost criminally neglecting Dexy’s Midnight Runners. This will not stand.

Is it just me, or does Tiger’s Automator guy look like maybe he wants to do a little more than just “automate”? The way he’s holding that pipe gives off a distinctly Mafian vibe, like he’s slapping one end of it into his palm and grinning sadistically before going to work on your kneecaps. Maybe they should call him “Persuader.”

In that spirit, I’ve made a little Automator action you can download here. All it does is compose a vaguely threatening email message in Apple’s Mail.app. Just run it, type in the name of the person you want to vaguely threaten, type in your name, and send the message. Simple!

If there’s a better use for computers than this, I don’t want to know what it is.

So I forgot to mention that back in March I was featured on a little CSS showcase site. True, it’s not in English, but I’m okay with being the Jerry Lewis of web designers. Or better yet the Mid-to-Late-90s Woody Allen of web design. Also, if you take a look at the other featured sites, you’ll see that mine ââ�¬â�� while a perfectly acceptable example of late 2004 design ââ�¬â�� isn’t really cutting it in 2005. It needs a little polishing. This was my first site design, and I’ve learned so much spent so much time copying other people’s code since then. Expect a redesign in the near future. Everyone else is doing it.