I want to give whoever wrote this headline for this Australian newspaper an award!
It’s hard to believe that it’s already the fourth Friday in April!
We’ve had a bit over a week of warmer than usual days for this time of year. We have already set a new record for the number of days in April with a daytime high of 70 or more! Rain is supposed to come back on Saturday.
Meanwhile, we have the Friday Five. This week I bring you: one story that made me laugh, the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about deplorable people, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about latest mass shooting, five stories about the pandemic, five stories from the world of tech, and five videos (plus things I wrote and some notable obituaries).
We’re getting rather warm dry days in Seattle. The curent long-term forecast says no rain for the next eight days. The sky has been so clear that at some times in the day, even with the blinds closed, some parts of the house are so brightly lit I sometimes have to wear sunglasses indoors!
Which brings us to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five videos about fairly serious topics, and five videos or a slightly more lightweight nature (plus something I wrote and notable obituaries).
We’re getting rather warm dry days in Seattle. The curent long-term forecast says no rain for the next eight days. The sky has been so clear that at some times in the day, even with the blinds closed, some parts of the house are so brightly lit I sometimes have to wear sunglasses indoors!
Which brings us to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five videos about fairly serious topics, and five videos or a slightly more lightweight nature (plus something I wrote and notable obituaries).
If only they had sense enough to feel like a fool…
Welcome to the second Friday in April!
I had a lot of fun at the virtual convention last weekend. I’ve spent the rest of the week scrambling at work, laughing at certain news stories, and taking delight in how many flowers are blooming on my veranda.
Which brings us to the Friday Five. This week I bring you: one story to wonderful it needs its own category five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about seditious traitors, five stories about other deplorables, and five videos (plus something I wrote and notable obituaries).
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that the most recent Friday Five was an almost unreadable mess. The reason is kind of a funny (infuriating) story.
I logged out of my work computer on Friday evening sometime around 6pm, as I often do, then switched to my Macbook Pro to start working on the usual Friday Five post. As usual I started by going through my list of bookmarked news stories for a bit to get an idea of which ones I definitely wanted to include.
I took a break to sort laundry and discuss dinner plans with my husband. Then I took the laundry down to the laundry room and got it started, came back up, assembled a burrito from the massive pile of burrito fixin’s my husband had made for our lunch and scarfed it down. Then I swapped the laundry from the washers to the dryers, and sat back down to actually type up the Friday Five in HTML in a text editor.
Around 9pm Pacific Time, while I was in the middle of working on the Friday Five Wordpess.com killed the Classic Editor (in the background; I didn’t find out until I was finished typing and went to set up metatags and such), which is what I was used to using… And even though the new Block Editor has a Block that is called "Classic" if you put HTML in there, it publishes it the way that last Friday’s post turned out.
Between working on the post, dinner, and dealing with the laundry, by the time I was ready to publish the post, it was my usual bedtime, and the editor I was using disappeared. I don’t want to explain all the hoops I had to go through to salvage my HTML code which suddenly just vanished, and then try to get the web site to let me publish it. I just reached a point where I said, "Screw it! The HTML publishes fine of Dreamwidth, but you can click on the links at WordPress and they work; it just looks horrible." And I went to bed.
Here’s the thing: I’m old. I’ve been publishing stuff to the web since the 1990s, but I really started in the late 1980s writing help files for a small software company in SGML, which is an ancestor of both HTML and XML. So I type HTML tags really fast. It’s all muscle memory. I don’t think "less-than sign space a space href equals sign quotation mark" to type the beginning of a hyperlink referenece, I just think "link" and my fingers type out <a href=" almost faster than I can say the word "link" out loud.
In part that’s because I learned to type on old manual typewriters before the advent of electric typewriters or personal computers, so I type at about 105 words per minute on modern keyboards. It’s just a thing.
The new WordPress editor does offer a Markdown block element, and if I type Markdown in to that, it works fine. The problem on Friday was that I already had the entire post ready to go in HTML, and retyping the whole thing in Markdown would have taken more time. There ought to be an option with any Web publishing tool to publish HTML. But stupidity, apparently, reigns.
Some folks will ask why I haven’t been typing the Friday Five posts in Markdown before this, because "everyone uses Markdown now" and the whole point of Markdown is that it is fewer keystrokes than HTML and the raw text is even easier for a human who doesn’t know anything about coding or the Web to parse. I know! A few years ago I was pulled aside at work to help with a side project one of the vice presidents was working on, and they wanted to do the help in Markdown. I reviewed John Gruber’s web page of the syntax, opened up my favorite plain text editor, and I wrote help in Markdown. Because the help was fairly simple there wasn’t much of a learning curve. And while, yeah, Markdown is a lot fewer keystrokes, that one project wasn’t enough to get Markdown into muscle memory. I have to think about the Markdown syntax, as simple as it is, to write this blog post.
I know HTML well enough that I don’t have to think to type it. And yes, that means that right now I still can type <a href=" as fast or nearly as fast as I can think, "Uh, let’s see, the link text goes in the square brackets while the link goes in ordinary parenthesis, I think?"
It won’t be long before I’m not pausing to remember what to type for the less often used things, but it’s a new habit I need to learn. And like most humans I am lazy. I’d rather keep using the thing I already know than to get as good at the new thing as I already am with the old thing.
So this is that part where you imagine me as Grandpa Simpson shouting at a cloud.
But writing this post has been good practice for the next Friday Five.
Stephen Colbert: Now’s Not The Time To Fix America’s Gun Problem, Says GOP In Familiar Refrain
Good Omens: Lockdown (Yes, I this is a bit over 13 months old and I posted it back then, but it came around in my stream and made me laugh again): https://www.youtube.com/embed/quSXoj8Kob0
It’s hard to believe that it’s already the third Friday in March!
Still trying to get into the groove of things. One of the lavender plants on the deck is starting to show so buds. I need to get some spot colors for some of the other pots and planters.
Meanwhile, we have the <em>Friday Five</em>. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about haters and deplorables, five stories about the pandemic, and five videas (plus things I wrote and some notable obituaries).
<a href=”https:/<a href=”untitled%20text%205.html”>untitled text 5.html</a>/variety.com/2021/film/news/jessica-walter-dead-arrested-development-archer-1234938246/”>Jessica Walter, ‘Arrested Development’ and ‘Archer’ Star, Dies at 80</a>.
It’s hard to believe that it’s already the third Friday in March!
The weather was warming for several days, and no the rain came back. And hay fever was virtually non-existent until the first rainy day.
Meanwhile, we have the Friday Five. This week I bring you: one story that made me laugh, the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about restoring the nation, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about latest mass shooting, five stories about the pandemic, and five videos (plus things I wrote and some notable obituaries).
I mentioned last week how my hay fever was kicking up. This week it got much worse. There was one day that the sinus headache was so bad I had to take a break in the middle of the work day to lie in a dark room for a couple of hours.
Meanwhile, we have the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about restoring the nation, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about haters and other deplorables, and five videas (plus things I wrote and some notable obituaries).
Welcome to the first Friday in March! It’s March! That means that I have been in quarantine for one year and 12 days!
Truly it is spring! My hay fever is worse, we’ve had a few days of sunny weather but still cold nights, and then it went back to buckets of rain. Don’t get me wrong, I love the rain. It’s just that the switching back and forth as quickly as it did a few times this weeks makes it difficult to plan anything.
Meanwhile, we have the Friday Five. This week I bring you: the top five stories of the week, five stories of interest to queers and our allies, five stories about the pandemic, five stories about haters and other deplorables, and five videas (plus things I wrote and some notable obituaries).
Font Folly 