Blessed by the Potato

I was just talking about how prolific I’ve been with regards to writing: not only for work and all that jazz, but with 10 000 words on BbtP in about 10 days. Almost too much for my poor readers to keep up with (especially the dull travelogue). Now, of course, I’ve jinxed it: it’s been days and I haven’t had a post up. Traffic dropped to record lows on the weekend, and I haven’t made any more progress on my novella or screenplay (too many projects going at once? Hmmm…) ongoing project to piss my free time away into the gaping maw of a black hole. In my defense, I’ve been sick the last two days, and catching up on my sleep.

To conclude, I’ll point you at an interesting link that relates to my last post about electric cars.

I woke up yesterday more refreshed than I had been in a long time, which was particularly odd since I only had about 4 hours of sleep last night. I decided to stick to my diet, and I did a remarkable job — the first day I haven’t cheated in a really, really long time. I had soup for lunch/breakfast, and a veggie sandwich on whole wheat for dinner. At one point my stomach was hurting a bit, so I had a chocolate-covered granola bar to help settle it down. I substituted water or juice for almost all my drinks, so I actually did pretty well by the end of the day.

Then, shortly after midnight I had a very sudden onset of depression and stress. I realized that despite feeling like a human being for the first time in a long while, I still didn’t get a whole lot done. Now I’ve got my mock defense tomorrow, and I still haven’t finished preparing my slides, let alone practicing my talk. It is, in a word, terrifying.

So I went through my pictures, since I’m also really missing Wayfare (I haven’t seen her in forever) and she has a really nice smile that just makes me feel good :)

And doing so, I realized that I have barely any photos of her at all. I know we’re both camera shy, but that’s borderline inexcusable. In particular, I don’t have any from within the last year… most of our picture-taking is done on vacation, at Halloween, and at Christmas, and this year I was too busy to take a vacation, she was sick for Halloween, and I was sick for Christmas, so there were none.

Looking at the pictures of myself, I realized that I’ve really gone downhill in the last few years. I’ve always been hard on myself, and cerebrally I know that, but looking back I wasn’t actually all that hideous in 4th year (the summer of 3rd year was also a particularly good one for me vis-a-vis working out, so it’s perhaps no coincidence that that was fall that I had the confidence to ask Wayfare out in the first place). I always had the problem of looking too young before that, then in 4th year the beard really helped me out, I think… and now I’ve swung too far into looking old and decrepit. At least I took advantage of what looks I had at the right time :)

I also found that photo of my bald spot buried in a Halloween folder. I had been meaning to compare for some time now, but just couldn’t find that photo anywhere (and it’s no wonder — I swore I took it in February of ’05, when I started Rogaine).

Anyhow, none of this really lifted my spirits much, so I decided that I had been subconsciously self-medicating with chocolate, and my good day had thwarted that. So, in a weak moment, I broke the one good diet day I had and had another few chocolate-covered granola bars (they’re not actually much better for me than regular chocolate bars — they’re just a little bit smaller, and have slightly more complex carbohydrates than sugar… they’re still really fatty).

In other news, this is my 100th blog post!. That’s not even counting my static pages (e.g.: recipes), so it’s moderately exciting! I had hoped to come up with some memorable post or event to mark the occasion, but simply didn’t. In my defense, it came up sooner than I had planned (I thought I would slow down my posting rate and not hit 100 until after my defense). So far, the site has been a little too much of a vanity project for my tastes, I was hoping to stay closer to topics of more widespread interest (and, sadly, this post is exactly the sort of thing I hope my site would not become). I blame the software — after the set-up headaches, WordPress has been surprisingly easy to use, and really handy for just firing up and hammering out some utter gibberish from whatever computer I happen to be on. The search function will come in quite handy, I’m sure, as I remember that finding something on my old site was quite a pain.

Oddly enough, I still miss the crappy gifs of various Potato-based dishes for the various sections of the site. Speaking of the old site, what piece of brilliance do you think I should salvage from it next? The Great Potato Encyclopedia was a clever idea, IMNSHO, but since its original introduction Wikipedia has come out and made it ridiculously big, so my effort will seem lame by comparison (particularly if I use a type of wiki software, which would almost be demanded for ease of use, even if I am the only writer). The Advice Column could come back with little difficulty, but it’s been a long time since anyone has asked my advice on anything. I suppose I’ve made too many terrible life choices myself to be accepted as a valid font of wisdom, multiple personalities or not. Plus my readership just simply isn’t high enough for even pseudoanonymity to apply.

Ah, well, aside from writing more drivel, the next steps for the site I plan on taking involve cooking some of the things in my recipe section and actually photographing the process.

I finally got around to adding a contact address on the sidebar. You’ll notice that I’ve taken two steps to try to avoid spam. The first, of course, is that I’ve put the address in an image. Unfortunately, that makes it look slightly askew from the rest of the column. Ah, well, we’ll just have to deal with it. The other is that I’ve used my Gmail address. For those that know my more frequently checked addresses, continue to use them.

I also pulled over One Nation Under a Groove: A Quantum Mechanical Analysis from the old site by request. My Pages section on the right is getting a little crowded, but I’m hesitant to start lumping the stories under a “writing” page (as I’ve done with the recipes). I also tweaked the line item spacing a bit, so it should be easier to tell multi-line titles apart.

Well, my trustly little webserver has been locking up with increasing frequency. I still get nearly a week before I have to reset it, but it’s no longer a guaranteed seven days like before, which puts me in the embarrassing position of having other people tell me that my website has gone down. So as a bit of a thesis gift to myself — and since the website looks to be fairly stable and extremely productive at the moment — I’m going to buy some professional webspace. I tried to find a Canadian host since Americans scare me a little at the moment, even though I know I don’t exactly have schemata for Rube Goldberg devices of terror hosted here. Unfortunately, the pickings are slim.

Right now I’m trying to decide between Monster Hosting, a Canadian host with a fairly cheap plan at $7/mo, and LunarPages, an American host at $8/mo (Canadian). BlackSun came highly recommended and was in the running for a while, but I’m trying to do this on the cheap, so their $10/month rate and $25 setup fee pretty much killed that. (I know, it’s lunacy to be agonizing over like $20 per year, but there you have it.)

LunarPages is offering a ton more bandwidth as well as a free domain name. I also know of one person using LunarPages, so that’s another plus to them (both for the more relevant referral, and also because I can help out a friend through their referral kickback program). MonsterHosting seems a lot smaller, and I don’t really know how much I can trust the few positive reviews of it I’ve seen. But I don’t really see their lower bandwidth offerings as a huge drawback since it’s still well above what I’m using now, and it might indicate that they’re a little more honest with being able to deliver what they sell. While the domain won’t be free, I can register holypotato.ca through them, which appeals to me a bit more than holypotato.net (or going with some other .com for my free LunarPages address).

So if anyone has any final advice before I end up flipping a coin and taking the plunge, let me know (especially if you can get a referral out of me :)

Turns out Star Wars: Empire at War was released a few weeks ago. I hadn’t really noticed, and won’t have time to give it more of a try for a while (the demo didn’t grab me and scream at me to get the game so much as whisper, in a sultry tone, “look for me in the bargain bin, and we’ll stay up all night. Oh, and I don’t mind if you spend the whole time wishing I was more like StarCraft… just as long as you play me hard, you video game addicted tool.”) The Onion had this to say about it: “Sure, you could find a deeper or better-tuned strategy game—but this one has AT-ATs.”

Oddly enough, I find myself humming the Imperial March a lot (Vader’s theme) lately, and I’ve had it stuck in my head all night. At first I didn’t really mind because… you know… Star Wars. But now, it’s getting on my nerves. Anyone know of a way to get it to stop, aside from getting a legitimately annoying song stuck up there?

I think it might be some sort of subconscious metaphor about my thesis. However, I’m not yet clear on what exactly it’s alluding to. The fierce oppression of a half-mad sorcerer? The desperate search to retrieve the plans to the ultimate weapon before it can be taken away by the rebel scum? The ascendancy of the pupil by facing the master in combat?

Anyway… I took a look at the site’s traffic. It peaked over the winter break, and has been slowly dwindling. I guess I haven’t been writing very entertaining posts lately. I’ve noticed a few patterns. Firstly, traffic dips significantly on the weekends. I can think of two possible reasons for that, the first being obviously that people like to procrastinate and read this while they’re at work (or that they only check on weekdays and have lives on the weekend), and the other being that since I usually visit my parents on the weekend, it’s never updated anyway. Next, despite my predictions to the contrary, long posts generally don’t generate any comments whatsoever. Perhaps they’re too long to bother finishing? And finally, it’s really exciting to have enough traffic to see patterns in it! (Even if half of it is from search engine crawlers).