Red Monkey

April 30, 2008

Ye Olde Family Recipe

We interrupt this program to bring you ...

... a cooking show. I know, I know.

I have never been a big one for cooking. It's usually long, involved and tedious (at least when your attention span for such things is about that of a hyperactive gnat). However, there are a few recipes that I'll suck it up for.

Koogali, is our one "old family recipe." I used to think that we also had a pecan pie "old family recipe" and a chocolate cake "old family recipe." The pecan pie recipe is apparently the standard Karo syrup recipe, and my grandmother's SCRUMPTIOUS chocolate cake recipe (coming from someone who doesn't really like cake) is really just Texas Sheetcake made in a 9x13 pan instead of a sheetcake pan. (No nuts in the icing, please. I like nuts, just not in this recipe. Besides, they tend to make the roof of my mouth itch. Wha? I keep telling you my body is NOT wired like normal people's bodies ... oops, I've digressed again, haven't I?)

My grandmother's family came to the U.S. from Lithuania. I cannot for the life of me remember if Grandma Rosie was born in Lithuania or the U.S., however. The Americanized form of the surname became Kalasky (and if you've watched Rugrats, you can probably guess that I enjoy pretending that I'm related to Arlene Klasky), but no one seems to recall what the original last name was. Makes it kinda hard to trace our roots back to the old country. The one really big thing that was passed down was our Koogali recipe.

We had this every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas and it was usually a family production to get it made. I usually proposed that we didn't need a ham or turkey or whatever, that we should just make a meal of the Koogali. Sadly, I was always shot down.

What is it? Well, the short form is that it's a Lithuanian potato dish. Serious Old Country cooking, mind you. Bacon and potatoes and an onion. Then, my other half discovered a few years ago, that it's actually spelled Kugelis ... the link goes to Wikipedia's recipe. Turns out, it's the national dish of Lithuania. Eh, who knew? The name means "flat potato dish" and that about sums it up.

Here's our recipe, complete with photos of the process. Keep in mind, you have to process the potatoes VERY quickly once you've peeled them or they begin to turn brown. It's not that they go bad that fast, but it doesn't look as appetizing and it can affect the flavour.

Ingredients:

• 1 pound of bacon (I used low salt this time around - didn't notice a difference, really)


• 4 eggs


• some starch (old world recipe, remember? this equals a palmful to me


• 1/2 of a large onion


• 1 T sugar


• handful of white flour (your guess is as good as mine)


• 6-8 large potatoes


• 1 1/2 cups of milk


• 1 teaspoon of baking powder (NOT baking soda, Chelle)

Fry up all the bacon and then save the grease. I told you this was an old world recipe, right? You should cook the bacon until it's pretty darn crispy rather than chewy. You're going to be breaking the bacon up and it's easier to do if it's crispy. It's gonna wind up soft when it's baked inside the mixture anyway, so you might as well make the shredding part easy on yourself.

Cut up the onion and fry it in some of the bacon grease. I used a shortcut of pre-cut red onion this time. We usually use the white onions, but I like the stronger flavour of the reds, myself.

Next, beat the eggs until they're foaming, then add the sugar, milk, starch, flour and baking powder. Mix this really well.

Now comes the tricky part. You need great timing here and that's why we usually had a slew of family members in the kitchen working on this.

Peel the potatoes and then grate them. You have to do this quickly so they don't turn brown, but if you have about 3 or 4 people doing the grating, it goes fast enough - this is definitely the best way to do it. If you don't have enough people to do it this way, you can use a Cuisineart to "grate" the potatoes, but the texture of the finished product is not as good. Look, I'm not one for the finer details like texture, but even I can tell the difference between the cheat method and the grating method. Grating rocks.

Since I was making this alone, I had to use my bitty tiny Cuisineart. Which is fine, because as you can see, we have a bitty, tiny kitchen as well.

Gotta stop here for a funny story. One of my mom's cousins was making Koogali one year. He was doing it mostly from memory and he SWORE up and down that they had to boil the potatoes first and then grate them. His wife looked at him like he had lost his fricking mind. He insisted, "That's how we've always done it." So they boiled the potatoes and then burned their damn hands trying to grate the things.

There, that bit of family history is now preserved for the ages. Grate boiled potatoes! LMFAO

Oh, you should probably flip the oven on now. Preheat to 350 degrees (Fahrenheit).

Anyhow, I had either five or six of the biggest damn potatoes I have ever seen. I'm telling you these were frigging TEXAS sized potatoes. Normally it's 6-8 large potatoes. I peeled them, cut them up into pieces the teeny tiny Cuisineart thing could handle and put those pieces in water to keep them from turning brown. As you do this, you'll notice the water turning murky-white. This is normal, it's starch leeching out of the potatoes (which is why you put starch in the liquid mixture earlier). Here's the shredded potatoes:

And you can see just in the time it took to take that picture, it was starting to go brown.

Now, quickly, mix that liquid mixture up some more, to make sure the semi-solids didn't fall to the bottom. (This is the milk, egg, flour, baking powder, sugar, and starch concoction from earlier.) Pour the onions and bacon in with the potatoes. Mix with your hands. Using a big-ass spoon does not cut it. Use your clean hands.

When that's nicely mixed, pour in the liquid concoction as well and mix with your hands. Then, take some Pam and spray the heck out of a non-stick 9x13 pan. I mean spray like you've never sprayed before. The original recipe calls for greasing the pan with the leftover bacon grease. Umm, in an attempt to not completely and totally clog arteries, use Pam. It works. After you've Pam'd the pan, pour in your concoction.

Now comes the bacon grease. I have tried multiple ways of using Pam instead, but it's just no good. The recipe completely dries out on top and does not taste very good. So, you need to use the leftover bacon grease and pour some of that on top of the Koogali. Spread it out over the entire top, a nice thin layer like so:

Now put it in the preheated oven at 350 ... for about an hour. When is it done? Well, you'll need to cut into the center to check it. It should be moist, but not runny. The top should look something like this:

Thought we were done? No way! While the Koogali is baking, we have to make the topping, but this is an easy-peasy deal. Take a tub of large curd cottage cheese and an equal amount of sour cream. Mix together. There ya go. The topping is ready. (We usually pour it back into the sour cream and cottage cheese containers and mark them with a big K.)

Now, just let me take a moment to tell you this: my dad HATES sour cream and DESPISES cottage cheese. HATES them. They are nasty spoiled uckiness to him. But even he swears by this mixture on top of the Koogali.

And now, I present to you ... the finished product:

But, we're STILL not done. I know, this is like an old Ronco commercial, isn't it? But wait! There's MORE!

Anyhow, every year there is an argument over whether or not Koogali is better the first day, fresh out of the oven ... or the second day.

Prepping for the second day is simple: cut a rectangular slab of Koogali out of the pan, Pam the heck out of a frying pan and make sure to fry the Koogali on all four long sides. After you've done that, you can attempt to fry the short ends, too, if you're silly like I am. The fried Koogali is generally solid enough that you can at least get a touch of browning on those sides before it falls over or your relatives tell you the damn thing is cooked and get the hell outta the way so that they can cook theirs.

I probably shouldn't have put the fried version on my favourite green plate ... but you get the idea:

And there you have it. My family's one claim to ever-lasting fame: Koogali.

(Unless it turns out that we really are related to Arlene Klasky and then she pretty much outshines anything else we've done. Well, unless you take into account that my aunt gets interviewed on NPR and has been quoted in USAToday and ... oh heck, so SHE's famous. The rest of us are schmucks.)

P.S. Want to try the recipe and you don't wanna wade through this long-ass post? Click here for the PDF recipe, text only, no side commentary. :)

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:56 AM | Comments (5) | Blog | Stumble

April 23, 2008

Toooooooo Many Questions

I saw someone answer these over at Cre8Buzz and since I enjoyed reading Piper's answers, I thought I'd answer them, too. I actually wrote the answers yesterday, but then managed to be too busy to actually post them until this morning. Yes, I am a dork.

Have you ever had mono?
Nope.

The last place you were (besides now)?
Hmm, in the house or out of the house? Last place I was in the house was the kitchen to do my breakfast dishes. Last place I was outside of the house was out and about for our seven year wedding anniversary last night. (She wanted Red Lobster. Then I got to go to Toys R Us.)

Do you remember anything from being 3?
A LOT, actually. But my favourite memory from being three is this:

We lived in Albuquerque for three months when I was three, and my mother was terrified of the "dirty indians." One day, she decided we'd go shopping up in Santa Fe, in this mall that she'd heard so much about. Turns out, it wasn't the kind of mall she was expecting and as we wandered from "garage sale to garage sale" (she didn't approve of the folks who laid their stuff out on blankets), I grew increasingly more fascinated. We paused to look at one man's booth and I began asking questions. "What's this? What does it mean? Why does it look like that?" He was quite patient with me and I think somewhat bemused. Mom, however, had wandered off, blithely assuming that I was paying attention to her rather than her paying attention to me. She came back just in time to hear me tell the man, "When I grow up, I'm gonna be an Indian, too!"

How many times a day do you drop your cell phone?
.00001 Seriously. It's pretty freaking rare for me to drop it.

The top three things you spend the most money on?
Mortgage. Electronics/Computers/Software. LEGOs.

Last food you ate?
Grilled Steak Taco from Taco Bell. 2 of them. For breakfast. (Bought them yesterday cuz there was nothing left to eat in the house.)

First thing you notice about the opposite sex?
This is a trick question, right?

One of your favorite songs?
ONE????
Oh bleeding hell. Well, at random, first one to pop into my head is: Unwell by Matchbox 20.

The school you attend(ed)?
Kindergarten, first grade - Austin - Pillow Elementary
Second grade - Austin - St. Louis Catholic school
Third grade - Austin - Pillow Elementary
Third grade through sixth - Arlington - Butler Elementary
Seventh, 1 semester of eighth - Arlington - Nichols Jr. High
Second semester of eighth, ninth - Arlington - Shackleford Jr. High
High school - Arlington - Lamar (there was a threat to move to Singapore my junior year, but we all told Dad hell no.)
Undergrad - University of Texas at Arlington
Grad - University of Notre Dame

Your cell phone provider?
Nextel. We get a discount through my other half's workplace.

Favorite store in the mall?
Ewww, the mall??? GROSS!
If I have to pick something, I guess Hot Topic. Or the Build-A-Bear shop.

The longest job you had?
I taught for 9 years, I guess that was the longest of the two professional jobs I've had.

What do you smell like?
I have a really really really really crummy sense of smell. So, I'll go with the oddest smell that I enjoy: road tar. Smells kinda like bacon frying to me.

The biggest lie you've ever heard?
I've heard so many doozies, it's hard to pick one. I suppose it would have to be when a certain person told me that he and I were saving the world, only it was a secret.

The last time you cried was because why?
When I was in fifth grade and my great-grandmother died.

In your opinion, do long distance relationships work?
They can.

Do you drink coffee?
Ewwww. Umm, I mean, hellz no.

What do you wanna say to your most recent ex?
I hope that one day you are comfortable with who you are and can quit looking for a personality in other people. I hope you find peace and happiness.

What do you remember from being 19?
A lot! Getting chicken pox for the second time; moving out of my parents' house; the first apartment; my first cat; working until midnight and getting home to listening to my ex say how many times my mother had called (starting at 10 p.m.).

Favorite color(s)?
Green.

First person on your missed calls list on your cell phone?
Don't think I've missed any this week.

Who is the last text message from?
I refuse to do text messaging.

How many pillows do you usually sleep with?
Two. A regular pillow and my "baby" pillow. I actually kept the "baby" pillow that my grandma made for me until I was in my 30s. By that point the, fiberfill stuffing was ... well, hard as a rock, lumpy and impossible to get comfy. So, I made another one to the same specs and placed a few pieces of the fabric inside with the stuffing of the new one.

Yeah, I'm overly sentimental and attached to things like that.

What are you wearing now?
Green Addidas t-shirt and dark blue running shorts.

How many pets do you own?
Two miniature dachshunds (Scraps is 6 and Scout is 4). Four cats - blended family there - my other half had two when we met and I had two. (Tux is 13, Mishu and Gabby are around 11, Rio is 9) A betta fish named Flash. He is the most stupid and irritating betta I have ever owned.

What are you doing tomorrow?
The same thing we do every day, Pinky.

Can you play ping pong?
Duh. Wait, do you mean competitively? In that case no.
My favourite set is still my Nerf ping pong set.

Favorite food?
Mexican.
I will do damn near anything for really good guacamole. Place some of that in front of me, and I think I would probably continue eating it until my stomach exploded. I have no will power when guacamole is in front of me.

Do you like maps?
I have always adored them. They fascinate me.

Do you like strawberry banana smoothies?
I have never had a smoothie. They don't really sound good to me.

Have you ever attended a themed party?
Nope.

Have you ever thrown a party?
Mmmm, a couple of house-warming parties. Otherwise, no.

When did you wake up this morning?
3:40 a.m. as usual. The other half has to leave the house at 4:30 a.m. to make it to work by 5 a.m.

The best thing about winter?
Ewwwwww. Winter SUCKS.
I guess going snowboarding is the best. But we didn't even get to do that this year.

Last time you were in trouble with the cops?
Never.

What color underwear are you wearing?
Grey.

Do you think Ryan Sheckler is hot?
Dude, he is a mad skater! Love him. Hot? Dunno, I'm not really the person to ask ....

What are your plans for this weekend?
The same thing we do every weekend, Pinky.

How many days is it until your birthday?
196
And it's ruined already. Stupid fooken election wrecking my 40th.

What do you want to be when you "grow up"?
A kid.

Are you on a laptop?
I'm using one. But if I was on it, it would probably break.

Are you smiling?
Too sleepy for smiling. Besides, I'm concentrating on this. Duh.

Do you miss someone right now?
Of course.

Are you happy?
Relatively. Be happier if I had a damn job, though.

Have you ever been in the hospital for an emergency?
Twice. First time I was 13 and the neighbor's dachshund bit me whilst I was babysitting the kids. On the upper lip. Perforated the inside, even. Ow.
Second time was for a severe asthma attack.

Last time you ate chicken?
Yesterday. I love chicken.

What jewelry are you wearing?
My LiveSTRONG bracelet.

What are you going to do after this survey?
Go back to bed.

Song you're listening to?
The dogs snoring.

The car you were in last?
My Civic.

Do you like avocado?
Duh. It's the main ingredient in guacamole.

How long is your hair?
Dunno. But I'm getting it cut today. (It's above my collar, but I'm not gonna frigging measure it. Geez.)

What's on your mind right now?
This survey?
Getting a job.

Last show you watched?
Deadliest Catch.

Last thing you drank?
Diet Vanilla Pepsi, the nectar of the gods.

Where did you sleep last night?
In my house. Umm, duh.

Bonus Question ... What is the one phrase you say to your kids, animals, other half that you never thought would be a regular addition to your vocabulary?
Scout, quit trying to bite his weenie!
(The younger of the two dogs, who is also the girl, plays dirty!!!)

When was the last time you smiled?
A little while ago. Watching the dogs play and wrestle. Smiling at the other half as she left for work.

What did you say last?
Yeah. (She wanted me to lock the door after her, since her hands were full.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:23 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

April 13, 2008

Gender: M / F / ? (part 2)

Continuing from Thursday's discussion about the differences between biological sex and cultural gender-roles:
So it does seem that throughout our human history, there have been quite a fair number of individuals who did not fit into the cultural gender role specified by their biological sex. I am not discussing sexual orientation, which to me, is a separate (although related) issue.

What strikes me about all of this is an issue which has always irritated me and is demonstrated most aptly by a modern example: the About Me box prevalent on every website with any real level of personalization. You can see the problem if you surf through Blogger blogs, MySpace, Friendster or the like. Some people have short, pithy About Me boxes - either their world is easily classified and categorized, or they've given up in frustration. Other people have About Me boxes which trail from the top of the page, down below the fold and then some, a long, skinny tail attempting to balance everything that person is.

The reality of humanity is that we are rarely easily categorized. People are so very much more than their religion, their race, their nationality, their ethnicity, their profession, their marital status ... and more than their sex or their gender.

So, what is it to be male or female in terms of expected gender roles? Well, obviously this changes from culture to culture.

My first-year college students, some 5-8 years ago, had to read a seminal article discussing how gender expectations led to male and female students learning and behaving differently in the classroom. When it came time to discuss the essay in class, the students immediately let me know exactly what they thought about the article: it was hopelessly out of date.

It was one of those moments in teaching that you can't plan, but when they happen, you wish you'd had a video camera to record the whole thing.

The students began by all agreeing that such preferential treatment of boys over girls simply didn't happen any more. It very quickly morphed into "boys and girls are better in different areas because boys and girls are interested in different things."

Girls don't like math.
Boys don't like reading.

As the students made these generalizations, I could see some of them starting to squirm in their seats. However, as first-year students, not all of them were willing to "take on" the entire class and it seemed like everyone else was agreeing.

And then one of the male students said, "Well, you can tell boys and girls are different just by what they play with when they're little. I mean, girls don't like to play with cars or get dirty or climb trees."

Before he could go on, there were a couple of mini-explosions across the room.

We spent the rest of the class having a great discussion on gender-roles and how those often differ from the reality of individual personalities. With a class that included several female engineering students, several international students and a couple of males in "non-traditional" fields, there was a lot of sharing of stories. My students left the class that day, still discussing the issues - a happy and semi-rare day for a required first-year course.

I think many people in the western world have come to the conclusion that it is not necessarily a trait of males to want to have a career. It's not necessarily a trait of women to want to stay home with the kids.

So, while some traits might be more prevalent in men or in women, they all seem to have not just exceptions (which implies they are not common) but that these traits might be tendencies, whether hard-wired or learned.

So what does hard-wire the male and female brain to be different?

Some research indicates that men use more grey matter, leading to a tendency toward more information processing; women tend to use more white matter, leading to more connections between various processing centers.

So, those people who say men and women think differently are right - in general. The problem is that there are always biological exceptions which muddy the waters.

For myself, I cringe when any survey asks me: M or F. I am not that easily categorized. They are not usually asking for my biological sex as that rarely matters in a survey. They are often asking for gender and I don't think that the majority of people in the western world truly fit into the expected gender norms. I know too many men who are "too sensitive" and too many women who enjoy the outdoors "too much." And if a researcher is simply quantifying us by M & F we're going to get pink Hello Kitty compound bows sized for a woman - which might make some of my friends happy (you know who you are!!), but which would just piss me off to no end.

Ultimately, what makes us what we think of as male or female is more complicated than our biological bits and there's a lot more overlap in both directions than M or F would indicate on a survey. As a species, we are programmed to look for patterns and to put everything into hierarchies. The problem is, most of our methods of classification are too simplistic to truly encapsulize who we are. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Thomas Beatie - someone born female, but felt like a man. So, he had his breasts removed, began the testosterone therapy ... but stopped short of a "full" sex change, citing that one day he might want to bear a child.

Is Thomas a man or a woman? Biologically, the answer is fairly simple as we sex people by their genitalia. However, if we were able to look at all of Thomas's systems, would we find all the hallmarks of female, or would we find female knees and reproductive organs, but a male brain?

Is the woman who is outside more than inside, who hunts deer and delights in dune buggies more male or more female?

And ultimately, does it really even matter? Aren't we simply ourselves?

Why should the exterior trappings of male and female dress or appearance matter to anyone short of potential mates? Why do we care?

In online communities, I try to not say if I'm male or female because I feel the question is far more complicated than the simple biological answer. I catch flak for it and I don't particularly care. If there's a shoutbox or live chat feature to the community, I generally find myself the center of a controversy - is "ender" male or female. People get angry when I won't answer the question. Eventually, I pose one question to them: "If I'm not looking to date you, why do you care? I am still the same person I was before the debate started here. Why does it really matter?"

So far, no one has been able to answer that question ... and they have all (so far) decided that it doesn't matter after all. They're still curious, of course, but we are an intensely curious species - and that's a good thing.

[Some further reading:
from the BBC
from

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:10 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

April 10, 2008

Survey Asks - Gender: M / F / ?

It's a question that sounds ridiculous and yet it is one which has plagued me all my life and turns out to be more complicated than it sounds.

What is it, really to be male or female, man or woman?

We know, of course, the biological bits which make someone a man or a woman. We know there are people born with the sexual organs of both, making the biological definition of man and woman a little bit more complicated.

If someone can be born both male and female in terms of biological bits and pieces - sex - why do we seem to find it so difficult to believe that there are people who are born with a social construct gender path which does not necessarily match their biological sex?

Let me back off of that question for a moment and discuss the difference between sex and gender. Obviously a person's sex is a matter of factual record. You either have a penis and testicles and an "overabundance" of testosterone, or you have a uterus, vagina, ovaries, your breasts develop and an "overabundance" of estrogen. And then, of course, you get people who are born with both sets of sexual organs and a cacophony of hormones.

But it's pretty obvious how to differentiate man and woman. Factual, even. Examine the reproductive bits, classify as M or F. Easy.

Gender, on the other hand, is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

Each society defines gender and since there are two visually and easily identified sexes, most, but not all, societies have simplified gender to match sex.

Now we have the first complication in what I see as our modern viewing of sex and gender. Many people insist that sex and gender are, indeed, one and the same. They often claim that it has always been so and to suggest otherwise is an unnatural and modern perversion of humanity. However, if we look to the ancient Greeks, we can see that there were shades of grey both within the gender of Greek males and, of course, within their sexual preferences. Those who rigidly insist that Male and Female gender is defined by Male and Female sex, have a tendency to dismiss the Greeks as perverted and sick.

Yet these are the same people who insist that suggesting sex and gender are not necessarily the same is a modern concept. Ancient Greeks, I propose, are dismissed simply because they do not fit into the paradigm of the rigid Sex=Gender people. The ancient Greek and Roman golden period did have its share of what we classify as debauchery and perversion - but they also gave us the concepts of democracy and many of our ideals of fair governing - along with a history of what demagoguery and tyranny and imperialism can do to a country.

I think it's disingenuous of us to dismiss what we dislike simply because we disagree with it.

Historical and cultural indications that gender as a social construct is NOT a new idea:
• Man-hearted woman: Agamemnon by Aeschylus
• Revolutionary war: the example of Robert Shirtliffe/Deborah Samson - a female who enlisted in the American forces and fought through a great portion of the war - as a man, because that was the only way to be able to act as she felt called to act.
• In the Sioux tribe, gender was not completely cut and dry. Some men were thought to be blessed by the moon during their vision quest and they lived as women - and were thought to be quite clever people - there was no cultural negative repercussions for being such a person. On the other hand, some men who showed cowardice in battle were punished and ridiculed by being forced to live as women - the lesson here being that you could be called to a different gender by something outside yourself - or you could act in a manner which didn't correspond to your call or to your biological sex, and be ridiculed for that.
• Many Celtic tribes did not particularly have the same gender role expectations that we think of today. Women were leaders, fighters and generally the equal of their male counterparts.
• Some Eskimo tribes had women who resisted the marriage and child-bearing expectation of their sex, and it was not uncommon for these women to "live as men" in terms of the expected gender role - they hunted and they dressed as the men did without societal repercussion.
• Likewise, many Native American tribes had men who lived according to the expected societal gender role of women - dress, behaviour, et cetera.

But if all of these "primitive" cultures included gender-role-swapping, why isn't that in the history books? Well, according to Caitlin Howell:

Many of the accounts are written by missionaries who unrestrainedly express their disgust with homosexual and cross-gender individuals. One Jesuit priest wrote, "...men were seen to wear the dress of women without a blush, and to debase themselves so as to perform those occupations which are most peculiar to the sex, from whence followed a corruption of morals past all expression... these effeminate persons never marry, and abandon themselves to the most infamous passions, for which cause they are held in the most sovereign contempt." (Katz 290)

It is likely that white disapproval of homosexuality caused Native American homosexuals to disguise that part of their identity, and tribes gave white anthropologists and ethnographers the possibly mistaken impression that they shared their disapproval.(Blackwood 28)

In other words, what made it into writing was the "modern" or victorious society recording their disgust at the "primitives." Also, since the disgust was so vehement, and the missionary culture so pervasive, the original culture felt it necessary to bury their gender definitions in order to reduce battles and tensions.

I'll end today's post by saying this: despite the modern attempt to define the societal gender-roles of male and female quite rigidly according to biology, this does not appear to be a universal truth, but a cultural tendency. Some cultures (modern and ancient) have very strong societal constraints put on males and females. Other cultures may define male and female roles strongly, but allow a fluid meaning of male or female and not restrict that meaning to biological sex.

I intend to follow up this post with examples of just how muddy the waters can be ...

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:26 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

March 23, 2008

Hope You Had a Good Weekend

I'm not writing this post to upset anyone nor to make anyone feel bad. I'm not writing it to attack anyone. I know some people say those things to cover up the fact that they are, in fact, doing exactly those things. I'm not one of those people. This is a think-piece, not an attack piece. :)

All through a variety of public discussion groups this weekend, I have seen one message over and over and over again. It's a wish for a good weekend. It's a wish for fun. It's a wish that solidifies a solidarity amongst a very great number of people.

But that wish also makes a huge assumption about others.

It is, in my opinion only, one thing to say Happy Easter on your blog - it's your blog and you should say Happy Easter or well wishes for a pleasant Purim, even a great Wiccan Sabbat of Eostar. It's all good. It's your blog and you should say whatever you like there with no doubt.

However, when on a general discussion board or a even a Friendster or Myspace analog, WHY do people insist on leaving comments which indicate a Christian religious preference on the profiles of friends when they don't know for sure what tradition that friend follows?

It's a nice gesture, don't get me wrong. It's never amiss to wish someone a good day regardless of what day that happens to be.

But I have dear friends who are Jehovah's Witnesses - they are Christian, but do not "celebrate" holidays. It always bothers me when I hear people wishing these friends a Merry Christmas. They, of course, are used to it. They know they are in the minority about their beliefs regarding celebrating holidays and while it gives a momentary "I'm not at the Kingdom Hall" moment, at least my friends tend to take it relatively in stride.

The same, to a certain extent, with my Jewish friends. Most of them know the wish is a genuine wish of goodwill.

However, there's always that moment of cringe. That moment of realization that your friends may mean well, but they don't get you. That moment of remembering that you're an outsider after all.

It's not a bad thing to wish someone a good day, a good weekend. But when we attach a certain personal significance, a religious significance, to it when we don't know that person's belief system ... it's not quite the well wishing we might have thought.

And I do honestly hope everyone had a great weekend and this post didn't upset anyone. It's just a little thought-piece - but one I felt needed to be said.

UPDATE:
As at least two of my commenters mentioned, there are also other reasons that wishing someone a happy Easter or hope you had a great Christmas, or whatever. If you're coming to this post from the main page, please click through to the comments and read their experiences as well. Thanks!

Posted by Red Monkey at 8:49 PM | Comments (5) | Blog | Stumble

March 14, 2008

Don't Feed the Trolls

My bedroom in high school and the first year of college, was, more often than not, pitch dark. It wasn't for the lack of trying to lighten it up - my mom bought the most sheer curtains she could find. And when I demanded "bed dressing" that matched my personality, Mom made matching curtains out of an extra set of the sheets. (White, with a stripe of rainbow down each long side ... yeah, I know. Early indicator?) Stark white walls, mostly white comforter, sheer curtains which let in the light from the street light at the corner of our front yard. But my favourite way to be was laying on my bedroom floor, all the lights out, just the glow of my "jambox"-stereo's equalizer dancing up and down. And that last year of high school when I scrounged together all of my money to buy my prized Magnavox Videowriter, I would sit at my desk, adding the amber glow of that cheesy word processor to the dim light of my room.

When my creative writing teacher first told us how he would go to an all-night Waffle House to immerse himself in the biomass (to borrow Stephenson's word), I was appalled. How could anyone write with all of the cacophony of activity and light around them? F.J. insisted that it was a valuable way to observe characters, to practice dialogue. Being far too much of an introvert, I could not really wrap my head around this enough to do it. That was about 1986 or 1987.

A few years earlier, my dad brought home a stunning new toy - a Commodore 64. He was amazed and gleeful like a little boy on Christmas morning discovering his new Red Ryder BB gun or Radio Flyer sled. He practically squealed as he opened up the package and pulled out that brick of a keyboard/computer. A whole 64k stored in this sucker! He explained to me, in one of our rare actual conversations, it used to take a machine the size of about half our house to do what this little sucker could do. I remembered one of those rooms - Dad took me to work with him once ... an icy air-conditioned room filled with huge metal cabinet-things. Punch cards. Later, rolls of paper tape.

Mom forbid the acquisition of a modem as efficiently as she'd forbidden cable television - but the boy across the street had a modem and I watched as one letter after another would pop onto the screen from some distant person. Heh, and watch those letters disappear as the person hit backspace to correct a typo.

But it wasn't until I was nearly done with my seven year stint at university before I discovered MUDdog and email and just how fascinating this online Waffle House could be. That was somewhere around 1992-4.

I've been hooked ever since.

This morning, once again, I've turned off all of the lights. I have the band Sick Puppies blaring on the stereo, though not as loudly as I'd like - my neighbors are still sleeping. The glow of my keyboard and laptop screen - and the blue glow of the stereo are all I want. I'm writing against the deadline of sunrise, remembering how easy it was for me to get lost in my introspection as a teenager and 20something in the dark. How much easier it was and is to reflect honestly on myself and my actions as well as the biomass I observe around me.

I recognize that I'm damaged
I sympathize that you are too
But I wanna breathe without feelin' so self-conscious
But it's hard when the world's starin' at you

To me, this is the most interesting thing about the internet. You have all of these people with their foibles and faults and strengths ... you have these intercies, these nodes, of common interest where this diverse mass of individuals pour their thoughts into shared pixel representations.

Why do we do this? Why do we strive to share our experiences and thoughts with everyone else? Why do we strive to get people to understand what we're thinking, feeling, wanting?

It seems to me that no matter how introverted or extroverted an individual is, we all are reaching for some connection beyond just our self - to know that we are not totally alone in our thought or experience or feeling. That someone groks at least a fraction of who and what we are.

What I constantly strive to understand, and I'm not sure I'm capable of really understanding it, is why some people are literally so lost in their own individuality that they cannot hear the experiences and feelings of others.

I can't even begin to recall how many times I have read the pixels of people who define their world by "I'm right" and you're either 100% with me or 100% against me. So when I see one of these people laying their pixels down in a frantic dance of light and dark dots, I'm sucked in by my own curiosity and confused fascination. When I watch as they blithely ignore the community around them and choose to take disagreement as attack; when they insist on reading a helping hand as condemnation.

And, then, of course, all of our shared human foibles come to the fore. The helping hand and the civil disagreement becomes frustration and anger - which does become attack and condemnation. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy that leaves the outer edges of the community in confusion and often shock. It's like seeing the "perfect couple" have a real fight finally. You see sides of these people that you never suspected lurked beneath all the letters they've strung together on the internet.

And when the smoke clears and all the participants who are able to do so actually sit back and take a look at what happened and how they contributed to the explosion, they are left with this conundrum:
How do I both "protect" my self, ideas and beliefs ... and balance my emotional reaction ... and walk away from the trolls who only want a fight and to get everyone riled up?

How do we differentiate motive on the net without body language and tone of voice to help us decipher our pixelated world?

In my experience, it becomes about building a context. If one person's response to disagreement is to always either ignore or attack, with no middle ground attempting to bridge differences and create understanding, then that person is probably simply trolling for trouble. It's a subjective thing. And, in online communities, it's a dangerous field to walk across. Newer folk are going to tend to side with the troll when the old hands attempt to slap down the troll out of frustration. The old hands know the history and have often decided to take a stand to defend their community and hunt the troll until they've left the community. New people, not knowing that the troll may be currently presenting the mask of the maligned victim in order to garner support and thus keep the battle going on longer, may openly side with the troll in an effort to defend their new community from bullies.

The term troll is highly subjective. Some readers may characterize a post as trolling, while others may regard the same post as a legitimate contribution to the discussion, even if controversial. The term is often erroneously used to discredit an opposing position, or its proponent, by argument fallacy ad hominem.

Often, calling someone a troll makes assumptions about a writer's motives. Regardless of the circumstances, controversial posts may attract a particularly strong response from those unfamiliar with the robust dialogue found in some online, rather than physical, communities.

Experienced participants in online forums know that the most effective way to discourage a troll is usually to ignore him or her, because responding encourages a true troll to continue disruptive posts — hence the often-seen warning "Please do not feed the troll".

Frequently, someone who has been labelled a troll by a group may seek to redeem their reputation by discrediting their opponents, for example by claiming that other members of the group are closed-minded, conspirators, or trolls themselves.

No matter how even-handed ... how just ... we try to be, the fact of the matter is, we are not perfect. We snap. We jump to conclusions. We get tired and cranky. And what separates us from the trolls? We are able to step back and re-evaluate our behaviour, to try to learn from our mistakes, to learn when to stop reacting next time and walk away from what we feel is trollish behaviour.

To creatures who seem to intrinsically need to be understood, it's a hard thing to walk away from that chance at communication. But some battles are won only when they aren't fought at all ...

The light is beginning to make the curtains glow ... so now I leave you with this ...

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:26 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Sketches | Stumble

February 17, 2008

Welcome, Nephew!

After a long wait ... it appears that the Red Monkey has a li'l nephew-monkey. My sister called about 11:15 p.m. eastern time on the 16th to say the li'l guy had finally made his full monty appearance. She sounded exhausted but content ... of course, that could have been the morphine. Hopefully I'll have more details tomorrow. Or later today, I mean.

WOOHOO!!!!

UPDATE 9:30 a.m.
Just got off the phone with baby-sis and here are some details:
He is 8 pounds, 8 ounces, which was smaller than they'd originally thought he'd be.
Don't have a length on him, but baby-sis says he's got the LONGEST arms and legs of any newborn she's ever seen. I'm assuming he's gonna be a futbol player considering how much he kicked her during the pregnancy. Dunno how she feels about putting his name publicly, so I'm not posting that, but I will say I love his name.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:00 AM | Comments (8) | Blog | Stumble

February 14, 2008

Cre8ing Some Buzz

Yeah, yeah, hush. I used that 8 on purpose because I'm talking about the site Cre8Buzz today. So there. Hmph.

Anyhow, Cre8Buzz is a pretty cool little site for bloggers. Generally speaking, MySpace, Friendster, Dogster (no, sadly, I'm NOT kidding), FaceBook, blah blah blah, they all bore me. In fact, they remind me of the silly days of GeoCities when everyone pretended to put their websites into little neighborhoods like all those li'l pixelpals were really hanging out kinds of buddies. So when my buddy Jodi said, OH you just HAVE to try this one, I rolled my eyes at first.

Wow. You still get the tons of gratuitous friendings, but most of the people who friend you either stop by your profile and/or your blog on a pretty regular basis. I, of course, suck at keeping up with all of the people on my friends' list, the same as I suck at keeping up with all my pixelpals' blog. (And yet, I'm irritated when they don't keep up with mine. I know. I'm an arrogant jerk sometimes. *sigh*)

Anyhow, I'm really digging the Anthill, as we affectionately call the Buzz (after their logo mascot, Antman). Well, not digging like an anteater or something. I meant to say, I'm enjoying it. Sheesh. Gotta watch the metaphors around you lot, don't I? If you want to check it out, gimme a buzz and I'll send you an invite.

Meanwhile, the Buzz is having a t-shirt contest ... and here's the design I'm entering ... make sure to click to get the larger image to pop up (still a fast load time on it, though) ... squishing it down to 400 px to fit into this template layout killed the detail of the logo. Wish me luck, the winners are announced on Monday.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:27 PM | Comments (6) | Blog | Sketches | Stumble

February 11, 2008

A Book

Okay, so no one tagged me with this meme, but I saw it on Jod{i}'s blog and stole it. Now, she knows I hate being tagged for memes so she's prolly kicking herself for not tagging me with it and busting my chops over it. To which I say, Nyah!

Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open it at page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence/ phrase.
4. Blog the next four sentences/ phrases together with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig your shelves for that very special or intellectual book.

Heh. I've been on a drawing and internet spree for the last year and haven't had my usual tower of pisa stack of books by my chair, but I'm kinda juggling a million things at the moment, and happen to have:
In the Beginning: The Navajo Genesis by Jerrold E. Levy right here at hand.

page 123, fifth sentence through the ninth.

It is also a means by which the creative or good side of chaos is retained as part of Blessingway.
When corn was created, Talking God was told to sanctify it but failed. Coyote, in company with Begochidi, was then asked to perform the sanctification:
"Go ahead, old man, you must be of use here," [Coyote] was told.

I'm really, really hoping I get to go to New Mexico in June to work on the Navajo rez for a week. If I could just land a damn job!

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:29 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

February 7, 2008

The Tower of Conceptual Babel

Back in 1993, I was finishing up my bachelor's degree in English in a state school. Not the fancy-pants University of Texas at Austin - known as UT. But the school we perceived of as the poor cousin, University of Texas at Arlington - known as UTA. It wasn't that the school wasn't as good, but we simply didn't get the press that UT did. We didn't have a football team. We were a commuter school. We weren't in a cool town like Austin, but out in the 'burbs between Dallas and Fort Worth. Our concept of ourselves was based on what others thought of UT ... we were obviously a poor outlying satellite.

Despite our concept of ourselves, we had some cool stuff going for us. One of the other tutors at our writing center told me about this nifty thing she'd discovered. It was called a MUDdog ... you got on one of the dumb terminals over in the computer science lab, logged in, entered a few commands and you were suddenly immersed in this text world. I was unimpressed. I had Zork on the Commodore-64 at home, thank you very much.

This was different, she insisted. Through the campus connection, this text world was populated with real people from around the globe. You could talk with them and interact with them in real time!

I tried it for a lark one Saturday when I didn't have anything else planned. Walked up to campus ... logged in ... and eight hours later I finally looked at my watch.

I've been hooked on various types of online communities ever since.

As someone who is always fascinated by human interactions, as someone who can't help but be an observer as well as a participator ... as a writer ... I am utterly enthralled by the microcosms of society that we set up online.

MUDS, chatrooms, IRC channels, "Web 2.0 sites," blogs, shoutboxes, forums (technically that's fora, but I try to go with the flow).

General public, special interests, moms, dads, writers, non-writers, artists, dog-lovers, cat-lovers, extroverts, introverts, introverts who become extroverts online.

Invariably it happens.

Invariably someone trots out their fervent belief in X. And X might be a product, a method of doing something, a religion, a favourite actor or politician or writer ... or whatever.

And just as invariably, someone else takes a polar opposite view.

Now, things can go a couple of ways at this point. It might be we have a nice, logical, rational discussion about the pros and cons of X. Of course, this is the least likely scenario, but it does happen.

Another option: things get heated. X is vilified. X is extolled. Vilified. Extolled. On and on and on. Neither side listens to the other and you literally get an extremist jihad, crusade, holy war of whatever flavour you wish to call it. Sides are drawn up. The inevitable rhetoric gets trotted out: "you're either for us or against us" ... "there is no middle ground" ... "well you know what I mean."

The option that goes one step beyond that is this: X is vilified and so is "that damn dipshit who said X was good." "You're delusional and anyone who thinks like you is delusional."

It seems that even when we speak the same language, we still live in a tower of babel. We still struggle to make our words understood ... to feel that we are being respected and heard and believed. And often, despite what we are sure is plain language and crystalline logic ... other people fail to get our point ... fail to agree. And obviously, the failure is almost inevitably theirs, as we have been perfectly clear and rational.

Over the last two weeks I have watched as two of the three online communities I participate in had serious melt-downs. Honestly, it's nothing I haven't seen before. Ideas being denigrated, people being denigrated, people feeling sure they were denigrated when they were not ... all because emotions were running high.

Often, it's like watching a bunch of junior high age kids (13-15 or so). Kids that age are still learning the finer social mores and how to converse without pissing people off. They speak plainly and say exactly what they mean ... but often their vocabulary does not include any grey area at all. The idea that words have connotations generally escapes them. The concept that words, despite our best efforts to deny this, words do hurt us. Or at least they frustrate us. (And please note that there are plenty of teens who do get this concept ... and there are plenty who don't learn this concept ever. This is merely a developmental stage and a generalization.)

Online, we add to this type of social group the fact that there is no good way to discern body language and vocal tone ... and often we misinterpret words that were not meant in the ways we see on the screen. And, sometimes, no matter how hard we try to craft those words to elicit in every person who reads them exactly and precisely what we mean ... all that work is simply lost in the babel of pixels and previous experience and the mind of the individual reader.

It is in watching these explosions happen online, where you can see each piece of the misunderstanding beginning to unfold and then to blossom and the fruit to explode, spreading its pollen of dissent over the entire participatory community ... it is watching this microcosm mushroom online that we truly see the babel of concept and idea which in the so-called "real world" leads to fighting and war. It's an amazing and, when put in this light, terrifying event to watch.

It starts so very simply.

And it is played out over and over and over again. As soon as one segment of a community finally "gets" how these things get started ... when a few people suddenly realize that they ways in which they phrase things matter AND that they become more capable of trying to take the other side's ideas as something to respect despite disagreeing (and perhaps disagreeing vehemently) ... as soon as this happens, another group comes along who has not yet learned these concepts ... and the battles begin anew.

It is the curse of our relatively short life spans and our frequent procreation and our different rates of learning and comprehending - as a race we seem compelled to play this scenario out over and over and over again.

Whether it's the mud-slinging of an American presidential "season" ... whether it's "your tree's leaves are falling in MY yard" ... or "your people are creating problems" ... or "your actions are eroding the atmosphere" ... "we don't want your sort here" ... "you don't believe as we do."

We bag and tag and categorize each other out of existence so that we don't have to listen to the conceptual babel and weigh all sides.

And even when we have learned the lessons and we try to stay calm and rational ... there is always human frailty, exhaustion ... and a point when someone else's rhetoric finally crosses a line beyond which we feel a moral imperative to call them on it because to not call them on that particular phrasing or concept is to allow an intolerable situation to thrive.

It doesn't ever end. And it feels like "we" never learn.

But whether the babel is language based or conceptually based, it is a constant of human existence. We are locked into our own skulls with wiring and operating systems only somewhat compatible with the others around us.

Our lives are never-ending attempts to connect and to forever try to understand and be understood in the face of failures and partial compatibilities.

Our strength lies in our stubborn certainty that we can finally find the right cord for connection and the right version of the operating system to achieve a true and deep melding.

I'm reminded of a book I never really liked, but I adored one single line. (Bret Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero)

"People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." Though that sentence shouldn't bother me, it stays in my mind for an uncomfortably long time. Nothing else seems to matter.

We are individuals afraid to merge ... and yet seeking to be understood so fully that we do merge ... which frightens us more and makes the need to be understood more fervent and powerful.

People are afraid to merge. To lose some aspect of their true selves? Fear that to understand all is to dislike? To find out some idea we might have about that person is false?

People are afraid to merge so we build these towers and walls to protect our thoughts and minds and feelings ... our individuality.

And then we wonder why others do not see things our way, not realizing that the bricks and stones and concrete of our towers and bunkers are simply not transparent. They don't just protect us and shield us, but they blind us to where others are.

Even our most fervently held beliefs are simply stones in the wall, often preventing us from understanding someone else. And when someone doesn't understand us when we think they should ... so often we begin casting our stones at them, trying to bury them in our beliefs - sometimes without even realizing we're doing it. Of course, this only makes us build our own walls thicker and higher ...

... and people are afraid to merge.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:51 AM | Comments (12) | Blog | Never Underestimate the Power of Human Stupidity | Struggles | Stumble

January 27, 2008

New Explore T-Shirt

I started out on CafePress quite a while back. Posted some designs, sprang the $60 per annum for a "pro" site that let me put Design A on a baseball shirt ... and Design B, too! (If you don't spring for the pro shop, one style of product = one design ... boooooooooring. At least, that's the way it used to be. Then they pissed me off, took an extra year's $60 from me and I won't have anything to do with them anymore. Bah)

Anyhow, after I left CafePress, I went to GoodStorm. (What is with all of these companies and software packages and such smooshing together two words without a space but still capitalizing both words? Oh, I know cuz then it's easier to make a web address, but still. WordPress, CafePress, GoodStorm. Bah)

GoodStorm had some incredible artists designing stuff. More shirt colours, but fewer shirt types. And no "ancillary" products like bags and pillows and mugs and posters. But, the company was way cool. You made more money than you did with CafePress - and best of all! They didn't charge you $60 a year to put up multiple designs. Awesomeness.

Now, GoodStorm has been bought out by Zazzle. *sigh* It's not that I don't like Zazzle. I do. They offer more products than GoodStorm did. But, now I'm back to the same damn restrictions I had with CafePress. At GoodStorm, I could utilized the entire t-shirt for a design. If I wanted it placed in a particular area, I could contact the good folks at GoodStorm and know they'd place it where I wanted and it would be COOL. Now I'm back to a smallish area placed way up high on the shirt. No wrap-around designing available, either.

I have updated one of my favourite designs for now and have it available at Zazzle. I'm not positive that I'm staying there, however. Zazzle doesn't do white ink on their "light coloured" products which puts a big damper in some of my designs and would mean that I could only offer those designs on white shirts or dark coloured shirts. And since I would have to offer the white shirt and the dark coloured shirts as separate products (in other words, I can't create one product and then pick and choose what colours I want available. I can choose all dark, all light, all, or one of a few subcategories like organic).

I do know that Zazzle has done shops for places like The Disney Store, Build-A-Bear Workshop and others ... they're a good company. I'm just not sure they're right for me yet. Just not enough control over my designs. But, I've played with the site for only a day. Maybe I'll find more details as I get used to their interface and explore some more. Or maybe I want to leave t-shirts behind and move on to posters and cards. I'm not sure. Mostly I'm just sad about the change.

Meanwhile, does anyone know of any other product shops which might offer more control to the designer?

UPDATE: On recommendation from a few people, I've also started a store at RedBubble. I have a little more control over placement and a LOT of control over the shirt colours. Plus, Zazzle does not print white and RedBubble does!

Posted by Red Monkey at 10:42 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Sketches | Stumble

January 25, 2008

Dog Lovers

Oh my oh my.

It's too late for New York City now ... they have fallen into the abyss. All that rampant homosexuality, has indeed, led to bestiality as all the nutbags suggested. Here, in stunning video coverage, is Mo Rocca's in-depth expose showing just how far the queers are dragging us down and destroying good, old-fashioned American family values:

(Yeah and in case you didn't notice, that was sarcasm above. Homosexuality does NOT freaking lead to bestiality. Sheesh, Huckabee, get your head outa your ass so you can SEE, okay?)

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:54 PM | Comments (4) | Blog | Stumble

January 22, 2008

Speechless

Bleeding HELL. First Brad Renfro and now Heath Ledger. I'm not a huge follower of celebrities ... I like to think that they deserve their own private lives and I don't want to encourage the slime who follow celebs or the spin agents who make up their lives for them (sometimes).

Particularly after just talking about Stephen King's "The Body" ... which was also the film Stand By Me, and having my inevitable twinges over River Phoenix, the deaths of Brad Renfro and Heath Ledger hit me hard this month. In fact, I was watching an episode of Dirty Jobs, a show I hate cuz I can NOT stand the lead guy, I was watching solely because he was showing how to shape a surfboard. I've found this interesting since the first time I saw Lords of Dogtown ... this was something Heath did during the course of the film.

Regardless of whatever happened to both of them in their last days ... regardless of what was going through their minds, the troubles and joys they had ...

I'm going to miss seeing both of them. I enjoyed their work a great deal and I enjoyed watching them perform and the world is that much poorer for the loss of it.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:21 PM | Comments (4) | Blog | Stumble

January 21, 2008

Tag, She's It

I was tagged by Mark Stoneman to name 8 random things about myself. Like Mark, I often ignore tags. But when reading his 8 things aloud to my partner and coming across his gem about the chickens. I decided, as usual, to twist the meme and change it up.

Here are 8 random things about my partner. (Done with her approval cuz even though with as much as she's tossing and turning and flopping around at night with her surgery sliced hand, I don't really wanna sleep out here on the futon.)

1) In homage to Mark's chickens: My other half was raised in farm country and the entire family was very into 4H ... her younger brother LOVED fowl. At one point they had, and I quote: a bunch of "cross beaked little inbred freaks which did not help the hillbilly impression since they were loose all over the yard, the FRONT yard." Apparently their beaks did not line up. The top beak was not in the same line as the bottom beak which did make the entire family wonder how the durn things even managed to eat.

2) She cooks wonderful things. Delicious, wonderful things. This is both because of 4H and the fact that her mother was a Home Sciences teacher (involved far more than your typical Home Ec stereotypical stuff).

3) She is the messiest cook I have EVER met.

4) She forces ME to do the dishes. (Okay, okay. To be fair, she does all the laundry and I do all the dishes.)

5) She is clutterblind. I have watched her as she stacks papers and books and objects on her little table until it's literally a foot high. And then attempt to place something else on top. And then get mad when half of this slides inevitably to the floor.

6) She reads fem slash fan fiction based on Law & Order SVU and also of the Birds of Prey (DC comics, Batman universe). (And I bet she makes me delete this one.)
(Her first response was to say, Hell yes, you have to delete that. Her second, grudging response, was Okay, you can leave it. But you have to correct it to say fem slash fan fiction ... because if you have to out me about this, at least you can let people know I'm not reading that horrid straight shit.)

7) I introduced her to comic books and now when she recognizes something and makes a comment like, "That's not really a part of the Batman canon, is it?" ... she then whips her head to me and says, "You see? You SEE what you have done to me? I should NOT know these things!"
(hehehehehehe)

8) She FORCED me into getting a dog. Now we have two and I want a third.

Posted by Red Monkey at 7:51 AM | Comments (4) | Blog | People Say I Have ADHD, But I Think - Hey Look, A Chicken | Stumble

December 9, 2007

Coding Help

So here's the deal. I'm working on the design of another website, a pro bono deal for a church. And I had this nifty idea. They have an Events page. The page has a "headline" which gives the event name, the day, date and time. Then there's a description of the event. It's a straight-HTML and CSS page. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a little nugget of code in the background that could rip that "headline" to an XML file every time they update that page? And then that XML file would display in a little box on the home page? That way the current events (sans the longer description on the Events page itself) would appear in a little box on the homepage and on the events page and they'd only have to update it once instead of on each page.

I know this can be done. But I don't know Javascript or a whole lot about XML (hey, MT and Feedburner generate my XML for me). I'm a graphic designer who knows some code, not a full-blown web developer. Anyone wanna walk me through developing this?

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:33 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

November 20, 2007

Holiday Happiness

Just some silly fun. First person to leave a comment correctly identifying ALL of the quotes (movie and the character speaking) will get a sketch from me. Remember you have to identify all 15 (and there are not 15 different movies here). Quotes which are divided on two lines are spoken by two people (that's number 2, 10, 13 and 14).

EDIT: IMPORTANT
It just occurred to me that the Captcha is going to be annoying for this. Dammit.
Here's how to beat the Captcha's timer (which, apparently I can't set to a different time).
Write your answers in a simple Text Edit program or Notepad. When you are completely done and ready to post ... then hit the comments link ... copy and paste your answers ... fill out the Captcha. Just don't hit the comments link earlier or the captcha image will "time out" without telling you.
If you did hit the link too early, just hit reload and it should give you a fresh captcha.
If it whines that the captcha is wrong, and you've done the answers in a text editor, it's no biggee to recopy.
Sorry ... but it's worth me not having to delete 300+ spamments a day :(

Name the movie and the person/people speaking ...

1) Is my shirt too big, or is that my flesh crawling?

2) How'd you like Grants Tomb?
It's lovely. I'm having a copy made for you.

3) You're just a bee-charmer, Idgie Threadgood, that's what you are. A bee-charmer.

4) Always have rhythm in your shaking. Now a Manhattan you shake to fox-trot time, a Bronx to two-step time, a dry martini you always shake to waltz time.

5) When I was your age, television was called books.

6) Look, I can see you getting all bunged up for them making you wear these kind of clothes. But face it, you're a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie.

7) We are men of action, lies do not become us.

8) So, what's an old-timer like you want with a two-timer like me?

9) This is your badness level. It's unusually high for someone your size. We have to fix that.

10) Oh, it's all right, Joe. It's all right. It's my dog. And, uh, my wife.
Well you might have mentioned me first on the billing.

11) I'm not even supposed to be here today!

12) I don't have it. Screws fall out all the time, the world's an imperfect place.

13) Say listen, is he working on a case?
Yes, he is.
What case?
A case of scotch. Pitch in and help him.

14) What's the idea of the kid?
Well, we have a dog, and he was lonesome. That was the idea, wasn't it, Mummy?

15) For once, I'm stuck without a punchline.

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:18 AM | Comments (4) | Blog | hobbies | Stumble

November 19, 2007

Reflections

It's a big week this week for a lot of reasons. Thanksgiving will always be an odd time of year for me. I dreaded the coming of November as a child ... it meant the holidays were approaching and I preferred school to the winter holidays. Not so much because I was an academic geek, but because it gave me something constructive and often at least semi-fun to do. It meant I socialized with other kids.

Being home for the holidays, on the other hand, was stress. We were either preparing to go to Grandma's for Thanksgiving or we were preparing the meal at the house. And while Mom didn't do any spectacular meals at any time, she stressed out about them all the same.

But like so many things at our house, it was all stress and the appearance of tradition rather than reflection and tradition. We didn't really reflect on what we were thankful for as a family. Sometimes, because I was an odd child who genuinely enjoyed quiet contemplation (almost as much as I enjoyed babbling with friends at school) ... sometimes I would try to engage in that thankful reflection by myself. It generally turned into a plaintive wish for different parents, however, and since that simply wasn't what Thanksgiving was about, I eventually abandoned the attempts. And about the time I abandoned them, my mother would begin bringing it up at the dinner table, trying to force us to say every little thing we were grateful for: the house, our family, the house, our stuff, a father who was a good provider, our stuff, oh yeah our health ....

But it was rote answers. What we were supposed to say. Mom had already decided what we should be thankful for and we were supposed to rattle off the correct answers with the proper respect and "thought" in our voices. However, by that time I was a teenager, full of the teenager's contempt for fakery. I like to think that it would have been one thing if we'd been seriously contemplative rather than regurgitating Mom's answers ....

After I moved out of the house, Thanksgiving was simply a day that I neither went to work nor school. It was a day to make Koogali (an old family recipe which I intend to make, take pictures of and share with you one of these days). It was a day to relax and a day to work on the inevitable mess in the house. It was a day to get caught up before a long weekend of frenetic work. On rare occasions in those early years, it was a time for a family visit and dinner.

When I moved to Indiana for graduate school, Thanksgiving remained simply a day off work and school and nothing more. We didn't have the money to go back to Texas to visit. We didn't really cook unless I made Koogali ... perhaps we warmed up some store-cooked turkey ... maybe we made chicken breasts. My ex and I were not big on cooking.

At that time Thanksgiving, like all the holidays, were simply bittersweet to me. It was nice to have a day off. But it was also a reminder that I simply didn't have the kind of close-knit Leave It To Beaver kind of family that I longed for.

And then 1999 rolled around. I'd been sickly, off and on, for about 2 years. I kept going to the doctor and getting fed antibiotics. He wouldn't run even a simple blood test. I'm not a particularly sickly person and I was finally getting irritated and nervous by 1999. By the beginning of '99, I was now getting sick just about every other month. I knew something was not right, but my doctor was not doing anything except phoning in another round of antibiotics.

Monday, the week of Thanksgiving, I finally dragged myself down to a doc-in-the-box that afternoon. The older doctor there, semi-retired but still practicing for the love of his profession, instantly takes a blood test. I listen at the door as he calls my doctor and yells at him. This is not good.

Tuesday, I see my doctor again. He's going to send me to a specialist and he's ticked because I can't get in that same day. This doesn't sound good to me. All I know is my hemoglobin is a 5.8 and apparently that's not good.

Wednesday, I see the specialist. I'm given a bone marrow test (this doesn't sound good) and then asked which hospital did I prefer, St. Joe or Memorial? Umm, neither? This was not an option.

So, Thanksgiving of 1999 I spent in the hospital, no diagnosis ... the specialist turned out to be a hematology/ oncology specialist. I had no idea if I should be thankful to be alive ... or preparing for a painful death. It was Saturday before I found out that I had Hodgkin's, aka Cancer Lite.

In the past eight years, I've gone from an adjunct professor of first year writing (with no health bennies ... yes, cancer, chemo and no health insurance ... it was fun) ... to a full-time instructor with health bennies at that same school. In February of 2004 I was told that my services were no longer needed there, but that I was to finish out the school year. It was a very painful semester of teaching. I still miss teaching. Every day. But, full-time teaching gigs at the college level are not easy to come by. So, I looked elsewhere.

Thanksgiving of 2004, I had interviewed for a job as a copy writer at a dot com based locally. It was one of perhaps two interviews I'd had since I started really looking for a new position in April. I got that job and was to start the Monday after Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving of 2007 now ... and I was laid off in July. I'm thankful for the severance package I've got. But today I looked at our old website ... and I see that the new owners have finally taken it over. There's so little left of what we had done. The logo that Alan designed is still intact. The nifty triangles that I think Rob adapted from Alan are there. And that's about it. The first project I worked on there, a huge educational piece ... that's gone. All of the work that Warren, Cory, Alan, Rob, Bob and I did on the site design ... it's gone.

I've had just one good interview since July. And that was about 3 or 4 weeks ago, so I guess it's too much to hope that I managed to land that job. The interviewer did tell me that they had over 60 applicants for the one position. They interviewed 8 of us. I'm thankful to have been one of the 8. My ego needed that little warm fuzzy even if I didn't get the job.

So even while I'm thankful this year that I have a steady paycheck even if I don't have a job, that I'm not in the hospital facing a cancer diagnosis, that I have a partner who loves me, that my little sister is expecting her first baby in just 3 months, that I celebrated my 20 year high school reunion by re-connecting with several beloved friends, that some old relationships seem to be getting more healthy ...

... a part of reflection for me will always hold a certain wistfulness as well. I am thankful for those things and more. And yet, I regret that I haven't secured a new job yet, that I haven't used this time off to completely whip the house into shape, that I am still in Indiana and not Texas, that I still haven't gotten my life to the point where I can begin the rigmarole required for adopting a child, that I still have not managed to single-handedly bring about world peace and ended poverty, that I am unable to help a friend whom the system has neglected from the day she was born and who is now in a wheelchair and a nursing home because no one in the system will listen to her, that ....

The list always goes on and on until I do nothing but dwell on the fact that I am not a perfect super-being; I am merely a fallible human.

I am thankful. But rather than simply being thankful for what I have, I choose to focus on what I can accomplish still.

That one day I may learn to walk in balance, to walk in beauty, to walk in harmony.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:20 AM | Comments (2) | Blog | Struggles | Stumble

November 5, 2007

Four Things

That lousy Jod{i} over at Looking Beyond the Cracked Window tagged me. I hate memes. I hate being tagged. She knows this. She owes me interview questions, and yet, she decides to go the easy route and "distract" me with a meme first. Hmph. Only because it's mildly interesting and I'm tired of moving crap around the living room to make room for my beautiful new drawing table ... I will answer. But don't think just anyone can tag me. I ignore most of them. Have even ignored some from the illustrious and lousy Jod{i}.

Four Jobs I've had:

• Assistant Professional Specialist (fancy way of saying not a professor, but a teacher of college students)


• Graphic Designer


• Copy Writer


• Cashier, Customer Service, Sales Rep, Cash Office, Inventory Specialist ... at Bizmart (which was bought out by the evil OfficeMax)

Four Movies I can Watch over and over and over (ad nauseum):
only four?????

• Incredibles


• Stand By Me


• Radio Flyer


• Dead Poet's Society


• Breakfast Club


• The Matrix


• Batman: Mask of the Phantasm


• Lilo and Stitch

Crap, I'm over four, aren't I? Tough.

Four Place I have Lived:

• Amarillo, Texas


• Houston, Texas


• Albuquerque, New Mexico


• Oklahoma City, Oklahoma


• Carmel, Indiana


• Austin, Texas (then I started kindergarten)


• Arlington, Texas


• South Bend, Indiana

Name the two places listed above where I would be ecstatic to live again.

Four TV Shows I Love to Watch:

• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends


• Dog Whisperer


• Life


• Law & Order: SVU


• MythBusters


• Bones


• House

Four TV Shows I'm Still Bitter Were Canceled:

• Joan of Arcadia ... so many curse words come to mind when I think of this show being canceled. It was one of the most intelligent shows on television. Which, of course, is why it was canceled.


• The Black Donnelleys


• Firefly


• Buffy the Vampire Slayer (actually, I'm not bitter over this one ... but I do miss it a lot ... I give Joss major kudos for knowing when to bow out, when the storyline was over ... I'm just ready for a new storyline in that 'verse!)

Four Places I have Been on Vacation:

• Talequah, Oklahoma


• Anadarko, Oklahoma


• San Antonio, Texas


• San Francisco, California


• Omaha, Nebraska

Four Websites I Visit Daily:

• BBC News


• ComicSpace.com


• Gaiaonline.com


• BlogCatalog.com

Four of My Favourite Dishes:

• Flautas con pollo from Fiesta Tapatia in Mishawaka


• Chicken Fajitas


• Lime Chicken (very spicy)


• Omelet with jalepenos, cheese and chorizo

Four Places I Would Rather Be Right Now:

• In a bigger house which was completely paid off in my name


• Texas


• At a job I loved


• Somewhere warm

Now, I'm supposed to tag four more people. I hate tagging as much as being tagged. So, I'll tag you, you ... ummm, you and naturally YOU.

Posted by Red Monkey at 1:59 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

October 29, 2007

Mozilla and Leopard

I love computers. We had a Commodore-64 back in the day and I've been utterly fascinated ever since. We also legally owned about two pieces of software and everything else was pirated ... so I learned very quickly to explore the program, explore menus and to experiment.

Today I'm one of "those" people. You know, A Mac Person. I've got a happy Intel MacBook Pro that I love. I installed APE and shapeshifter a while back so I could mess with the look of my GUI. Sorry, I've lost the non-computer people, haven't I? My bad. Suffice it to say that APE and shapeshifter let me change the appearance of windows and such, much like a theme for FireFox or Windoze XP.

Out of the kindness of my heart, I did NOT upgrade my computer Friday upon arrival of the new Mac operating system. I was good. I was going to wait until after my other half's birthday was over so that I was not totally distracted by the thousand and one small details that come up after an upgrade. Instead, I posted to the 9rules Notes asking if anyone had discovered any issues whilst upgrading. At first, I was lambasted for a fool and a not-true-Mac-Person for not instantly ripping open the box and running the update. I tried to explain that I was a softie who was trying not to be Teh Computer Geek for the other half's birthday.

After reading about no problems, Saturday I ran the update. I backed up a few things, but not everything. (Oh yes, I was really THAT stupid!) Thunderbird, my email client, had begun crashing inexplicably and I was hoping that the upgrade would stabilize that. Apple had sent through a firmware update and since then, Thunderbird has been freaking out over anything with an attachment. It was driving me mad.

I got the Blue Screen of Death upon the finish of Leopard's installation.

The Blue Screen of Death? But that's a Windoze thing!!! How can this be?

I searched the house for a boot disc so I could finish the backups that I should have already done. Couldn't find one. And, oddly enough, my restore discs that came with the laptop were NOT in the software archive in my home office with all the other software. Grrrrrr. I finally found them, hoped to boot for them, found myself having to use Restore instead. Fine.

Restart.

Oh. My. God.

Wiped. Everything gone!!!?! Noooooooooooooo!

And then I looked more carefully. Instead of approximately 110 gigs of free space on the hard drive, I had about 40. Hmmm. I found a folder called Previous Systems and luckily all my files and preferences were there and, apparently intact. It took me the better part of Saturday and Sunday to get everything working again, but I'm hopeful at this point that I didn't screw up too badly. Turns out that Application Enhancer (APE) blows up the Leopard install. That didn't hit the 'nets until after I'd discovered the issue myself. D'oh!

But the thing that has me frustrated beyond belief at the moment is this:

Thunderbird will NOT have ANYTHING to do with attachments at all now.

I've reinstalled it. I saved my mail and my addressbook, but otherwise deleted everything in the profile and re-created the profile. Nope. I couldn't reply to any email because Thunderbird didn't want to use the signature file. I couldn't even open the Attachments portion of the preferences.

I'm now to the point where I've deleted my signature file ... I can get to everything in the preferences again ... I can now reply to emails. But if there's an attachment, I can't open it or reply or the damn program crashes.

I'm at a loss. On top of that AIM has stopped opening and FireFox was being awfully screwy yesterday as well.

I'm beginning to think that Teh InterWebs hate me.

Anyone else having Mozilla issues????

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:06 AM | Comments (5) | Blog | Stumble

October 22, 2007

home

So much to write about ... and I'm just too tired.

List of things to discuss this week:

1. Rowling and Dumbledore


2. Travel and Airplanes


3. The Reunion


4. More stuff that I can't quite remember at this moment due to exhaustion (see #2)

Hopefully I'll start the discussions tomorrow ... oh, and of course, there's the Thinking Blogger tag from LibDrone as well. :)

It's going to be a busy week, methinks.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:15 PM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

October 3, 2007

Lamar High School ... 1987 Reunion

Lamar High School ... 20 Year Reunion ... Arlington, Texas

Okay, here's some updating on this. The price if you pay before 10/9 is $67 or $134 for a couple. This is good for both events (and, naturally, you can't pay for just one event).

Reunions by the Party People
Friday, October 19th, 2007 ... Ice Breaker Party ... J. Gilligan’s ... 8:00p.m. - Midnight
J Gilligans 400 East Abrams St. ... Arlington ... 817.274.8561
(Private party cash bar event)

Saturday, October 20th, 2007 ... Reunion Celebration ... (Casual Attire) ... Rangers Ballpark in Arlington ... 7:30p.m. - Midnight ... tex-mex buffet ... DJ ... dancing ... cash bar ... awards program (awards for freaking WHAT???)

More info? Check out http://www.alumniclass.com/lamarhstx/

There's a slew of people I have not been able to find that I would love to meet up with there. I've gotten in touch with Lori Goe and Annette Simonini ... but I'm still looking for:
Janet Kim (Kyungah) ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Brenda Heath
Kate McDonald
Shannon Heizer
Suzanne Gruchow (even tho you moved before going to Lamar!)
Veronica Cano
Susan Stetson
Anna Tan
Cindy Ritner ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Amy Alexander
Ashley Aguilar
Kristi Grimm
Alison Campbell
Paula Gill
Lisa Pawloski
Suzanne Scott
Jill Stewart
Jenny Britton
Tracy McGuire ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Lynn Adzigian ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Natalie Parrish ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Russ Johnson ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached him ...I have heard briefly from him and hope he will be attending

And, of course, there are a slew of other folks that I'd like to catch up with again as well.

Really, I just posted this in the hopes that those people who haven't found out about the reunion can perhaps hit this info thru Google since the info's not all that easy to find.

And there are those of you who have contacted me, wanting to know who the heck Red Monkey is. If you followed through to my About Me page and through the rest of my site, you're still confused as you don't know who Robin MacRorie is. That wasn't the name I had back then.

Well, maybe you can ask around at the reunion and figure it out. :) A little mystery never hurt anyone.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

October 1, 2007

MT 4

If you're a MT kind of person ... don't upgrade yet!

Seems the good folks at SixApart do not have the bugs worked out of the new system yet. Not even close. I was happy enough with 3.2 with the exception of not being able to find a Captcha program to help rid me of my plague of spamments. I saw MT4 go beta and then, I swear I saw it go production. And it included a Captcha!

I upgraded. There was a day of screaming and fussing as I tried to get everything straightened out -- the bulk of the issues coming around the new ways to implement commenting. Apparently I copied/pasted something badly and it took another 24 hours for me to work through my screw-up. Typical.

Then I installed the captcha. For the life of me, I cannot find where the directions for this "plug-in" which comes with MT 4.x are. I know I had it working for a while.

Fast forward to Saturday, the day of the Purdue/Notre Damn game. I was ready to upload a new graphic and post. "Session Over, please log in again"

Okay. I surf with FireFox and it had probably been a day or two since I had actually done anything in MT. I sign in.

Welcome. We are ready to upgrade your database.

WTF? I did that weeks ago. This isn't like some automated upgrading to the next version of MT, is it? I look. Nope. Apparently, it just randomly decides that it needs to "upgrade" an already upgraded database from time to time. Some people have it happen really frequently. Okay, fine. I let it upgrade.

That evening a friend IMs me. Hey, I can't comment on your blog. The Captcha isn't there any more, but the blog wants the Captcha verification.

Shit.

I still haven't figured out what went wrong where. I've spent the last couple of days haunting the MT forums. Nothing. I've sent a bug report to MT. I've been searching thru Google. Nothing.

I STILL can't figure out WTF is wrong or how just "upgrading" the database could have broken this. Dammit. So, no comments AGAIN until I can figure out what the hell went wrong this time. And I'll be publishing a full report of the issue here ... just in case it happens again ... or to someone else.

If you are from MT or SixApart or have simply got some ideas on what the issue could be, please, please, please email me at en der (no space) AT that thundering coyote domain name that you see above (yeah, way up there in the address bar of your browser. yeah, that's it ... no "ing" and the coyote comes before the other word.) DOT com.

At this point I'm so ticked off I'm beginning to think I should swap over to WordPress ...
I love MT ... but this is seriously pissing me off. :(

UPDATE:
As I went to freaking hit publish ... the damn database says it wants upgrading again.

I may have to kill something soon.

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:49 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

September 2, 2007

All Nighters

And I thought I was done with the all-nighters. Silly, silly mortal.

Comments should be working. The Captcha images are hard to read and REALLY ugly, I know. I'm going to make some new images as soon as I get a really good look at how the Captcha is set up and make sure that my tinkering isn't going to break things again.

I'm leaving my spam rules alone for the moment, so if you post an URL (other than the one in the URL field ... so if you post a "second" one in the comments field itself), then the comment will get sent to spam. I'm really really really hoping that this cuts down on the spam. After I got the freaking comments fixed ... within five minutes I had 6 more spamments. Unbelievable.

Well, I ought to get up for church in 4 hours ... dunno if i'll make it or not, but I'm finally signing off for now. (Oh, and I dunno if the little smiley icons will be back or not ... I'm tired of dinking around the templates for now.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:23 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

September 1, 2007

HELP HELP HELP

ANYONE who knows anything about version 4 of Movable Type, particularly about comments ...

Here's the deal ... all the old posts have the comments section on them still. The form is still there, but if someone tries to leave a comment they get:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

I haven't clue one where to start with that.

Two:
The newest entries don't even have the freaking comments form ON them, much less the comments count at the bottom of the post here on the main page.

Please, please, please, email at e n d e r AT this domain. (Yes, the word with thunder and coyote in it ... not anything with Red Monkey in it.)

I think if I ever get this to work, it's an awesome looking upgrade so far. But good lord, SixApart needs real tech writers to go thru and do the step by step instructions for upgrades, for upgrades with custom templates, for new installations. Cuz you've got like 900 documents which is great, but it's freaking impossible to find what we need.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:58 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble

ARGH

Okay, comments still broken. I have NO idea what's going on with the template anymore.

Tomorrow (err, later today) I will probably go through and copy each old template, save it to the hard drive ... delete all templates and CSS ... and then attempt to use one of the MT styles just to see if that fixes the comments issue. If it does, then I know that it's not a permissions issue and it is a template issue. Hopefully that will help me track down the problem.

*sigh*

Seriously, I would rather wait an extra 6 months to a year for them to build an updater tool instead of having to do shit by hand like this. Dammit.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:14 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

August 31, 2007

Help, SixApart

Okay, so I got the fresh installation done. I'm trying to figure out the template tweaks that need to happen. And now the comments are bleeding BROKEN. I'm actually getting an Internal Server Error now when a comment attempt is made. Grrrrrr. I've done some checking on the Movable Type site, and can't find the issue.

1) I am sure there is a permission mis-set somewhere. I need a list of what all the .cgi file permissions are supposed to be.
2) I need a good look at what my freaking comments template is supposed to look like. I've followed this and thought that would fix the issue. Bah.
3) I did have it semi-functional for a while last night, but it was telling me that there was an error due to a cached page. I deleted cache. I did a force-reload. Same error, no more detail. I disabled the happy NoHarvester plugin, thinking I had done something wrong with that.
No joy.

ARGH!

Movable Type, I think you should hire me to do your manual writing. Seriously.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:28 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble

August 30, 2007

Spamments

Comments temporarily closed again.

I had 1700 spamments in 24 hours. There was one real comment that got trapped in the spam filters and particularly since it was from a new commenter, I'm glad I took the time to wade through all 1700 spamments to find the gem. (Thanks Nim!)

I'm going to attempt to upgrade to MT4 today and tomorrow. Hopefully I'll have better luck getting the spammers filtered out, although I would LOVE it if someone who knew htaccess could help me figure out how to shut out these bots. I'm not sure how to figure out which ones I'm being hit by. I took the main list that's been floating around the internet for a couple of years, but I doubt that list was up to date.

*sigh*

I'll bring the comments back as soon as possible, folks.

Posted by Red Monkey at 9:11 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

August 10, 2007

Comments Broken?

I reset comments back to the original settings after that last post. The spam box is still filling up ... but I can't seem to post a test comment. Can someone else post a comment?

UPDATE:
Okay, so apparently only I can't post comments to my own blog. LOL Thanks to those who tested the comments for me.

Posted by Red Monkey at 5:14 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

Freaking Spam

200 spamments in 3 hours.

I spent 2 hours listing known bad bots in htaccess today. I'm still getting 200 spamments in 3 hours time.

I'm at a loss. I've switched preferences on the blog to continue to accept comments, but to send everything to moderation. (And I think the moderation template is screwed up ... so if you get there and it looks funky, I should care and want to fix it ... but I'm really tired of dealing with this crap at the moment, so I don't care.)

I don't have the time to be checking the spam filter constantly and deleting all these spamments. I'm begging anyone who's had any luck with blocking thru htaccess to email me and offer to help me out. If I can't resolve this soon, I dunno ... I might close the blog completely. MT 4 is due out soon-ish ... and they'll have member registration enabled ... I may upgrade to that and require registration to be able to comment. That might help, too.

Meanwhile ... this is the excitement of my day: COBRA still not activating my health insurance, so I still don't have the medicine that helps me breathe so instead of going outside, I'm staying in the house. I can't reach the site that delivers my paychecks because their site is effed up. (Attempting to hit the log in button which brings up the login screen leads you to a "We can't find that page" error ... otherwise I'd worry that my login information was bad - but I don't even get a chance to log in!) There is still no news on the job front.

Bah.

UPDATE:
Okay, so I set the blog to not immediately publish any comments. And that sounded good. Except that when I went to test it to make sure it was working right ... it wouldn't accept any comments.

EXCEPT THAT THERE ARE STILL SPAMMENTS HITTING THE SPAM FOLDER!!!!!!

WTF?

I have decided that today is not a good day and I hate everything and just thought I would share that with you. That is all.

Posted by Red Monkey at 4:43 PM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

August 6, 2007

Temporarily Closing Comments

I'm going to close the comments down for the next five days or so. Sorry folks.

I am getting nearly 2000 spamments in about 36 hours time. And while very very very few of them actually hit the site, I do feel the need to go through the spam folder and make sure there are no legitimate comments which got accidentally stuck in there. After the Ghost entry for the Artsy Contest, for example, I had several comments wind up in the spa