Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Mouthful o' Bunny
April 23, 2005

Shortly after arriving home from work on Tuesday, I heard the sounds of a people-herd moving through the bushes in front of my house. Several children and the neighbor from next door were tromping around through the pachysandra. What was this?

As it turns out, Butterscotch, the outdoor cat from next door, had chased down a baby bunny and was carrying it around in its mouth. The kids had confronted him (and spoke harsh words?) and Butterscotch released the poor bunny, who ran off through the pachysandra to the bushes in front of the house. The neighbor kids chased the bunny into a corner under the relative security of the vinyl siding and a thorny rose bush.

EzStatic 2.0 and Pluggable Functions
April 22, 2005

The changes don’t really merit a full version number upgrade, but I got tired of adding 0.0.1 to each release number.

This update fixes issues that people are having with the WordPress 1.5.1 beta. Primarily this has to do with the pluggable functions not being available to plugins until after all plugins are loaded. So if a plugin tries to access get_currentuserinfo() in the global scope (that’s one of the pluggable functions) then the plugin will short out and produce a nasty error on your home page.

How are we doing? - Fill out this survey!
April 22, 2005

I have purchased things at several places lately that have attached little “Win $10,000! Complete our survey!” notices to the bottoms of their receipts. What’s the deal with everyone wanting to know how lousy their service is? Are they actually going to do anythig about it?

I have received these receipt-borne customer surveys from Rite-Aid, TGIFriday’s, Home Depot, Donatos, CVS, and Staples, just to name a few. Some of them I bothered to fill out. Others I just throw away. Am I really throwing potential winnings down the drain? Have you heard of anyone actually winning one of these things?

And is the information you provide to these companies useful? There’s only one way to find out – take a survey about this site!

Dawn of the Almost Dead
April 21, 2005

I was pretty tired last night before bed. Berta and I stayed up a little too late. Somewhere near the end there I was rambling on to her, trying to explain the vagaries of the javascript in my autosave plugin for WordPress. She stared at me, listening, but I could tell that she was too tired to absorb any of it.

I think I just needed to tell someone what I had been working on, and poor Berta was available. When we’re 70, she’ll just walk away in the middle of my talking, assuming I’ll continue talking aloud to myself. I’m surprised she doesn’t do that now, really.