This clip of The Ross Sisters is apparently from a film called Broadway Rhythm, but that’s all I can tell you about the song or the stars. I don’t know who they were, what else they did, or what the hell the song is about. But it’s mesmerizing, that’s for sure. Pretty standard 1940s pop until about a minute in — after that, hold on to your hat.
Slate has an article about sonnet walks in London:
As we shambled down the Victoria Embankment, a bum on a bench started to harangue us for money. Suddenly, his requests for spare change segued into Sonnet 91, “Some glory in their birth, some in their skill / … Thy love is better than high birth to me / Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost.” The transformation was incredible — menacing to captivating in two lines. We carried on — a more cohesive group by now — and as we picked our way through the tourists in Whitehall Gardens, a blind man stumbled and fell. Naturally, we ran over to pick him up, only for him to launch into a sonnet. And so it went, through winding little roads, past ancient pubs and Middle Temple Hall, all the while being surprised by 12 stealth sonneteers posing as: a needy guy on crutches (Sonnet 89, “Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt”); more street people; a woman talking to a cheating lover on her cell phone; workmen; lost tourists seeking directions; and, as we grew increasingly suspicious of everyone we saw, a guy in a chicken suit.
I have got to get to London.
I’d been having a problem with Safari lately: when loading certain pages — like parts of the WordPress management interface — I sometimes (but not always) got an error message about a “bad server response (NSURLErrorDomain:-1011).” Refreshing generally cleared it up, but sometimes I had to refresh two or three times before the page loaded. No useful details were included with the error, and Googling the message turned up nothing useful.
Today I learned, via this Ask Metafilter thread, that nightly builds of WebKit are available via OpenDarwin. I’ve had no errors so far since switching to the nightly build. Hooray for open source!
I wanted to speed things up a bit, so I looked into cache options for WordPress. Supposedly WordPress 2 (which I am using) has a built-in cache, but either it’s not working or it’s just not very effective, because this site was running a lot slower than I wanted it to.
There’s a plugin called wp-cache that I’d tried before but decided against because I was using some other plugins that shouldn’t be cached, such as wp-scrobbler. Since I’m no longer using those plugins, I decided to give wp-cache another try. Immediately, however, I ran into some problems, foremost of which was the fact that the first time I loaded any given URL, I got a blank page. Subsequent reloads were fine. Turns out the problem has to do with running the plugin under WordPress 2.0.2 on PHP 5; that combination apparently doesn’t work in the default setup. There is a fix, but it’s buried in the comments (#183, to be precise), so I figured I’d repeat it here in case any of my readers run into the problem.
To fix the problem, open up wp-cache-phase2.php in the wp-cache folder, find the wp_cache_ob_end() function definition, and change the ob_end_clean() function call to ob_end_flush(). In version 2.0.17 of the plugin, which is current as of this writing, the line that needs to be changed is #219.
The plugin makes a huge difference in response time, and should also make your web host happy, since it requires less CPU time and fewer database calls.
Advertising fascinates me. I like to think I’m not unduly influenced by advertisers’ claims, but as a medium, as a subject of study, I’m simultaneously drawn to and repulsed by it. Although I own a TiVo and normally fast forward through the ads when I watch TV, every once in a while I leave the remote alone and watch a commercial break or two, just to see what’s what in the advertising world these days. And what I love most are the really, really bad ads.
You know the ones I’m talking about: the ones that disgust you, confuse you, just plain don’t make sense within the context of a sales pitch. They don’t just fail to make a convincing case — often they do the exact opposite. They put bad associations in your mind. They make you want to use someone else’s product out of spite.
Here’s the latest example I’ve seen:
The Setup: We’re in a doctor’s waiting room — “Dr. Ray’s office,” according to the receptionist’s voice from off-screen. A woman glances furtively at a much bustier woman beside her. Then we’re inside an examination room, where Dr. Ray himself is speaking to the camera. He takes some measurements, expresses some surprise at how small our breasts are, and says that while there’s nothing wrong that, he thinks we might be happier with bigger — or much bigger — breasts. The perspective changes, and we see that he’s talking to a chicken.
The Pitch: “Naturally larger chicken breasts, on the Bacon Swiss Crispy Chicken Sandwich. New at Carl’s Jr.”
My Comments: Am I the only one who gets a mental image of chomping down on a mouthful of silicone? Is this at all appetizing to anyone? Did they consult any women about this ad? I can’t imagine this is a happy association — major cosmetic surgery and fried chicken sandwiches — for most of them. I can only assume that, like the restaurant’s previous ad campaign (“If it doesn’t get all over the place, it doesn’t belong in your face”), this one’s targeted mostly toward the stereotypical young, middle-American male. I guess it worked for Hooters.
For the second time in my life, I’ve managed to develop a pain in my forearm by typing with poor ergonomic form. I’m currently wearing a very annoying brace on my left wrist — if it’s tight enough to do any good, it tends to cut off the circulation in my thumb. Still, it beats getting carpel tunnel and needing surgery. Plus it makes a good visual aid for teaching proper typing position to my students.
No, I’m not moving, but this blog is. Actually, it’s already moved.
For the past several years I’ve had a dedicated server to play with — I’ve gone through three different companies, run a small (read: unprofitable) hosting business, and learned a lot about server administration. Now it’s time to downsize.
There are some major changes happening in my life right now — most of my readers already know about them, I think, so I won’t go into them here — and I’ve decided to move to a shared server to save both time and money. I decided on DreamHost because, for the money, they come closest to what I and my friends, family, and clients have become accustomed to. In fact, for a fifth of what I was paying before, we’ll get the same amount of disk space and twice as much bandwidth — and still get all the useful software installs like SpamAssassin, MySQL, and WordPress. Most importantly, the whole thing will involve a lot less work for me. No longer will I need to deal with keeping software up-to-date, for example — a chore on which I’ve consistently fallen behind of late.
The site may not always respond quite as quickly, since we’re now sharing CPU time with whoever else happens to be on our shared server, instead of about a dozen relatively sleepy domains on a ridiculously overpowered server for our meager needs. So far, however, I’ve been pleased with the responsive and intuitive account control panel, and have had no major problems with the transition of my domain from the old host to the new one.
If your site is hosted with me, expect to get an email soon detailing when your domain’s transition will take place and what configuration changes, if any, you’ll need to make. I think in the long run we’ll all be better off in our new home.
