Blogs

I have been very busy, what with my professorial duties, and making the Pet Labour Troll, and building my new house. But today I can at least spend a little time trying to finish coding this blog. To which end, I have just added some scripting that posts every new entry to my Twitter feed. If it works (and it ought to work), there will be a brand new status update as soon as I submit this entry, that says, “blogged on seangleeson.com: ‘And now, my blog posts to Twitter’” (because that is the title of this entry) along with a shortened URL.

Of course, there are myriad services and plugins already extant that do pretty much exactly the same thing. But just as with my Facebook app, the hangup there is the “pretty much” part. None of them does exactly what I wanted, with the wording I wanted, or my desired algorithm for shortening the text if it exceeds 140 characters. This one is just what I wanted. (Phoebe too, I think.) And using my own script means I can use my own URL shortener as well.

So now, all y’all who follow my Twitter feed (I believe there were five of you, last I checked) never need to miss a blog post!

I want a nice pair of oxford shoes not sweatshop made. Leather, black. Suggestions welcome. I have huge feet, women’s 11ish, men’s 9.5-10 (US.) Best if priced under $100.

was the O’Melays, who were the visiting friends! I didn’t want to out them until they got back to their lovely farm. It was such a delight to finally meet Tabitha who I have known for almost seven years. The kids all got along swimmingly. Tabitha’s children are generally between my kids in age: Tristan is one year younger than Abby, Kassi is nine months older than Gilbert, Toly is nine months younger than Trixie, and Rome is nine months younger than Gloria. This meant that there were multiple playmates for each O’Melay. Tristan flitted between the older girls and Gilbert and Kassi played with Gloria and Faith. Toly and Bede wrestled with each other like puppies, and Rome floated around the edges.

Everyone got a mild cold and stuffy nose but the only one really sidelined by it was Tristan, who spiked a fever too. Poor dude!

Overall the visit was wonderful. They came down so Karl could build a wall in our new garage to partition it off for Sean’s office, and that was accomplished. Karl is amazing. Tabitha and I made food, as previously noted.

I also got other gifts: Sean got me The Complete Sherlock Holmes and Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, both of which are great.

So all told, a Very Happy Birthday!

Today is Wirt L. Harris’s birthday! Happy birthday, Dad!

My friends are here and have been here since Saturday morning. The house has ten kids and four adults and it is loud and happy! We eat a lot. On Saturday we cooked three dozen eggs, two pounds of sausage, a pound of bacon, two pints of beans and about eight pounds of venison. (Saturday was to feed sixteen people since Sophia nd Josh came too.) Sunday we ate some of the Saturday leftovers and also cooked eighteen eggs, a couple pounds of ham, two five pound chickens and two pounds of broccoli, along with three loaves of bread and twelve dozen cookies. Today we made an enormous pot of venison chili, ate it all, (again, with Sophia and Josh’s help) and finished off three-fourths of the cookies and another thirteen eggs.

I have to make bread tonight so I can bake it in the morning. Yum!

In other news, my birthday is tomorrow and I have my birthday present to myself: hardware and software upgrades for my beloved Dell Mini 9. He (his name is Aristotle) got a new hard drive, new RAM and a new OS! I’ve been accruing these bits and bobs for months and got the last piece of hardware today, an external DVD drive. It was all I was waiting on and now I’m installing Windows 7. I’m very excited!

As I mentioned, an English political blogger, one Anna Raccoon, had commissioned me to make a shiny new British version of my rusty old Autorantic Virtual Moonbat (AVM). The new robot is now built, and I am heartily sorry to introduce you to the Pet Labour Troll (PLT).

Just as with the AVM, the PLT comes in both a chat module, which lets you talk to the robot, and a smaller sidebar module, which does not.

And just as with the prior incarnation, the PLT lets anyone put either module on any website with just a line of code.

But the Pet Labour Troll also incorporates many improvements over the old AVM, using technology which was not available back in 2004. The PLT is coded in ActionScript 3 and PHP 5, making it twice as fast. And it has three things the AVM never had: its own domain, its own Facebook page, and its own Twitter feed.

The domain, labourtroll.com, has all the instructions for embedding the robot on your own website.

The Facebook page posts rants from the troll at random intervals, and the troll will reply to any posts written on its “wall.” After its first day of operation, the page has garnered 29 fans on Facebook. I expect this number to go higher.

And the Twitter page, at twitter.com/labourtroll, has its own feed of random ranting as well.

I’m sure you will join me in extending our British cousins our sincere sympathy, as they come to know the horror that is the Pet Labour Troll.

We have guests coming this weekend. It’s a perfect time to visit because for the next month we have two houses, see, so there’s room! We’re going to build an interior wall to partition off part of the garage and get an idea of what new flooring will be needed.

I’m thrilled to see the folks who are coming. I plan to cook a lot today and tomorrow. I hope my friends don’t mind the mess. It’s a pity they know me so well, I can’t blame it on moving.

In other news, Beatrice Anna snuck in and turned four when nobody was looking. I’ve turned my birthday photographer hat over to my eldest, and she has yet to post the pictures, but when she does I’ll link a few. In the meantime, you might like to read her birth story. It was very exciting, in retrospect. The day it happened, it was like a moment caught out of time, and absolutely the most divine of all my births.

When I was in fifth grade, I switched schools. Someone there asked if I had been born in the UK, because I had a trace of the Queen’s English in my speech. I assure you it was not affected by me, but a natural byproduct of being raised in a home where the only thing on television was PBS, then recycled British children’s shows via 1985 Nickelodeon. The Third Eye, anyone? How about The Tomorrow People? The strongest, quickest and best, Dangermouse. And of course Doctor Who!

Thanks to the wonder of the internet I can continue this tradition with my kids. They are Whovians through and through, and Gilbert and Bede currently love Alphablocks, a CBeebies programme. Enjoy!

We’re signing the contract on it tomorrow! Go, us!

Way back in 2004, I invented a humorous Flash application named the Autorantic Virtual Moonbat. It was a chatty hate-filled robot who generated random nonsensical leftist rants, such as “Chimpy McBushitler STOLE the ELECTION by outsourcing transgendered polar bears!!!” Perhaps you saw it. It wasn’t just on my blog, it was on hundreds of others as well, because I let anyone who wanted it embed it. It was very clever and funny, because it aped the style of excitable liberal writers so well.

And then, well, time passed. It still works, but I stopped updating its knowledgebase years ago. The poor dumb thing still thinks George Bush is running the world, and that global warming is a credible theory. Well, okay, so do other liberals, but my larger point is, I was pretty much done with it. And yet I still believe it can have a successful career in politics. That’s why I’m sending it to the United Kingdom.

An English political blogger contacted me, asking if the AVM could be reprogrammed as a crazy British leftist, rather than the American sort, in time for the upcoming U.K. general election in 2010. I answered in the affirmative, and so soon the device will have a new home — and a new name! — and a whole new list of enemies to hate. I will certainly keep you abreast of details as they are made final.

Sean just got back from a grocery run. It’s so satisfying to suddenly have the problem of too much food in my kitchen. I feel so rich when I open the cabinet and see twelve cans of tomato paste. It’s the little things.

I’ve been planning things for the new house in my mind. The kitchen there is much larger than the kitchen here, which has five square feet of counter space. We have room for a microwave, a coffee pot and a toaster and absolutely nothing else, no room to prep cook, nothing. Standing in the new kitchen is marvelous.

I’m going to take Trixie and Gilbert over there this evening, let them see it. I’m not taking Bede until we’ve finished the flooring changes because I don’t want him to have one image in his mind and get it all confused. I don’t anticipate him having much trouble with this move (well, no more trouble than a nonautistic six year old) but why take chances. Man, I am so looking forward to NOT HAVING STAIRS. While they have rocked my glutes with no effort (woohoo!) they are so dangerous. I worry daily that someone will be angrily shoved near the top of the flight and then tumble down, down in a sickening heap. Shudder! Soon, soon.

We’re going to get vinyl plank flooring for the living/dining room. Stuff’s badass, I tell you what. I’m willing to trade natural for waterproof, inexpensive and resilient.