Apparently the comment preview thingamabob was freezing the page for some folks so it’s toast.
Edit: hmm… actually with some IE7 testing, it seems the problem is that IE7 doesn’t like gzip-compressed pages. Or at least the way WordPress sends them. Disabling that fixed it. Let me know if it continues. Although I’m aware performance is blazingly slow at the moment.
Upgrading blog software today, so hang tight in case of weirdness.
(And yes, the first thing I’m doing is downloading a full data backup…)
Edit: All done. New features: archive list added back to sidebar (not really new, just forgot to earlier), gratuitous links to social bookmark sites added to posts, oh, and some of you wanted a comments preview button for some reason.
No, really. Like Raph, I’m not sure if there is anything left about me that isn’t already an open book, but let’s give it a go.
1. I was a high school dropout. No, really. I was a fairly troubled adolescent, and I spent more time reading in the local college library than in school. It helped that I literally lived across the street from said local college at the time. Eventually I just quit making a pretense of showing up to school, as it was getting in the way of my actually learning things. It didn’t seem to hinder my career overly much, but it’s still not an educational path I’d recommend.
2. I was in the military for 60 days. No, really. The US Navy, to be precise. And I never left RTC (the naval version of boot camp). Women had just been made drill instructors when I was there in the early 80′s, and the highlight of my brief career as Seaman Recruit Jennings was having two female DIs ambush me as I was going somewhere and harangue me for about 10 minutes about how I was a disgrace to the United States Armed Forces. And they said I’d never accomplish anything! Eventually the military and I came to a mutual understanding that we weren’t really suited for each other.
3. I am rodentophobic. No, really. Full blown phobia and everything. I freak out, have an anxiety attack, etc. It’s really kind of embarrassing. I’m to the point now where I can stand to be around a mouse in a cage BUT DO NOT MAKE ME TOUCH IT, and with rats, all bets are off. Comes from two things: when a small child, entering a dark garage/pantry and having a flying rodent aimed loosely at my head, and somewhere about the same time lying in bed listening to my parents detail all the things about rats that basically make them into the Terminator. You know, chew through metal, form intricate civilizations, can smell fear, etc. Anyway, I. don’t. like. rats. Suffice to say that any game I work on will not have rat-killing as part of its advancement schema.
4. I rode cross-country on a freight train once. No, really. And it was filthy. As in, covered in grime looking like you just walked out of a factory in a Dickens novel dirty. It’s one of those things you should (only) do once, I guess. At any rate this was over 20 years ago and I suspect security is a mite tighter now. But when I did it, the train crew didn’t really care. Which I really wish I would have figured out closer to the end of the trip when I finally upgraded from a coal car crevasse to one of the engines. When I popped in my new seat, an engineer just poked his head in, yelled “DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING” and kept going. But it was great for one reason: the train took a wrong turn in Texas (I was trying to go from Georgia to California) and I ended up in Arkansas, which took me a solid hour to figure out. By that time I was tired of train travel and settled down there for the next decade or so. And whenever anyone asked how I ended up in Little Rock, I always answered “By accident.”
5. I’m a really, really, really bad public speaker. No, really! Unfortunately this is something more and more of you are learning as I get dragooned into public speaking. It’s a lot easier to write than speak, y0. I tend-to-talk-really-really-fast-and-follow-a-script-and-not-look-up-and-forget-to-breathe.
So, I suspect the main reason Raph tagged me was to spread this insidious meme further into the bloodstream. So… the following people are now free to not respond, and feel guilty! Abalieno/HRose, Cosmik of n3rfed, Jeff Freeman, Amber Night and Damion Schubert, – step right up, and bare 1/5th of your soul. Or not.
Checking my referral logs, I noticed something amidst the flotsam of spam fake referrals, google searches for Jessica Chobot porn, and the odd message board post:
Part of this is, of course, my iron-fisted rule over the Scott Jennings community as ranked by Google. So I can see where some whining is warranted. Justified even. I mean, we can’t all be the duly appointed representative of the Jennings clan, right? Sadly, in the end there can only be one official Google-approved Scott Jennings, and it is a mantle I wearily bear.
But, come on. King of the Dorks? From an improv comic director who writes an e/n blog? Sure, he probably goes outside once in a while, and has actual “friends” he “talks about” and a “real life” outside of “levelling video game characters“. But is that any reason to indulge in base name calling? Surely, we in the Jennings-based community can rise above that, and be an example to those benighted folk unfortunate enough to not be named Scott Jennings. We are made of sterner stuff, and held to a higher calling. Like it or not, we Scott Jennings must, as we understand that Jennings is both possessive and singular, understand how this can become a metaphor for life itself.
In the end, we must focus our awe-inspiring Jennings fury on the real enemy – the pedophile Scott Jennings, which Google safely has ensconced away on Page 3. And as King of the Dorks, I decree that there he shall remain. So shall it be written, so shall it be done!
As part of some mild blog cleanup, I edited the About Me page on the blog.
Also note that my email has changed from scottj to sjennings -at-brokentoys-org because the spam was just becoming overwhelming and it was all from the blog email. Yay for spam.
Spent a small amount (very small) of time maintaining the List O’ Links. Some new additions, lots of deletions due to inactivity timeouts!
VirginWorlds recorded my recent AGC rant in their podcast. Starts about 63% in.
With Elrond still missing and presumed slaughtering small birds somewhere in the Austin wilds, here’s Ellie.
We went to the animal shelter with every intention of getting a small kitten that we could mould to our iron will acclimate to living with us comfortably. As you can see what we ended up with was neither a kitten (she was picked up as a stray, so the shelter estimated she was about 7), nor particularly small (like me, Ellie could stand to lose a good third of, well, her).
Ellie had been in the shelter since June and probably knew that it was pretty important to her future to play nice, so she crawled up in our laps and stayed there. As you might be able to tell from the photo, she has decided our house will suit her, and has deigned to allow us to feed and house her. In other words, she’s a cat.