• SensualVenus.com
  Sensual Venus is a place for a Female Voice to be heard, a Family of Women Writers. We ladies have
  our own vision of Eroticism, our own Fantasies. Our Authors will Touch you and Beckon you with our Aching Love.
  (tags: women sex)
• PwntLinkers
  Fighting the war against those who hotlink images…one battle at a time. [via kalephunk]
  (tags: onlineculture)

Well, the pictures from last night are going to have to wait until tomorrow. I had forgotten my digital camera at home too, so I bought a single-use one to take pictures at the cat show. (Photography wasn’t technically allowed…but I did it anyway.) I was glad I had gotten one, too, because C got called up onstage as part of an audience participation section! We used up pretty much the whole camera, and, being used to the instant gratification of digital, I wanted to find a one-hour photo. There turned out to be one on 23rd near 7th Ave, which is not far, so I brought the camera there a few minutes ago. It turns out that to get them on a CD you have to wait another day, so I agreed to that and I’ll pick the CD and prints up tomorrow.

Right now I am nursing a Starbucks coffee outside the store where C’s P.O. Box is. Yesterday :MK: sent my meds by overnight mail and they should be here in about 20 minutes, assuming they come on time. (There were several mail carriers in the store, so hopefully one of them had my package.) Yesterday I was saved by the pill fob on my keychain, which I had actually remembered to fill after the last time I forgot my meds one morning! I was super-dippy this morning, though, so my meds better turn up!

Last night we watched a DVD of the original King Kong. Having seen that, I now think the new version is a good update for modern audiences. (Really, zaph!) I still think Peter Jackson could have saved about half an hour by trimming the Kong vs. Rex scenes and the bug scene, but I think the effects and plot expansion made it well suited to today’s audiences.

Okay, I just called the photo place to ask what time I should come back tomorrow, and he said it might be ready today! He’s going to call when they’re done, maybe around 5 or 6pm. He also said “are they from a concert or something?” I said yes, and he said “yeah…they’re kind of far away.” So who knows how they will turn out. We were front row center, though, so I couldn’t have done better given that the little camera had no zoom.

Back to the manual posting…huh.

• Smiley Xtra
  Firefox extension automates the posting of smiley faces in blogs, forums, etc. [via rockwrok]
  (tags: firefox graphics)
• Skin Project
  Writer Shelley Jackson invites participants in a new work entitled “Skin.” Each participant must agree to have one word of the story tattooed upon his or her body.
  (tags: tattoo)
• Make-a-Flake
  Flash toy to cut paper into a snowflake without having all the little bits scattered around. [via blog-her]
  (tags: fun.stuff)
• WordPress Help
  The great podz’s site provides pretty much all the tutorials and information you could hope for.
  (tags: wordpress)

Ack! I left my laptop bag at home before driving up to NYC for an extended weekend. Inside the bag were two very important things: my laptop, and my meds. (Those who know me know that these are equally important to my health and overall well-being.) Various options have been discussed - I could just go home after the cat show tomorrow; I could have my meds sent by overnight mail (about $20 via USPS), have the laptop sent, etc. The choice I’m going with for now is to have my meds shipped overnight via USPS. I have access to my friend C’s computer (when he’s not using it) and I have my Sidekick, so that should keep me reasonably well connected despite the feeling that I’ve left a body part behind. Everything I do is stored on that laptop, so computer-based plans I had for the weekend - graphics work, more video blogging - are shot. But I’ll manage.

That said, though, if anybody reading lives in NYC and has a laptop they can lend to a trustworthy geek who is in town through midday January 3rd, please drop me an e-mail…

Ooookay…I think I have successfully upgraded to WordPress 2.0. It seems like everything has gone okay. The only thing I am not sure about is the Feedburner stuff; the plugin is not compatible with WP2 and the workaround was a little confusing for me. Hopefully nobody is reading with wp-rss.php or wp-rss2.php directly, because I’m not sure what to do with those, but the main URLs - /feed and the legacy full.xml - seem to redirect okay. I am really going to miss Live+Press until it is updated to work with WP2; I will go back to manually copying my entries into LiveJournal. But unteins has always been pretty responsive in Live+Press development so I’m sure something will happen with that eventually. There are a few other plugins I have yet to test - Text Replace and The Execution of All Things being important ones I’d like to get back. But for now it seems to have gone okay, I think/hope.

Just because I can, I guess. Be warned: much Hello Kitty to follow.
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This morning I signed up for Diet to Go, a frighteningly expensive diet plan. At about $435/month, it’s more than a Weight Watchers membership and probably more than Jenny Craig or anybody else. So why am I doing it? Well, I’m tired of seeing the scale go up instead of down. I feel quite frustrated because as far as I can tell, I have been eating pretty well, and it’s not working, which just makes me want to throw up my hands altogether. So on Tuesday and Friday evenings for the entire month of January, I am going to stop at their office near my work and pick up the meals for the next few days.

I signed up for the 1200-calorie/day vegetarian plan, for three meals a day. Someone who works for my company also uses Diet to Go and he said he started on the three meal plan but soon realized he could put together his own breakfasts more cheaply; I have decided to start with three meals anyway because I want to see if it really works. This does depend, of course, on not eating anything but what they supply to me. That’s how I’m going to look at it mentally: NO cheating. There will still be other food in the house, of course - I don’t live alone - but I think I can mentally handle the concept of “no, you can’t have that, it’s not on your plan.” But that has to apply to everything - I think my weakness has been the “eat what you want” attitude of simple calorie counting and Weight Watchers. So I’m going to try the approach of not eating anything I want.

I’m still sedentary, and I need to change that too, but meanwhile I’m going to start Diet to Go and see how that goes for a month.

• Vlog It
  Software specifically designed for video blogging.
  (tags: blogging software)

Whee, it’s a second video blog entry! I will probably just keep storing stuff on Putfile and translating it here, unless I figure out how to do subtitles on the signing in which case I’ll just put a link to each new entry. The quality still isn’t good; I have to figure out how to adjust compression settings. English translation below!
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Okay, I just have to show off one of my gifts from yesterday. Those of you that understand ASL can click here; those of you that don’t can peek at the translation below.
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