Sorry in advance for the excessive acronyms. Google means never having to say you're too sorry.

I spent a good deal of today reading, both on screen and off. I decided it's time to jettison Blogger as my CMS of choice and I discovered that I can now install WordPress at my ISP. This is good news. So, the process for moving the data was easy and yet hard. WP has a Blogger import function, but not if you used Blogger just to ftp files to your own site. If you did this, the importer cryptically fails. Fortunately, there is not one single tech support problem you can have that someone else hasn't had and blogged about, so I Googled for solutions. I changed this blog, briefly, to a blogspot blog and then exported that data... to WordPress.com (because my ISP can't do some sort of secure socket tango required to import directly from blogspot). So, once I was on my third blog of the day, I could export all 130+ posts (and comments) directly to a raw file on my laptop which could be imported. Hurray!

Then my ISP had a bizarre tragic once-in-a-blue-moon crash and all of the sudden my new blog started failing in bizarre ways. I called the ISP to see if it was me or them, and they seemed to think that it was them. So... I waited. I had dinner. I finished reading a book. I sat down to watch a movie and the phone rang. It was Bob the guy who owns my ISP, asking me how long I'd been using WordPress. I said I'd been using it in general for a few years but only on eskimo.com for a few hours. He seemed happy to hear this. Apparently their crash had messed up one table in my database and he went to restore it from yesterday's backup only to find that nothing was there yessterday. I think I made him happy when I said "Oh just delete it, I can reinstall from my backup" which I bet is something a sysadmin rarely hears. So then I reinstalled WordPress, reuploaded my data and here we are. This is, if I'm lucky, the last post on Blogger then I'll flip the switch and start using WordPress which I much prefer. It shoudl be fairly transparent, but maybe just a wee bit better looking.

I read a whole book today and didn't do much else besides that and this whole tech transfer nonsense. My birthday is on Wednesday. I pretty much like birthdays. Anyone who would like to, please feel free to send me a postcard. I like mail. Box 81, Bethel VT 05032.

Labels: birthday, blogger, tek, wordpress

Here is a story about ways technology has enhanced my life.

I got a car. Here is a photo of it. (1) For some reason I like having two cars. Part of this may be that I like having a back-up car. Part of it may be that it costs almost nothing to insure a second car in Vermont. Part of it is that I've wanted a wagon for quite some time and the opportunity presented itself. So, this is my new (to me) car. It needs a name.

The way I got it wasn't really your typical deal. In fact, it's a neat story. My pal Erica just left her librarian gig at Cornell to start a nifty new job in San Francisco at Second Life. (2) She was selling her car on Facebook. (3) You might know Erica because her blog and my blog are the first and second blogs that show up on Google when you search for "librarian" (4) Yeah, that's us. I saw the photo and said "oh hey that's the car I need." My car is totally fine, but ever since a scary run-in with a guardrail last winter, I've been thinking I might want something a bit more AWD-ish. Plus, I've wanted a wagon or at least something I could, in a pinch, sleep in. I haven't slept in a car in a few years now, but I like having the option.

Since these cars are basically Vermont's State Automobile they're tough to get good deals on. And I don't really enjoy driving all over the place looking at cars from Craigslist (5). So, Erica's seemed decent and when I said the price was maybe a little high for me, she made it not a little high and I emailed (6) and said said "I'll take it". I sent her a check through my online bank. (7) It was forwarded to her in CA. She mailed me the title and the bill of sale. I called my insurance company. They emailed me proof of insurance. (8) I got a ride from my very good friend Forrest out to Ithaca (thanks Forrest! I met him on MetaFilter (9)) where we found the car in the Ornothithology lab parking lot with a note to me and the keys under the mat. Erica said "It's the one with the flying spaghetti monster (10) on the back, to distinguish it from the 45 other green subaru legacies in the parking lot."

We drove back in tandem keeping a sharp eye out for danger. The trip would have been shorter but Forrest heard on the radio (11) that there was a huge wreck on 87 North and we took a detour through Saratoga Springs to avoid it. I got home and made a few moves in an online Scrabble game (12) to chill out, answered some personal and work email, (13, 14) prepared a book to put in the mail for paperbackswap.com (15) and went right to bed.

Labels: health care, jessamyn, me, tek