Day: July 3, 2007

Tuesday we get a look at the baby once again via ultrasound…supposedly this’ll be the fancy deal where you can basically see what he’s going to look like when he pops out into the world in a couple of months. Of course you know I’m going to post some pictures from that.

In the meantime, baby room work continues, with one of the heaviest pieces of my furniture – a bookshelf that has traveled with me through every move I’ve ever made – now in the game room.

Thing is…I’m not sure it’s going to go right there. It’s a case where, now that I’ve got it there and have it loaded down with a couple hundred pounds of bound printed material once more, I’m just not sure it’s going to work there. It creates a little “hallway” coming into the game room, which may just be too narrow (especially with the arcade cabinet creating an extra corner to navigate). And the back of it isn’t exactly photogenic. So…it’s still a work in progress. I’ve just got a lot of progress to make in the next few weeks. Really, the important step is getting it out of the bedroom that’s going to become the nursery.

During cleanup, I have found a few treasures that I had declared missing, from the jewel case with my Tron 2.0 discs in it to a VHS copy of MST3K: The Movie signed by Trace Beaulieu:

By the way, the third and final volume of Amazing Stories soundtracks arrived today, and let me tell you, as pricey as these were, it’s so worth it to have the whole set.

I’ve been on the lookout for a new WordPress theme for Scribblings, because the current one (“Fishy”) has started doing weird stuff that I’m not too fond of (try paging down and watching the left margin on the various blog entries). The problem here is that, now that WordPress and themes for it are a big deal, some honest-to-God mediocrity is seeping into the whole thing. Themes that just flat-out don’t work as advertised no matter what browser you use to look at them, themes that rely wholesale on brute-force non-compliant HTML code, and the new bane of my existence, “sponsored links themes”. These usually include a set of links toward the bottom of the page – though I’ve started to notice that some theme authors are working up the stones to drop these links near the top – which link to some really spammy stuff: the usual suspects, drugs, highly suspect search engines, and other forms of link-farm bullcrap. The authors of these just about always include something in their terms of use about how you can’t use their themes if you remove those links. Now, part of me wants to just remove the links and see if the authors ever actually even find out and do anything about it, but I’d rather just find a suitable non-“spamsered” theme and try to keep the internet’s barely-functional honor system intact. But it infuriates me to see how much this is happening. I hope that this isn’t just the tip of an iceberg that might see WordPress targeted in much the same way as phpBB is. I reserve a special hatred for spammers in whatever form they take, and theme authors who integrate that stuff into the fabric of their work are spammers, whether they want to think so or not in their little worlds. (Thank God for Weblog Tools Collection, which carefully notes which themes are spamsered; that’s a criterion that themes.wordpress.net desperately needs to add to its search tool.)

Off to bed. I’ve got a date with a baby in the morning.… Read more