Weekend report

Another long and varied post. Oh well.

Apparently wordpress publishes posts dated for when you first started the post. The last two posts I made showed up out of order and several days earlier than I actually finished them. I started them with a list of notes I intended to write about figuring I’d finish them over the weekend and post them on different days, but it didn’t let me.

I just got up for a minute to take the trash out and Talore stopped pretending to be asleep and stole a slice of bacon off my plate. At least she’s mostly stopped trying to steal my food when I’m there.

Since the first one didn’t really have a lasting effect I gave Talore a proper bath last night. She was curious while I was filling the tub, but not curious enough to step in it. When I put her in she was trying to keep her feet first but not have any foot touch the water. That would have been a great video, but I only have two hands and didn’t have a good stand in the bathroom. Her lack of traction on the bottom of the tub meant it was fairly easy to keep her there, but a good bit of water got splashed over the edge when she’d flail around trying to grab hold of it. I didn’t have any cat shampoo, so I just rubbed her with water where she wasn’t low enough to be in it.

She complained a little, but when I was talking to her and petting/rubbing her (even with water) she was somewhat calm. Toweling her off also went much better this time, though the fact that I had her in the bathroom and could let go of her without her fleeing helped. I did get a couple of scratches from not having trimmed Talore’s claws, but that was just when she was flailing with her claws out, not because she was trying to climb up my arm. It turned out much better than the first attempt: even without soap her fur is much fluffier than it was.

A week or two ago there were noises of someone moving stuff around in the apartment next to me before I went to work. I’m guessing they moved out, because since Thursday I’ve been hearing a beep on an 11 second timer, and I’m pretty sure that it’s the smoke detector in that apartment complaining that it’s low on battery. If I’d guessed that’s what it is before late last night I’d have gone by the apartment office yesterday to ask if they can do something about it.

I forgot to pick up for the roomba today. Apparently the first thing it did was back over the elastic cord for that cat toy as it was getting off the charging dock and declare itself stuck.

It’s come to my attention (see the next paragraph) that I need to dust most of the surfaces that the roomba can’t get to. Unfortunately I got the roomba because I don’t bother to clean as often as I should, so my desk is probably the only thing that will be dusted with any regularity.

Last weekend I was compressing a screencapture video for posting on youtube, so I was using my old desktop. That computer is still set up for transcoding videos, and it prevents the processing time that takes from affecting what I’m doing on my main desktop, even if it takes longer to do it that way. Apparently it had been far longer since I used that computer than I thought. I swiped ram and a power cable from it when I built my server, and I left the side of the case off for a good while. That let a significant amount of dust in, so when I turned on the power supply after plugging it back in and the computer turned itself on I got a face full of dust as the vent fans ejected all of it out the back of the computer. Talore was sitting next to me watching and she fled instantly, but I failed to react that quickly.

The ebook section of the library I live next to now has a decent selection of at least the newer Terry Pratchett books. Last time I checked for ebooks I only found a list of about 100 books, none of which I was interested in, so this is a big improvement even if I’ve already read all of them. Actually, about half of my search results are e-audio books, so it’s not as large a collection as I thought, but still better than I found a few months ago.

Downloading a book (Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson) was relatively painless, though it helped that I already had an adobe id for Adobe Digital Editions. Adobe Digital Editions appears to be a flash application, so right clicking anywhere brings up the flash settings menu, which is extremely annoying when you expect a useful context menu to be there. I did eventually figure out that the book could be dragged from the library section to the nook icon on the left, but that wasn’t obvious to me to start with.

Meta Post

That’s right, a blog post about my blog.

I did some more exploring of the settings, so now there’s the calendar widget to the right instead of a by-month archive listing. I also added the category listing (since I’ve been using categories instead of tags so I can’t put in a tag cloud) and a search widget, and I moved the login/rss feed widget to the bottom of the page. The blog posts per page are reduced to 3 (from 10) to keep the page shorter and reduce the number of images loaded per view of the front page.

I was looking at the traffic to my site. I don’t know how the Googlebot found its way to my blog (especially considering I didn’t have the redirect from the blank www.w3asel.com to the blog up until after I noticed Google found me), but this post was hit by someone from a Google search on the qr code read error I got. I’ve also gotten visits from the UK and Canada, and besides Google, the Yahoo and Netcraft crawlers hit my site.

Most visits to my site happen in the late evening (probably mostly me), and I’ve barely got more hits from Windows than from Linux (also my fault). Unknown beats out Macintosh to round out the OS list, and I’m guessing “Unknown” means Android. Only 12% of the visits to my site have been through IE, and I’ve gotten a number of hits from Google Chrome (does Android use Chrome for the browser?).

Paying for decent web hosting certainly makes life easier than hosting on my own server. Not only do I get an actual domain name (instead of an ip address not even I could remember), but I get nice statistics pages, automatic installation tools, and I don’t have to worry about securing my server as much.

Laser Pointer Video

I put the cat bed that Talore refuses to use in the middle of the floor last night to see if the catnip would still catch Talore’s attention.  It does occasionally, but the low wall apparently makes the perfect spot to hide behind while stalking the laser pointer.  Here’s a video (taken in low light of course) from my phone.  I had to upload to youtube because wordpress wouldn’t take the format the video was recorded in.