an exercise in percussive maintenance
Category: A Bit Of Silliness
I want to apologise for not having a fitting offering for April Fools this year. I’ve been trying to think of something since last week, but the perfect idea only hit me this afternoon, way too late to implement it. I’ll tell you this: next year’s April Fools will be legen…wait for it…
Instead, I’ll point you to the latest “improvement” devised by the…good people running WordPress.com, the AutoMatton.
Can anyone say “Skynet”?
Three posts in three days. I know, right? Better not make this a habit. But how could I let National (not my nation, but who cares?) Grammar Day pass without a tip of the proverbial hat? Especially after coming across this totally cool grammar quiz on the Grammarly Blog via Grammar Girl’s Twitter feed? (Goodness! I’ll stop typing “grammar” now. Okay, a couple more times: grammar; grammar. I’m done now. Promise.)
I lied. I’m not done. But you need to click here to see the rest.
No, I’ve not developed a sudden appreciation for Milton. To tell the truth, I’ve only read a couple of his poems, that one included, and did not quite get it. Like most poets his work warrants more in-depth study if one truly wants to appreciate it, and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
Today I went for my bi-annual eye test. I am blessed with severe short-sightedness from both sides of the gene pool and have been a proud member of the four-eyes club since the age of eleven. But even twenty-two years later I still find eye tests a harrowing ordeal.
Now aren’t you curious whether I’m serious or not? Click here!
At one point last year I started volunteering in the WordPress.com support forums. It started out as a way to procrastinate on my writing and studies, but I soon became hooked. Partly it was the great bunch of established volunteers who welcomed me into their midst and taught me (and are still teaching me) the ropes.
But the true reward is that rush of endorphins every time I successfully help someone solve a problem with their site. That, and the fact that my knowledge of WordPress.com has grown with leaps and bounds as I really dug into the support pages looking for solutions to other people’s problems. In fact, I’ve already incorporated some of the things I discovered thanks to the forums into this blog.
It’s not all fun and games, though. People come to the forums because they have a problem, and unsolved problems lead to frustration. Frustrated people can become…not nice. Some people take their blogs VERY seriously.
But then you also get people who take things in their stride, like the user whose ENTER-key started misbehaving in the post editor. His final reply to the thread really made me smile, and I thought I’d share it with you:
I refreshed Firefox and that fixed the problem. Kind of like electro-shock therapy — not sure exactly what it did, but it made a big difference. The ENTER key behaves as expected now. Who knows for sure what happened to trigger the weirdness, but several possibilities occur to me:
a) I leaned my elbow on the keyboard when reaching for Kleenex and hit a strange key combo that a malicious coder set up when she was passed over for promotion at Mozilla
b) The cat walked on the keyboard and did some sort of feline reconfig
c) An angry God looked down and said, “Let’s fuck with him for awhile”.
d) None of the above
Anyway. Thanks for your help and suggestions.
Onward toward the abyss!
And on that note I wish you a happy weekend 😀
if all else fails...use a hammer 