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November 29, 2006

Eating our way across the South - Piccadilly

Tricia thinks that the fried chicken at Piccadilly is the best she's ever had and I agree... that Tricia thinks it's the best she's ever had.

(It was not bad. I'm not sure why I'm being so snarky tonight. I need to stop writing food reviews and get some sleep. The Carrot Soufflé was certainly unique.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)

Eating our way across the South - Chick-fil-A, Cups, Fusion

I know there was a Chick-fil-A in the Columbia Mall of my Maryland youth, but for some reason I never went there. My first Chick-fil-A experience was with Erica, and it was founded in Atlanta, so it counts as Southern for me. I was so hungry this afternoon that we could have been eating cardboard and I think it would have been fine. Waffle fries are cool! And the lemonade is great.

Driving back from Madison this afternoon, I was getting sleepy and so I pulled over when I saw a sign that said "coffeehouse" -- coffee-culture has not really taken hold down here, so you take your opportunities where you can. Fusion makes a perfectly adequate regular cup of coffee.

Which meant that when we picked up Erica's parents and went to their usual Jackson coffee stop, Cups, I didn't get anything. So I can't review it. It smelled nice and coffee-y, though.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:33 AM | Comments (2)

Eating our way across the South - Taco Casa, Shipley's, SnoBiz

Erica and I talk about food a lot, and so I've gotten to hear a lot about the food of her youth. This trip I've finally gotten the chance to check off some of these flavors. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to put Taco Casa and Shipley's Do-Nuts in the "must be Erica's food nostalgia" category. Taco Casa is a Mexican food franchise headquartered in Kansas and it's pure what-Americans-in-the-70s-thought-Mexican-food-was. And Shipley's has terrible coffee (but it's cheap!) and I found the glazed donuts (sorry, do-nuts) spongey. (A cinnamon twist wasn't too bad, though, and got bonus points for cinnamon-distribution throughout the dough itself.)

A childhood flavor that does live up to the hype Erica has been giving it is SnoBiz. SnoBiz is flavored shaved-ice, with some of the flavors (Erica's favorites) having added "Creme" (condensed milk, we're pretty sure). Early in our dating life, I bought Erica an ice-shaver and some flavored syrups, but she still craves the original. Usually when we come down to Mississippi it's for the winter* holidays, so the local SnoBiz stand is closed. Today we were at a mall (a sad, sad mall) in Jackson and there was a food stand that had official SnoBiz-brand SnoBizzes. We got small Blueberry Cobbler and a Strawberry Shortcakes (both Creme flavors). I nearly passed out from the sugar high, but I have to admit that it was tasty.

* Though winter should be in quotes, because it's usually in the 70s when we're down here.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:11 AM | Comments (3)

Eating our way across the South - Billy's

Billy's is an Italian restaurant in Mississippi in the elbow of an outlet strip mall. Given the odds against it, the fact that Billy thinks it's odd that his Italian restaurant is "known" for its chicken salad is nothing. The chicken salad itself is a little bland, but you get a lot of it, and the other salad sides spice it up, especially the olives. I think I would have enjoyed it more on a po'boy. That is, what Billy's calls "Italian-style po'boys", but I would probably call "an Italian-style baked sub". Unless a po'boy is just a baked sub. I think my mind might have just been blown.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:00 AM | Comments (0)

November 28, 2006

Eating our way across the South - Shoney's

Our good friends Kate and Brian are just (relatively) up the road in Jackson, working on shows at New Stage, and on Monday night they came down to visit us. Where do you go to have dessert and coffee at 9:30 on a Monday night in Vicksburg? Shoney's, and why not. Well, the why not is that the coffee is terrible and the milkshakes are that kind I hate where the top third is covered by a blob of too-sweet and too-thick whipped cream. But on the upside, the staff is super-friendly and they don't hassle you when you stay for an hour and a half with empty dessert bowls in front of you.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:54 PM | Comments (0)

Eating our way across the South - Rowdy's

I've been hearing about the catfish at Rowdy's for years, but this trip was the first chance I'd had to actually try it -- and it was worth the wait. I had the newish "thin and crispy" style, which is more to my taste, anyway. I also tried a bite of Erica's more traditional style and it was just as tasty. The corn-bread hush puppies and yeast rolls were both excellent and we plowed through an extra basket of them. We dipped everything in the house "Nosser’s dressing" which was kinda like thousand island (maybe? I'm terrible at identifying dressings) and rather tasty.

Erica loves the other house specialty, batter fries, but I found them a little too mushy and bready for my taste. As I said, I'm a bit more of a crispy fan.

The atmosphere is very comfortable, but there's a pervasive attitude that you are a regular, which can be a bit tricky even for locals like my hosts -- we didn't get full menus until we specifically asked if we could order something other than the specials of the day, and our meals came with dessert but again we had to ask to discover that the desserts were sitting out on a table.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:40 PM | Comments (0)

November 27, 2006

Eating our way across the South - Anchuca

The day after Thanksgiving we went for lunch to Anchuca, an antebellum mansion in downtown Vicksburg that is now a bed and breakfast with a cafe. The dining room was small and, frankly, I was expecting small salads and cucumber sandwiches or the like. Erica and I got a bowl of seafood gumbo and a panini, "The Vick" to share. The gumbo was, oddly, free of rice, but had a good flavor and an acceptable amount of seafood. The Vick was a cheeseburger panini -- topped with both Cheddar and Swiss and caramelized onions and mushrooms. It was, simply, incredible. The onions and mushrooms created a delicious sauce for the sandwich, and the Ciabatta bread was the best I've ever had.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:56 AM | Comments (2)

Eating our way across the South - McAlister's Deli

McAlister's is a chain, and has an aggressive expansion plan that means that it soon won't be a Southern-only thing. But for now, they are, I've never eaten there before, and they have sweet tea -- so I'll count them. McAlister's has sandwiches and soup, but their specialty is huge baked potatoes with a variety of toppings. I got Erica's favorite -- the Spud Max: "nearly 2 pounds" of baked potato, turkey, ham, cheese, olives, sour cream, crimminy -- I can't remember what else. I'm still full. And the sweet tea is great -- not too sweet.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:50 AM | Comments (0)

Eating our way across the South - Hal and Mal's

The day after Thanksgiving, we were in Jackson, MS to see Jimbo Mathus Knockdown South at Hal and Mal's. Hal and Mal's is a large multi-room restaurant and venue and the back room where Jimbo was playing didn't serve food (nor have draft beer). But we were able to go over to the other side of the restaurant and order some take-out and bring it back (which is why the presentation is so... styrofoam). The fried food sampler was everything we could have wanted from such a thing, including fried pickles, everything coated in the same flour batter. The red beans and rice came with some fairly tasteless french bread and a surprisingly large sausage.

Jimbo Mathus has gotten a lot more Mississippi redneck in both dress and music since his Squirrel Nut Zippers days, and both suit him well. Things seemed a little shakey for the first couple of songs, but the band seemed to warm up and really got into a groove. Viva la swamp rock!

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:44 AM | Comments (0)

Eating our way across the South - Highway 61 Coffee

The Reids' long time friend Daniel Boone (yes, related) has opened a coffeeshop in downtown Vicksburg, underneath the art gallery, the Attic Gallery, owned by his wife, Lesley Silver. Highway 61 Coffee is a cozy little place decorated with the same kind of folk art found upstairs. We're coffee snobs and I'm not giving in to familial loyalty when I say that they pull a nice shot of espresso. We've been there at once a day every day of this trip.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:41 AM | Comments (1)

Eating our way across the South - Rendezvous

We're headed to Vicksburg, Mississippi and then New Orleans for an extended Thanksgiving holiday. Erica's going to be showing me all her favorite spots and we're going to be eating our way throughout the South.

On the drive down from Chicago to Vicksburg we stopped in Memphis at Rendezvous for a late second dinner. Downtown Memphis on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving is pretty dead, and what you'd think is the front door of Rendezvous directs you go around the corner to the alley. Around that corner, past some dumpsters, and it all started to feel like this might be a fool's errand. But as soon as we got inside, we could hear cheerful chatter from a still-busy dining room.

Rendezvous has a fairly short menu and the menu section of "Other Items" has the sub-head, "strange as it may seem, some folks don't eat pork ribs every chance they get" and we decided not to be those strange folks -- we both got a small order of ribs. Their ribs come with a pretty thick dry rub and the sauce is on the side -- one hot and one not -- which I think might be the perfect arrangement for me. As odd as it may sound for a ribs fan, I'm not really a fan of messy food. The plate came with two small sides, an oddly yellow cole slaw and a delightfully greasy pork-and-beans.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:37 AM | Comments (0)

November 26, 2006

You Dog

Congrats to Dan for finishing NaNoWriMo, early even.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)

November 20, 2006

Happy Feet

I was having some trouble following the words in the Happy Feet Trailer, but Erica has them memorized and Mustapha has already learned all the steps.

Posted by Fuzzy at 3:37 PM | Comments (6)

November 17, 2006

Rules

If you're in the middle of NaNoWriMo (Dan, I'm looking at you) and you're having any trouble, maybe it's because you're not following the rules for writing.

(via Justine Larbalestier)

Posted by Fuzzy at 6:03 PM | Comments (1)

8 am

I'm not sure I've heard anyone complain about being up on a weekday at 8 am as much as Jin.

This morning Shaun and Jin came over at, yes, 8 am to make a short video. You see (deep breath, because I'm not sure there is a good explanation for this) on Tuesday Ze Frank used an intro that had been submitted by the MSU improv group Lab Rats. He issued them an assignment to film some short form improv with what we used to call a "tower of suggestions" -- "OK, so you're in Disneyworld and you're scouting for a major league pitcher, in the style of a soap opera, and one of you has bad breath." Shaun decided that we should take those suggestions and turn in a video, too.

So we stood on my back porch in the early morning cold and... did not improvise very well.

And then I uploaded the video in a format that Ze Frank's Gallery doesn't understand (MP4! It's very standard!) and so no one could watch our video unless they downloaded it and changed the extension from _mp4 to .mp4. Which is very unlikely.

Anyway, the Lab Rats did their video, too.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:53 PM | Comments (6)

MDB + BNL

Erica and Noah and I went to the All-State Arena last night to see Andrew "Scrap" Livingston play. Oh yeah, and Mike Doughty and the Barenaked Ladies as well. (Do I make that joke every time? Probably. We like Andrew.)

Number of bass players in the show I've had dinner with? 2.

Number of cameras a cop made me put back in my car just because he wanted to, as far as I can tell: 1.

Number of cameras in the venue: a bajillion.

Number of cameras I brought back into the venue in my pocket: 1.

Update: Mike used my pics on his blog.
Update2: Noah posted about it, too, with pictures of his own.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:33 PM | Comments (0)

Child's Play 2006

Two things I think are cool are video games and children (they are, you know, our future). So I whole-heartedly endorse Child's Play, the charity started by the guys from Penny Arcade, which gets donations of toys, games, books and cash to sick kids in children's hospitals around the world. You can make a straight donation, you can buy toys or games directly from Amazon and have them shipped straight to a hospital, you participate in an event, or you can even buy a PS3.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:48 PM | Comments (0)

November 16, 2006

I've got a lot left

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

(via Beyond the Beyond)

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)

Ted 2

I'm not sure why it took me so long to get this video online, but here it is:

Forgotten Heroes: McGuillicutty II is nominally a sequel to Ted McGillicutty, Man of Action, though the name is spelled differently (oops) and the only character who has returned is the villain Elvis (Shaun Himmerick) who seemed to be dead at the end of Ted. Like Ted, Ted 2 is an entire action movie compressed into a few minutes, though this time instead of taking place within a single apartment building, the action is spread over the city of Chicago. We also re-used our notion of having one actor play "everyone else" with Sean Cusick taking on multiple roles. Brian Goodman rounds out the cast as our hero, Joe McGuillicutty.

Like many of our short films, this one was filmed for the Fast Forward Film Festival.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:27 AM | Comments (1)

November 13, 2006

What Is Up With Gwen Stefani

But what, you ask, is it like to take a road trip with Erica? Your questions answered in 8 seconds (3 MB MPEG movie).

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:35 PM | Comments (3)

Jeanne's three-legged cat, Buzz

I wasn't sure if there was already CatsInSinks.com and I was somehow comforted that there was.

Get your "awwww" sounds ready -- Sunday we got to met Jeanne's cat Buzz who, as of a few weeks ago, only has three legs. He was shot and no one is sure how or by whom. The vet had to amputate his right front leg and said that Buzz would be out of it for weeks and weeks. Just a few days after getting home he was running up and down stairs and when we met him he was playing with cat toys and jumping into sinks. SUPER. CUTE.

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:24 PM | Comments (1)

Why I won't watch Lost

There's an article in New York Magazine called "Never-Ending Stories: How to fix shows like 'Lost'" about how TV producers never want to actually solve the mysteries on those kinds of shows because that would (they think) stop the delicious ratings-candy. I agree with everything the author says so hard it hurts. It's the same reason I won't read on-going superhero comics. I just like my stories to have beginnings, middles, and ends. Is that so wrong?

Posted by Fuzzy at 8:51 PM | Comments (1)

Jeanne and Jeff's wedding

This past weekend Erica and I took a roadtrip to Cleveland, Ohio to attend the wedding of my sister Jeanne Clair to Jeff Schwarz. It was great to be together with the whole family, which won't happen again for a while, because Disco took off right after the wedding to go live in Buenos Aires for nine months.

Friday night the rehearsal dinner was at The Boneyard, where we learned that Amelia is great at DDR and Jake is quite the Arctic Thunder driver. After that broke up, Disco took us out to the Lakewood Masonic Temple to see the Boilermaker Jazz Band and do a little dancing.

Saturday the wedding and reception were held at the Western Reserve Historical Society and Crawford Auto-Aviation Museum, which explains all the airplanes and cars in the background of all the pictures. I'll admit I got a little teary-eyed when Jeanne came walking down the aisle. But to distract you from that, I'll talk about my bow tie.

Neither Disco nor I were standing up in the wedding, but he convinced me that we should wear our tuxedos (we have them, after all). I have plenty of ties, and even a clip-on bow tie that came with my $10 tux, but I decided that it was really important that I get a real bow tie for my tie. Erica picked one up for a reasonable price at Monitor down on Wilson and Clark. They gave her a photocopy of instructions on how to tie it, but we didn't bother to look at it until we were on the way to the wedding. Bow ties are impossible to tie! I tried, and failed, to tie the tie based on those directions. But Erica took the tie and figured out how to tie it based simply on "it needs to look like this, so this needs to go there". And then when we got to the wedding she managed to get it tied on me the same way. My wife is so awesome!

Posted by Fuzzy at 8:32 PM | Comments (0)

Japanese Mac/PC ads

Watching the Japanese Mac/PC ads, even without being able to understand a single word, it's obvious that PC gets all the good lines. (The American ones are here, if you've never seen them. How is it living under that rock, anyway?)

(Via Daring Fireball)

Posted by Fuzzy at 9:54 AM | Comments (2)

November 9, 2006

Check out Noah!

A few months ago, Noah made a music video, starring puppets (some custom, a few you might recognize from elsewhere) for a Barenaked Ladies contest. The finalists have all been combined into the above video and Noah is, of course, one of them. Hooray!

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:11 AM | Comments (1)

November 8, 2006

Minimal Photoshop Skills

For Zabeth, because while I have adequate Photoshop skillz, I seem to find it impossible to attach a picture to a Myspace comment.

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:49 PM | Comments (0)

I think I know

... why the election went the way it did: adorable babies, who each voted twice!

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:32 PM | Comments (0)

One more code from The Boy Detective Fails

Back in May I talked about the codes you can solve in Joe Meno's novel, The Boy Detective Fails. One of the decoded texts ends with an email address. I emailed the address, but never received a reply. A few weeks later I stopped by a talk-back after a performance of the play The Boy Detective Fails and asked Joe Meno himself what was up with that. He said that since the book was still in pre-release, it was likely that no one at the publisher was checking that email yet. So I forgot about it until Kathy asked in a comment if I had solved a further code received from that email address. I sent off an email yesterday and got back a message in code.

So, some hints for solving that code after the jump:

The code in the email is, like the one at the bottom of the pages, a substitution cipher where each letter represents another. But unlike that other code, it's not a simple rotation through the alphabet. Instead, the substitution letters were chosen, it seems, randomly. Basically, we're going to have to start guessing at letters to substitute and then see how those play out. But we've got two big boosts when we start to guess -- the spaces and punctuation have been left in (there are only so many two letter words in English, for example) and our correspondent has signed his full name. So by starting at the end of the message and trickling those decoded letters up through the message, it starts to become like solving a crossword puzzle -- "what's a 5-letter word that ends in 'ing'?".

Oh, and there are two words misspelled. Don't let that drive you crazy.

Posted by Fuzzy at 1:05 PM | Comments (1)

November 6, 2006

Politics

Bagel and Croissant are spreading lies like they were cream cheese. It's time to spread a little truth:

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:55 PM | Comments (0)

Zombies! and Man Eater

Sean and Atom were smart to schedule their horror-themed edition of the Fast Forward Film Fest for the weekend after Halloween -- what costumes and supplies were left at Walgreen's were all 75% off. We bought all the fake blood they had.

But, backing up half a step, the really crazy thing was that when we got to Atomix Coffee to pick up the topic suggestion for our film, we discovered that Shaun and I need to communicate a little better -- we had both signed up for a slot for FuzzyCo. I like to think of mistakes as opportunities, so I said we'd do two movies.

We got, then, two topics: a "Zombie" movie with the sub-topic "no public restrooms" and a "Monster" movie with the sub-topic "fired from a part-time job". Erica pretty instantly had an idea for the Monster movie, and I had a simple idea for the Zombie movie. We went back to Shaun's place to meet up with the rest of the crew: Shaun, Kristen, Jin, and Don Hall. We brain-stormed around our ideas for the zombie movie for a while. That is, for a little bit too long. But once we got in gear, everyone suited up as zombies really quickly and we hit the streets to film. I all the shots pretty well visualized in my head (which is so nice when that happens), so it was just a matter of capturing them all on video.

We finished filming that first film at around midnight and sent everyone but Jin home. Erica and I dragged Jin over to the Old St. Andrew's Inn and then back to our place to film the shots that had both of us in them. Then we let him go, too, and stayed up until 2 am or so filming each other.

In the morning, editing went really fast. Erica did sound effect research on her computer while I zoomed through the video on mine. We were done with both movies by 2 pm and when we got over to Atomix to drop the movies off, we were the second group to turn in our films. Yay us!

The screening was at Dessa Kirk's studio, which was pretty awesome. I've been a fan of Dessa's work since I encountered some of her pieces in Grant Park last year, so it was cool to be in the space where she creates those things. And she turned out to cool, too, which is always a bonus -- I can separate the artist from the work, but it's nice when you don't have to.

And then, the screening. Both of our films were well received. (And it made me feel a little smug when the second FuzzyCo logo came up and someone in front of us said, "two films in one night? That's not possible.") And then the judging and...

Zombies! took the second prize! $80, a pound of coffee, and an Atomix travel mug. And we're award-winning filmmakers (again)!

And, finally, here they both are:

Zombies!

Maneater

Posted by Fuzzy at 4:09 PM | Comments (3)

November 5, 2006

I'm a little embarrassed

I should have known the Jesus/Mary one.

(Via PNH)

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:49 AM | Comments (2)

That was completely expected

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
North Central
The South
The West
Philadelphia
The Northeast
Boston
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

(Via Sean Bonner)

Posted by Fuzzy at 10:28 AM | Comments (3)

more

Hey, I read Dan's NaDruWriNi and that reminded me...

Erica and were both wearing our Mad Bomber hats (a fire! oh, no, poor mad bomber!) whcih, if you're not familar, are big rabbit-fur lined hats with big ear flaps. Sterotypical "Russian" winter hats, except that Mad Bomber has been making them for years and have evolved them with modern fabrics, etc, so Erica's is a bright red and mine a bright blue. On the Red Line tonight, there weren't many seats free, so Erica was sitting next to a guy who was pouring over a racing forum (form?) and I was sitting across the aisle from them. After we've been on the train for a good 15, 20 minutes, the guy starts talking to me across Erica. Between his accent and low volume and the noise of the train, I caught one word in three.

Mumblemumblemuble Russian hat?

Me: (smile politely)

mumblemumblemumble Russian language?

Me: No, I don't speak Russian, I just have this hat.

mumblemumble (words that sound like Russian)

Me: (smile politely and shrug)

mumblemuyble (either "how much did you pay for it?" or "do you want to sell it?" -- really, I'm not sure)

Me: It was a gift. (This is a lie. I just didn't want to get into it.)

mumblemumblemumble, etc, and so on.

Later, he got super excited that the guy sitting in front of him had a cell phone camera. Whee!

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:54 AM | Comments (0)

nadruwrini

So I'm supposed to be writing drunk, butr I'm not really. Mostly, I'm writing tired. I mean, I had two beers with dinner at Cleo's (a 312 and a Newcastle), but that was at 4 pm and we did some shopping (Rotofugi! Alcala!) before we went to Dessa Kirk's studio for the Fast Forward showing. Because Dessa's studio is so far southwest from us, and we're not so familar with the neighborhood, we hung out near Atomix for as long as we could after we dropped off the movies, with the above-mentioned eating and shopping, but then we ran out of things to do, headed for Dessa's and ended up getting there about two hours early. We helped Sean and Atom set up chairs, so they gave me a Sam Adams. I drank it kind of fast, so then my stomach was feeling a little bloopy and so I didn't drink anything else through the showing, which started rather late.

We had two movies in the festival, which is enough of a story and I've got pictures and stuff, so I'll wait to tell that when I upload the movies and stuff. But suffice to say that one of the films came in second in the festival, which is pretty freakin' awesome.

We left whatever neighborhood Kedzie & Lake is and took the Green Line back downtown and then the Red Line up to Belmont in time to catch the very tail end of Don't Spit the Water. But we were really there to see A Demon Who Never Appeared, another Blewt production run by our friend Jared (and Kumail -- no offense to him, it's just Jared's our friend so that's how I reference it). It's a variety show with a through-line featiuring the characters who run the show -- Dr. Kumail, Maestro Hannah, Colonel Wigspliter, and the Demon. We've been meaning to see it for months and never have, so it was good to see the show tonight. Funny stuff. I drank a Fat Tire during the show. One of the big bottles. But that show also started late, so it was nearly two by the time we got out. We'd heard that Scot Goodhart and Holly Gibson were having their engagement party at the Holiday Club, but we were worried that the HC might close at two, so we just came home.

And I know that for NaDruWriNi you're not supposed to edit and I'm making a looooot of typos, but I think that, even fully rested/sober, that the way I type is to make a ton of typos and then immediately backspace over them and correct. I'd have to make a strong effort to leave the typos in.

So I grabbed a glass of pear brandy to sip while I'm typing this (really, a shot glass, but glass sounds classier. And I am sipping, not shooting. That'd really be a waste of good brandy.) The bottle of Malort was sitting there saying, "You're already being dumb by drinking something probably minutes before you go to bed, so why not be really stupid and drink me." But I resisted.

And now it's very late -- we were up until 2 or 3 last night shooting the FFFF footage, and then got up at 8 this morning to edit it -- so it's been a long day. Like I said, more NaSleWriNi than NaDruWriNi. So, to bed, I guess.

Posted by Fuzzy at 2:39 AM | Comments (1)

November 3, 2006

Making it work

With a collective "No way!" we discovered that our friends Patrick and Jenny also went as Timm Gunn and Heidi Klum for Halloween. And Jenny just started working at the Goodman, where Erica worked for 5 years. So, basically, we're the same people, just time shifted. Which is great, because they're awesome people to be.

Posted by Fuzzy at 11:02 AM | Comments (0)

November 2, 2006

How I got rid of MT numbered entries

Sausages, laws, and websites -- most people don't want really want to know how they're made. So feel free to turn your head away now.

I've been using Movable Type as my blogging engine since 1999 and, even though I'm using the latest version of the software, I've still got a lot of legacy cruft throughout my sites. For example, the individual posts of FuzzyCo and the New Improv Page are all just numbers (technically, "padded entry IDs"), like 001883.html. It's ugly, it doesn't tell you anything about the post, and it's depreciated by search engines. So I wanted to switch to a more modern system, where the above post would be a slightly more readable how_i_got_rid_of_mt_numbered_e.html.

It's easy enough to just change a setting in Movable Type and rebuild the site using new name styles, but I also didn't want to break links people (including myself) have made to old entires. There's a oft-linked solution to embed the old entry names in the entry basename, so that old entries would keep their numbered names through rebuilds and new entries would get new names. But there are two problems with this: 1) I don't want the old entries to stay ugly -- I want those numbered names to be gone, daddy, gone and 2) I understand that there limitations (bugs, even) in how MT handles customized entry basenames. What to do? htaccess! An htaccess file can (among other things) tell a webserver to redirect one filename to another and I could a similar technique to the name-remapping solution linked above to automatically generate (most of) an htaccess file.

Order is somewhat important here, so here's the steps I went through:

1. Backup your Movable Type database. Always, always backup before you do any big changes. Backup all the time, anyway.

2. I made a new index template called "redirect" (I could have named it "htaccess", but I wanted to have to manually rename it when I was ready to put it into place, to have that degree of control).

That template contained the following:

<MTEntries lastn="99999"$>
Redirect 301 /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="6">.html http://example.com/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1">/<$MTEntryBasename$>.html
</MTEntries>

(The middle part from "Redirect" to the second ".html" should be one long line, with no line break.)

To break this down, <MTEntries lastn="99999"$> says "do this for the last 99,999 entries". (If you have more entries than that, you'll need to adjust. Also, hats off to you.) Redirect means redirect any request for the listed file to the listed URL. 301 is a code that tells the requesting browser that this is a permanent change (302 is temporary) and search engines and well-behaved web services will update their databases, bookmarks, etc. /archives/<$MTEntryID pad="6">.html generates the current file name (the entryID, padded with zeros to make a 6 character string) (your file path may, of course, vary). http://example.com/<$MTEntryCategory dirify="1">/<$MTEntryBasename$>.html generates where the new file name is going to live. I'm switching to "primary_category/entry_basename.html", so your code may vary if you're switching to a different scheme.

3. Save and rebuild the template. Note where the file is generated.

4. Go to Settings >> Publishing and under Archive Mapping change the Individual Entry Archive to use your chosen naming scheme. Save changes. (If, like me, you're doing this because you've been using MT for a long time, you may want to go to Settings >> New Entry Defaults and change Basename Length up from the old default of 15 to the new default of 30.) Rebuild your site. Check that everything is working with the new naming scheme.

5. When you're sure everything is working, move/rename the redirect file to .htaccess (the leading dot is important). Don't replace any exisiting .htaccess file! The possible complexities of your local web setup are beyond the scope of this post. (Have I disclaimed enough?)

(I also changed my Category and Date-based Archive name schemes at the same time, but there were so relatively few of them that I just constructed the htaccess entries with some simple grepping in BBedit. I suppose it'd be possible to do something similar to the above for them as well, though.)

I've only made the change to the New Improv Page so far, and I'm going to pound on it for a few days to make sure there isn't anything I've missed before I change over FuzzyCo, but I thought this method was worth sharing.

Posted by Fuzzy at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)

Get Out and Vote

We've never discussed it, but I have the feeling that my brother-in-law^2* and I might be at rather different points on the political spectrum. But I agree wholeheartedly with his wise words about the upcoming election:

Next Tuesday, please go out and vote. But, before you do, make sure that you educate yourself about the candidates and their stances on the issues that are important to you. Visit the candidates' websites, read recaps of their debates, etc. Don't vote for someone based on public opinion or because they have a cool name. Vote for someone because you feel that they are the best candidate to make positive decisions that will affect your life, and the lives of those close to you.

*My wife's brother's wife's brother.

Posted by Fuzzy at 12:05 PM | Comments (0)

November 1, 2006

Vote Out Judges!

It's almost election day, and so time for me to harrange all my friends to a) vote and b) vote out some judges. In Cook County we get to vote whether to retain our judges, but it's a reasonably obscure process and there are a lot of judges (70, this year) and so it's very, very rare for a judge to be voted out. But there are a couple of really terrible judges on the ballot this year, so if you live in Cook County please check VoteForJudges.org, read my Metblog post on the subject, and vote No to Cynthia Brim, Robert Kowalski, and Amanda Toney. (Or just do what I do and stick it to The Man and vote No on all the judges.)

Posted by Fuzzy at 7:30 PM | Comments (0)