I’m testing a new comment system on Metamusing. If you have a moment, pop your head into the comments and post something, and let me know if it works for you while you’re at it.

Thanks,

[update] That’s the end of that experiment. Disqus (the software I was testing) managed to delete lots of older comments. They were still present in the wordpress (software I use to run this site) database, but they were no longer present on the site’s pages. Once I deactivated Disqus, the comments came back. Thanks for helping test.

Check out this piece over on tuaw.com that gives a great little terminal command for OSX which puts a ‘recently used applications’ object on your dock. It takes two seconds to do and I’ve found it very handy.

… a couple of hours. This website will be offline starting somewhere after 3PM today, and won’t be back for at least a day or two. Wish me luck, it’s down to the wire, the uhaul folks still haven’t called. I’ll rant about that once I come back online.

So I’m in the midst of a move to Holyoke MA. The server that runs this website will need to move to its new home, and that home is getting its network updated to support all the additional equipment moving into it. Metamusing will see some downtime as a result, probably starting Thursday night. It’s possible the downtime will last for several days or even longer, depending on how things go at Susan’s house. It shouldn’t be as bad as when I moved to Saratoga several years ago, when I was down for about 3 weeks (thanks, Time Warner) but it could be over a week. In the meantime head on over to the wonderful metafilter, one of the sites that got me going with my own site, to feed your news of whatever jones.

Susan doesn’t think much of the green in the right column, and I have to say I agree with her, but I like some of the functionality of this theme, particularly the stuff happening in the right column, so I’m torn. I can also work on the color theme, but also I’m curious as to what folks think. Let me know in the comments and I’ll choose whether to switch back, find something else, or tinker with the photoshop templates to get a better color scheme going.

Susan was invited to be one of the subjects of a public art project on campus last fall that involved having her portrait sketched by an artist, then allowing any member of the campus community to doodle on the portrait. The finished works were then publicly displayed on the outsides of campus buildings and around campus for several months. For most of that time Susan’s portrait was hung inside the Mead art museum, but for a little while it was hung outside the building she works in. They’re beginning to take the portraits down, so we quickly snapped a shot the other day. Witness Susan of the giant and not so giant head:

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Kirsten pointed out in the comments that Susan looks like Queen Elizabeth in that picture, so here’s a higher resolution shot of the actual artwork:

Oh, there’s so many contexts where that would be useful. Unfortunately this post is only about one context, but it’s useful and you’ll love it nonetheless. The scenario: windows prompts you to update it and you dutifully do so, after which it tells you it needs to restart, but helpfully allows you to defer this until later. Great! Except it reminds you…every…goddamn…minute…with an annoying as fuck popup window. Ever shout at that thing? Turns out a little googling reveals how to shut that thing off for good. The cheatsheet, if you don’t want to clickthrough:

Start / Run / gpedit.msc / Local Computer Policy / Computer Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Update / Re-prompt for restart with scheduled installations