November 05, 2007
Hoping for Nine Golden Lives
I'm finishing up some final tasks on my laptop as I lie in bed. One of my cats is resting his head on my shoulder. This is a new thing for him, its about two weeks old or so.
My boys, as I call the two cats who have been my companions for the past four years, never cease to amaze and amuse me. As much as I complain about them being attention hogs, cuddle whores, and noisy creatures, I don't know what I'd do without them.
The potential of losing them scares the shit out of me. It is one of those things I try not to contemplate because it just brings out a raw fear of the unknown. All things considered, it is highly likely that they'll be with me for the next ten or more years, or tonight could be their last night with me. I just don't know.
I've lost pets before, but in all those cases they were "family" pets, where I was one of many humans with the relationship with the pet.
In this case I am the consistent human in my cats' lives. It is different somehow.
I had a friend who has an older cat who is suffering. She fears having to make the decision to put her cat down. I don't even want to contemplate being in that position, let alone the decision itself. My advise to her:
Compassion is doing what is right for someone else, even when it doesn't feel right for us.
I've been reexamining the golden rule, and trying to figure out if I live it daily. And I've discovered that I try to and want to, but it is harder than I thought to actually live it consistently.
Even with that said, I don't envy the situation of the pet owner who is faced with the decision to end a pet's suffering by ending his or her life.
It is hard to live the Golden Rule.
November 21, 2007
Teaching new tricks, or how not to write a novel
So in theory I've been participating in Nanowrimo again this year. So far I've put in enough words for one day of effort on a straight line average basis.
On the other hand I've gotten lots of other stuff done, so I consider this to be a success.
My largest accomplishment was a reworking of my blog templates. From a broad design standpoint nothing huge has changed. But I've made all sorts of little improvements. Including:
- Comment forms on static pages, so you can see the blog entry while you're commenting on it.
- Comment listings no longer direct to just a listing of the comments, but to the individual archive page, so you can see the entry and the comments on the same page.
- Yearly Directories. This was the most important part I think. My templates were last updated sometime in 2004, and at that point 18 months or so was a reasonable list. I'm upto thirty four months of blog entries. That just got to be a little insane to navigate, and often it the menubar was longer than the entry.
- Related links at the top. I reworked the sitewide template to allow a "topper" to be added to the menubar. The benefits of this is that the most likely to be accessed links are at the top of the page. No digging in below the search box.
- In general a better visual language for the menubar. I've broken it up with lines into their own boxes, so I can group links into more logical categories, instead of just having huge lists
- I've added an Atom 1.0 feed, and stopped linking to my RSS 1.0 and Atom 0.3 feeds. (They're both there since there is no pressing reason to remove them, you just have to have already linked to them.)
My next focus is going to be implementing some templates and tags to reduce the size of my HTML pages, as they're getting to be a bit big. (One HTML file is actually a whole megabyte on its own.. thats all text, no pictures!) After that I need to roll out my mailing list that I've had around more or less for a couple years, without advertising it..
Oh, yeah and all of this work is going ontop of Movable Type 2.64. Those of you who know blog software will think I'm crazy, but its like a VW Bug. It keeps going until you just decided to kill it. At the moment it does everything I need it to do. Sure I've stretched it with some plugins and some Server Side Include driven magic, but it keeps on trucking as a nice cornerstone to my website.
I'd replace it but I'm not inclined to rebuild everything.