Not at all a normal Seattle forecast, but this hasn’t exactly been a normal Seattle November, either. Kinda fun to see what might happen as the week goes by!
Black Friday Morn
Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving day!
A piece of advice: if you can manage it, don’t be so foolish as to work retail on the day after Thanksgiving. This year, the Northgate Mall gave its tenant stores the choice of opening at either 5:00am or 6:00am. My manager was kind enough to choose the 6:00am opening time…but that still means I have to be there at about 5:30am.
So now, here I am at five in the morning, trying to shake off a turkey coma so I can go deal with the craziest of the Black Friday shoppers.
Ick.
I will never be convinced that anyone has to be shopping at this hour of the morning. They’re all flat-out insane.
Storm Season
Wow — in the past few minutes, there have been three thunderclaps loud enough to rattle the windows (and the sound rolls on for at least a good ten seconds each time), and now we’ve got hail pelting down like crazy, plus the wind and rain that you can expect for a storm like this.
Make that four thunderclaps.
And I’ve got to walk to work in about half an hour. Ick.
Hooray for winter!
Update: I just pulled this image from KOMO News:
Neat!
Teen Repellent
I’d heard some time ago about the teen repellent noise — an ultrasonic tone that teens can hear, but adults can’t due to natural hearing loss as people age, that gets annoying enough to drive teens away.
It was named the ‘Mosquito’ because the sound resembles that of a buzzing insect. And it works by emitting a harmless ultra sonic tone that generally can only be heard by people aged 25 and under. In trials, it has proven that the longer someone is exposed to the sound, the more annoying it becomes.
Crime Reduction Officer Bob Walton elaborated further: “Effectively, it’s a transmitter which sends out a specialised frequency noise which according to the manufacture is particularly audible to young people under the age of 25.
He said: “I’m in my fifties and when it’s turned on all I can hear is a very faint buzz. But I understand from young people who have been exposed to the noise, it is very annoying.”
Amusingly, not long after this started being used, the concept was appropriated and adapted by teenagers for use as a cellphone ring tone that they could hear but that their parents or teachers could not. Clever kids!
Here’s a site that has a selection of a few different ring tones at various frequencies, from 8 kHz up to 22.4 kHz, so you can test your own hearing abilities and see if you’d be able to hear (or be annoyed by) the tones.
My results:
| You are a dog |
|
Or maybe you are a mosquito, you certainly can’t be human. The highest pitched ultrasonic mosquito ringtone that I can hear is 21.1kHz |
| Find out which ringtones you can hear! |
Header Images
I’d like to get further into customizing my site later on down the line, but for the moment, I think most of my tweaks will be pretty simple. I have had fun grabbing a selection of images to use for the randomized header image at the top of the page, however. Theoretically, you should see a different image each time the page is loaded.
More may be added to this as time goes by, but for now, here’s a rundown of what you might see (unless you’d prefer to be surprised, in which case, ignore what follows…):
Pop Culture Disconnect
This week in my History 101 class (covering everything up to 1500), we’re looking at Ghengis Khan, Kublai Khan, and the Mongols. The professor spent a few minutes talking about the Mongol’s invasion techniques, which were simple but could be fairly ruthless: if armies surrendered they’d be treated fairly well; if they fought, they’d often be razed to the ground and completely destroyed. After summarizing this, he commented, “really, they were pretty close to the Borg.”
I chuckled, and there was a moment of quiet while he took a sip of his tea. Then one of the girls in the class slightly timidly asked, “…what’s ‘the borg’?”
Sigh. I’m getting old.
Back already!
Well now, that didn’t take long!
As you can see, I’m back…mostly. I haven’t uploaded my old graphics/ directories yet, so many of my old (pre-Flickr) entries will be showing lots of broken images until I get all that taken care of. The most important part, however — getting the words transferred over — has been accomplished. Yay me!
Next steps include getting the images reloaded, taking care of dad’s site, and pfutzing around with the theme so I have something other than the default WordPress themeage going on.
Off and running like a herd of turtles…
Lockdown
Seeing as I haven’t been writing a whole lot lately, this seems as good a time as any to declare this site on temporary hiatus while I transfer over to the new webhost.
I’ll be turning off comments while I pfutz around with things, and there will likely be some (hopefully small) amount of time where things essentially cease to exist before I get everything transferred over.
Be back soon(ish)…
Vogue No More
There’ve been rumors about this for a few weeks now, and apparently there’s truth to them after all:
The cat is now out of the bag among the goth community now so it might as well get put out there to the general public. Facts: 1) The Vogue is closing at the end of the year. 2) The new club will be called Blacklight and will be in the upper level of the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) and opening in the second half of January.
All things change…now I’ll have to figure out where the CHAC is…oh, okay, almost a whole block and a half away from the current location. I can cope with that.
Jumping Ship?
So…
…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?
So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags‘ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.
Anything else?
“What Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).