Rumors were that Apple and Wal*Mart were… let’s just say they weren’t getting along. A bit chilly, their relationship. Well can you blame Wal*Mart for being upset that Apple has the music world on fire… and now too the movie industry — downloading and listening/watching with iTunes is so much better than anything that even remotely involves even driving into the Wal*Mart parking lot!

But rumors are just that, right? And Mac Rumors reports that Apple and Wal*Mart are working together! Yay! Maybe I’ll be able to buy my new MacBook Pro at Wal::cough::Mart!

Well then I get this little tidbit from Wal*Mart’s affiliate program. I hope I’m not violating any confidences here. After all, I take my privacy policy very seriously and I am committed to protecting Wal*Mart’s privacy. Anyway, the thing is that you can now pre-order Microsoft’s new Zune at Wal*Mart’s web store. And here’s what their message said about that:

This is the new iPod killer from Microsoft - and now your customers can pre-order it at Walmart.com!

Yes, that’s right. And signed Sincerely,

The Walmart.com Affiliate Team

Hmm… very interesting, doncha think? Now if I were buying a music device, I would buy nothing but the iPod. But that’s just my two cents.

A brand new web host and my 29th TT and I was all excited and I was going to get around to visiting…

::ring::ring::

And then my day went to hell. To make a long story short, I had to dig up a goat, go to the vet’s house so he could… OK, maybe I shouldn’t tell the whole gruesome story. Let’s just say that I left the vet’s house and drove to the state lab so poor Bambi could be tested for rabies.

Yeah, that’s right.

Because if she had it, Wifey was more than a little concerned that she’d been exposed to it. And since none of the lab work had come back yet with any reason why she (the goat) had gotten so sick… Well, we just didn’t want to mess around.

So late in the afternoon, Bambi was re-buried, minus what we left at the state lab.

The good news is that the rabies test has come back and she did not have it. It was negative. Which is positive very, very good news!

And once I get caught up on everything else I didn’t get done yesterday (work work work)… then I’ll get around to visiting my fellow thirteeners.

1. I’ve moved my blog! If you can read this, you’re in the right place.
2. I’m testing the new Mister Linky for WordPress Plugin. Check it out! Leave your link!
3. Wifey and I celebrated our anniversary the other day in Boston and visited the Museum of Fine Arts.
4. Domains of Wonder is fantastic and you can see it for another couple of months. It’s Beautiful and very, very interesting!
5. It’s really feeling like fall outside, and that’s my favorite season of all!
6. I even got to  wear a sweater the other day for a couple of hours!
7. Did you notice anything different about my banner? (Go ahead and look closely.)
8. I’ve decided to give up the new-and-improved Uisce, so I’m my old self again.
9. No, I don’t know what that means, either.
10. My phone just rang it was a wrong number and the person refused to tell me what number she was trying to reach. I hate that!!
11. But then again, I detest telephones in general. I think they are my least favorite thing.
12. That and flies.
13. And hatred, I hate that most of all.

If you can read this… I guess you’ve arrived!! Welcome!!

This will be my last post on Blogger. No, I’m no quitting again… that’s getting kind of old, don’t you think? And this whole new-and-improved-Uisce, too. He’s so fucking boring!

So I’m moving to WordPress and here’s my new address: http://www.whiskeytalking.com/uisce/. Should be pretty easy to remember, no? But please update your blogrolls and bookmarks and all that, because that will just make life better for everybody! :)

Now… for the benefit of the masses who have already begun and will no doubt continue flocking along with me to WordPress, I’ve jotted down a few notes along the way.

Step 1 was to convert my template. You really need to know what you’re doing, there’s no question about it. So kids, don’t try this at home. I don’t want to speak for any of the professionals, but I’ll bet they’re willing to take your money and help you with this or any of the conversion steps. And sure, I do consulting for cash, but I’ve got someone far more qualified in mind for this particular kind of work.

Once my template was ready, step 2 was to import my Blogger posts. And you’ll notice once you arrive at my new home that I pulled in my old Whiskey Talking posts as well as the new ones. I’m actually thinking about pulling in some old content from my previous blog, the one that only some of you know about, and there’s exactly one of you who has been to my old blog but doesn’t know we’re the same person.

Anyway, about the import. I had no trouble at all using the import-from-Blogger feature of WordPress, except that it left out a great deal of content from many of the posts. So here’s how I dealt with that…

2a. Go to each of your Blogger monthly archives (yes, switch to monthly archives if you don’t already have them) and save them to your hard drive.

2b. After you’ve imported, you’ll have monthly archives in WordPress, too. Save each of those to your hard drive. Wait, make sure that you set your reading options to allow 999 posts at a time, so each monthly archive has every post for the month!!

2c. Go through each set of archives and compare them side by side, bit by bit. If you don’t have a tool for doing this, it’s going to be really hard, and I use a certain text editor called Emacs that was designed for programmers and I don’t really recommend for the masses.

2d. As you’re going through you’ll find that any javascript in your Blogger posts was not carried over, not just the script tags but any onclick/onmouseover/onmouseout attributes and even “javascript:” found inside of href attributes! Keep on the lookout for these. You’ll need to edit the WordPress posts and move these by hand.

2e. Anchor tags seem to have targets removed. If you know what I’m talking about, you may want to add some JavaScript to your footer that adds targets to all of your anchors dynamically after the page has loaded.

2f. You have to move your images. Each reference to photos*.blogger.com will need to change… by which I mean that every picture you’ve uploaded to Blogger needs to move, probably to the same host where you’re running WordPress.

2g. Your image tags were probably altered by the import, so if you want them centered or right-justified, for example, you’ll need to alter that formatting for each one. Yes, it’s tedious, but remember, you’ve got to change the URL anyway, so why not do it all in one pass. (And note to self, move stuff off of flickr.)

2h. If you’re using Mister Linky’s widgets, all of your data can follow you to your new blog. If you’ve used the standard Auto-Linkies you created your own post ID’s (or the Widget Wizard did it for you) and you can keep using them. Note, of course, that this is JavaScript and so they had to be migrated from Blogger to WordPress by hand. If you used Ever-Linkies or Comment-Linkies your post ID’s were generated automatically by Blogger. This is a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. It’s bad because you’ve got one whole set of ID’s in Blogger and another whole set of ID’s in WordPress, but it’s good because Mister Linky will perform this conversion step for you. All you need to do is send him all of those Blogger and WordPress monthly archives and he’ll prepare a script that converts from Blogger ID’s to WordPress ID’s once you’re ready to continue. Be sure to contact Mister Linky before you generate your archives, so he can make sure they’re in the correct format, with all of the ID’s, etc. The other good news is that since the JavaScript was in your templates, you didn’t have to fret over the fact that the importer threw away your JavaScript, which you probably didn’t have any of.

Step 3, relax and have a tall glass of… I dunno, how ’bout a whiskey? After all that work, you’ll probably need something even stronger, but my prescription pad has run out of tickets.

You won’t be able to comment on this post, so if you’ve got something to say, come on over to the new place… I’ll be waiting for you!

\_/ Uisce

Last year during National Novel Writing Month, I actually wrote a novel. No, you can’t read it. It sucks.

But don’t worry, the next one will be better. But it’s not going to happen this year.

As you might imagine it takes quite a lot of time, if not effort, to put 50,000 words on paper… or in my case, into my laptop. And this year I just don’t have the time.

I do have a really great idea for another novel, and this time I’ll aim for a more respectable word count of 90K-100K. But I’ve got to keep myself from ruining it by trying to jam it into a NaNoWriMo.

I’m just glad the idea for last year’s novel sucked, so it was really no great loss.

Don’t get me wrong. NaNoWriMo is a really great opportunity to force yourself to write that novel you’ve got kicking around inside your head, because if you don’t just do it, you never will. And maybe you’ll even love the process so much that you’ll want to do it for real some day. And once you’ve got one under your belt, I figure it can’t be that hard to pick up the pen and start the second one, right?

But not this year, not for me. If you see me discussing any kind of inkling or possibility that I might participate this year, please just slap my little nose with a rolled up newspaper and tell me, “NO!”

Every time I dig a hole, it seems, the rains come and fill it with heaven’s tears.

When you live in The Granite State you don’t take digging holes lightly. Wooden fence posts, only when necessary. Most of the time we just pound in one of those steel posts and they seem to have a way of finding the nearest buried rock on at least the first and second attempts.

But when a loved one is lost, one just does what one has to do. Removing the turf, preferably in one piece, is the first step. Cold winter nights will be coming soon. All that I can offer to my departed friend is a small blanket of grass. It’s the least that I can do.

Grass, how she loved the grass. It’s been a month or so since we opened up that new section of goat pasture. It didn’t take long before she and the rest of her herd discovered the vast buffet of delights. There were five of them: three from the previous generation and one daughter each from two of the older does. The kids were just like their moms: one tough and independent, one sweet and affectionate.

And why is it, only the good die young? She was the last to be born and the first to be fallen in love with. Smaller than any of the others, a high-pitched “maa maa” when she spoke. And she looked just like Bambi. I know, it’s a boy’s name, and a deer’s name at that, but that was my nickname for her.

It’s a sad day here on the farm, and the afternoon’s forecast is for rain. The heavens weep as nature calls back her little goatie friend.

My dear friend MysteriousLady has this really neat awards party going on and this is what I’ll be wearing:

So head on over to the party and cast your vote… but remember, I had nothing at all to do with anything beautiful that you see here. So vote with confidence. Vote for Leanne!!

1. I’ve been working on a very special project.
2. With any luck it will be ready to test later today.
3. Hint #1: I won’t be testing it here.
4. Hint #2: it’s just for WordPress blogs.
5. OK… yes, I actually wrote a plug-in!!
6. That’s all I’m saying about it. :)
7. Visit my alter ego this afternoon if you want to know more.
8. And it definitely won’t be available for download until I’ve tested it for a few days.
9: I’m funny like that.
10: I also did a cool new design on Café Press.
11: I can’t mention it here because my RL friends might google it and find me out.
12: They’re all going to a comedy show and wearing shirts with my design.
13: I mean like in public — how cool is that?!

Update: It turns out that this is my 28th Thursday Thirteen, and… can you believe it? I’m actually going to start keeping track of them!!

As Killired pointed out, I’ve been remiss in posting, and I’ll just blame it on her and say that I was waiting for her to comment on my previous post! :P

Truth is, I’ve just been too busy. Busy, too much to do in very limited time. Time, limited from lack of sleep. Sleep, interrupted by cats and dogs.

Tom and Jerry. Don’t ask me which one was the cat and which one was the… oh wait, wasn’t one of them a mouse? Which one has the dog? There’s Sylvester and Tweety… but no, one of those is some kind of chicken, right?

You see, it’s all about the fucking cat. And so is this. I wrote eons ago about how the cat takes up the whole bed. Sometimes she’ll sleep on top of Wifey and sometimes she’ll sleep right between us. We won’t even go there, but yeah, it’s a little awkward to have a feline chaperone in bed. The biggest problem I wrote about back then was that standard sheets and blankets were not really designed for the cat-in-the-middle situation. There ends up being no cover for me because they go over Wifey and then under Kitty and then they run out.

I think Wifey did go out and buy a king-sized top-sheet and maybe even a blanket but that’s only part solution and only part of the problem. Here’s the rest of the problem. I can choose to disturb Kitty if I want some covers. And what happens next? She jumps. Might scratch Wifey in the process, and that’s bad enough. And lands on the floor. And scurries off. And scurries by… You guessed it, she scurries right by Mr. Puppy’s crate.

And he starts barking and Ms. Doggy starts barking and Kitty runs under the bed… but it’s too late, there’s too much commotion and it’s still building on itself and we’re woken up by it.

I have no solution. I’m not willing to shoot the cat, though that would tend to deal with the matter quite nicely… No, I’m not doing that. I’ve thought seriously about putting up some kind of barrier so that Mr. Puppy doesn’t see Kitty when she scurries by… I don’t know, will that really work? And then he wouldn’t have such a good view out of his crate anymore. We could shut Kitty out of our room, but then she might be lonely, and night time is the only time she gets to spend with her peeps because she’s afraid to go downstairs during the day when the dogs are out.

So help me out. What to do? Not that I really think there’s anything to be done. How do you keep the cats and dogs from acting like… like cats and dogs?

I’d like to take this opportunity to warn the public about a matter of utmost importance.

And why would I do such a thing? I’m not really sure, since I really don’t like people. But the thing is, I like you people just fine. It’s the real-life people that get on every one of my nerves.

Take yesterday evening, for example. I was at a meeting and this women brought her dog. The dog kept hopping his little paws up on my leg and poking at me with his little nose. Now this wasn’t so bad, because I love dogs. But what was this woman thinking? You don’t bring your dog to a meeting and let him bother people. Honestly, leave the dog and get the hell out of here, lady. The dog can stay.

But I digress. The important issue is regarding soap. I keep a bar of soap at work, in case I need to take a shower. No, my job is not so sweat-inducing that this occurs very often. It just happens that in the summer we go out and play softball once a week, and there you go. And I keep the soap in a very special soap container. But what if I run out? Aha, that’s precisely why there is a spare bar of soap in my filing cabinet.

And here’s the problem. Would you like to know what else is in my filing cabinet? Cookies. They’re like Oreos but they’re vanilla. I hate chocolate, as you all know. Anyway, these cookies have been hermetically sealed inside of a somewhat heavy-duty Zipper-style bag for weeks and weeks. I know, people are shocked that I don’t eat the whole thing of cookies, but the truth is, I just don’t have much of a sweet tooth.

Anyway, would you like to know what these sealed cookies now taste like? If you guessed soap, you’re oh so smart, and you’re right! Eewww, I said. Of course, I ate two of them, because I was drinking some tea, and I wanted a couple of cookies to go with it, and I guess I didn’t really care all that much that my cookies tasted like soap.

But you all — I care about you all!! And that’s why I’m here to tell you, keep your soapy products away from the food. Just because you have a plastic bag doesn’t mean the soap is going to keep its soapiness to itself. And there you go. You’ve all been warned! :)

1. Who am I and what have I done with Uisce? I know, I know.
2. Ann Richards, former Governor of Texas and famed Democratic convention speaker has died at age 73.
3. Wifey and I went to a wake last night for a friend who died the other day.
4. Death is just such a total bummer, I think.
5. My new phone is even cheaper now, isn’t that always the way?
6. I’m still pretty much laptop-less, waiting for Apple to release the MacBook Pro with a faster processor.
7. I bought a couple of hard drives and I’m going to upgrade my DVR this weekend.
8. It’s called MythTV and it’s a great do-it-yourself project for computer geeks.
9. If you know what a Tivo is, that’s what I’m talking about.
10. Why do you have that puzzled look on your face?
11. I really didn’t expect this list to be so techie… but hey, that’s me!
12. I almost wrote fifteen things, I’m so out of practice at this!! :)
13. I’m Uisce and I approved this message.

You people know how I am, I’m all about clever slogans… so how about this one…

I’ve got a message for all you morons out there that think you’re going to save a few minutes of commuting by running that light that is clearly red.

Here’s my plan, and it’s going to require the cooperation of every licensed driver in America, so spread the word. Whenever you see someone running a red light, honk your horn. And honk it loud.

Not only will this alert anyone who has a green light that their life is potentially in great imminent peril, it will also let the red-light-running know that he or she is an asshole and doesn’t deserve to live. And hey, maybe it will scare them straight, or even scare them into a telephone poll.

I’m totally serious about this. If we can save just one life, or soil the pants of just one bad driver, it will all be well worth it.