I’m stiiiil tweaking around with the design here. Thank jebus for the Internet, for how would I ever waste time without it???

This time I’ve found a new design that I like even more than the Coffee Cup one, with the added bonus that you can actually fit graphics and content on the page together at the same time simultaneously so that people like Carol who use medium resolution settings can actually read my witticisms without giving the scroll bar a workout. I think you’re really going to like it, it looks really, really great.

But, um, it’s not working right now. Here, at least. It’s working great on my test site, but not so much over here. Sigh.

I think I know what’s wrong with it but since I don’t know jack about javascript I can’t fix it. So I’ve sent an email to the person who ported this to WordPress and I’m hoping to hear back with an easy solution. Keep your fingers crossed.

In the meantime I’m going to leave this up even though the graphics aren’t loading right. I like the three column layout well enough to deal with the issues I’m having with the graphics and javascript not loading.

Once I get those ironed out, then I’ll start battling the other issues I’m having with it even on the test site where it’s running right. It looks great in Mozilla-based browsers (Firefox and Opera, at least), but IE chokes on the right sidebar and pushes it down to the bottom of the left column sometimes. But maybe I’ll leave that part broken as an example of why Firefox beats the pants off IE: view the site with both and pick the winner!

But for now… Well, for now it’s 3 a.m. and I ain’t gonna be fixin’ nothin’ more tonight. So goodnight, Irene.

I just checked my hit counter a little while ago and I thought it was broken. Hits are through the roof right now, 300+ today and growing. (Okay, that’s not that much, but it’s through the roof for me.) Where are all these hits coming from? MSN again. Of course. I can’t get hits from a decent search engine, no, I have to get slimed by MSN.

So what the heck, I’ll do a little Public Service Announcement. Attention MSN searchers: Google. ’nuff said.

But what are all these MSN-heads looking for? Is it “women fucking cats,” like back in March when I was “Number One With MSN“? No. Is it “better sex ever,” like back in February when I was number nine over there? Sadly, again, no.

No, this time they’re looking for pictures of the baptism of David Arquette and Courteney Cox Arquette’s kid. I wrote a few days ago about how some private pictures of it are getting emailed all over the place and that I’d gotten a copy of them. I said that I was going to break the chain and not forward them to anyone else.

But, hell, now I’m getting all this traffic from people looking for the pictures. And I have the pictures. So I thought maybe I’d post them after all. Because, you know, I have them and if I show them to you maybe you’ll think I’m cool, maybe some of that celebrity pixie dust will rub off on me and I’ll be fabulous too.

So fine, here you go, here are the pics. And as you’re clicking these links to look at them you should keep in mind that you’re prying into a private family event, that the family is upset that these pictures are out there, and that you probably wouldn’t like it if it were your kid’s baptism pictures getting sent all over the internet by strangers to strangers just because they’ve seen you on TV. You should consider that clicking on these links might make you feel just a little bit small. And that it should.

But don’t mind me. Enjoy.

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I finally — finally — have a captcha working on my comments to block spam. Thank God. I’m not thankful because I needed it, I’m thankful because now I can stop working on it.

This has been a huge time-sucking headache that has been pissing me off for weeks. I first tried to set one up a month or two ago in the Movable Type version of this blog and didn’t have much luck. I never could get it to work right and I ended up screwing up the formatting of my search results and category templates so badly that you could hardly read the text in them. My hosting tech support wasn’t much help, Movable Type’s support forum wasn’t much help, Karl tried to help but didn’t get much further than I did, etc. I finally gave up, took it out, and kind of made myself forget about the formatting problems.

Then a week or two back I had an attack of the stupids and tried again, and again got nowhere. Again, my hosting company’s tech support was zero help — emphatically no help, I should mention — and again I gave up. And the formatting issue starting pissing me off again and I stumbled across a WordPress design I quite liked (this one, “Coffee Cup”) and I suddenly didn’t like my old design anymore. So I switched blog engines — all because of a captcha.

So now I’m on WordPress and I find that I’m getting a ton less comment spam than I was on Movable Type. I dunno why, I haven’t even gotten around to instituting a blacklist or any spam prevention measures at all, really. I’m just not getting spammed now. (Not that I’m complaining.) So it’s not like I really need a captcha, but … dang, I think they’re cool. I still want one.

So I went out and found a few WordPress captcha plug-ins and I installed them. And I could. not. make. them. work.

Pissed. Me. Off.

Again, my host’s tech support was no help. One of their forum moderators put some time in helping out but he eventually just … stopped. Never told me he was giving up or that it just wouldn’t work on their servers or anything, he just … stopped. Which was slightly frustrating. So I gave up again.

And then there was Stan. (As Beth would say, “Cue angel music: Laaaaaaaaaaaaa!”)

He wrote a captcha for his own blog and he sent me the code to it use here. And of course I couldn’t get it running either. But Stan stepped up and over the course of the last three days he helped tweak and tweak and tweak through email until it worked. And now I have a captcha! Yay! Check it out, kids, give it a whirl, post a bunch of comments about how cool and fabulous it is.

So I’m sending a big shout-out to my man Stan. Thank you very much for getting me up and running with this. Spammers the world over hate you now for inoculating the Lunchroom against them. Well, okay, maybe they don’t, this is such a small site that they probably didn’t even notice, but if they did want to spam here specifically and did notice and did gnash their teeth in frustration, well, they’d be really pissed.

But whatever. Stan, you da man!

When it comes to crastinating, I’m a professional. Whoever came up with the adage “never do today what you can put off ’til tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow” must have had me in mind. I’ve always been this way — tests in school, writing deadlines, projects around the house; I wait ’til the last minute on all of them.

And I’m doing it now. I’m teaching my first class tomorrow for my new training job. It’s a Word 2000 Level 1 class, so it should be pretty easy, but the thing is that I haven’t actually trained in a classroom situation for something like two years. I’m so rusty you can see flakes of, um, rustiness falling off me. I really need to prep for this class to make sure I’m comfortable tomorrow. Prepping has been on my mind for the last several days.

So of course rather than prepping, I’m monkeying around with this website. And I’m sending out resumes for a better job. And I’m reading journals. And I’m folding laundry. And I’m writing entries about procrastination. I’m doing everything I can think of to avoid doing something that’s only going to help me. I do the same thing when I want to work on my script: I avoid that which I feel is most important.

I have no idea why I do this. I hate it.

Dateline: The Internets – Courteney Cox Arquette and husband David are so mad, they could scream. Or, at the very least, sue someone.

Sent Friday, the fast-spreading email reportedly had a subject line of “FW: Friends in town” and contained pictures of Aniston, Cox Arquette, Arquette, baby Coco and various other friends and family members. The text read: “Jeff, Here are some pic’s [sic] of that Christening that I went to, that I was telling you about…”

…And now I’ve received this email.

Yep, pictures are in there. David, Courteney, Jennifer, Coco, various family members. Yep, looks like Aniston started it (but I’m sure that was spoofed). Loooooots of email addresses in there from all the forwarding, too, no doubt some of people who would rather not have their email spread all over the internets. I guess I’m supposed to send it to all my friends now, too.

Nope. Not gonna do it. Like I’ve said previously, I don’t do chain letters. Besides, it’s private family stuff, it’s none of (y)our damned business.

Delete.

Chain broken.

Have you seen Stevie Wonder’s house?

No.

Well, it’s really nice.

(From Something Awful by way of a small victory.)

…same as the old site.

We’ve got a new look going on here, obviously. It’s the same old content but with a shiny new wrapper. Me likey.

When last we spoke, I was in the throes of battling with a Movable Type comment plug-in that A) I couldn’t get working right and B) didn’t work right so badly that comments didn’t work at all so that C) I ended up wasting pretty much all of last night and all of today and most of tonight giving up on it. I was having “issues” with my Movable Type installation to begin with and this was its death knell. Ding dong, the software that made me bitch is dead. I’m on WordPress now, and so far so good.

And now… Now I’m getting the hell away from the computer. I need a break!

Comment spam is the scourge of blogging. I don’t exactly have a thriving community going here, so it’s not like turning comments off would make or break the Lunchroom — hell, half of the six or seven of you who actually read me probably wouldn’t even notice. But that would mean “they” won. I don’t like it when assholes win. So I have kept my comments turned on and battled the scumbags by using the Movable Type’ Blacklist plug-in.

Blacklist works pretty well at blocking the spam — from your end. You don’t see it because it doesn’t get published. But it does get logged on my end, behind the scenes. I get dozens of notifications daily of spam comments posted here that require moderation to publish — or delete. Most of your comments, the ones I want to see, publish automatically without my help; it’s the spam that Blacklist is cutting off at the pass, as it should. But it irks me to know I’ve got all these spam comments queued up behind the scenes and pending, waiting for my approval or deletion. I could just leave them that way and nobody would be the wiser but me. But because I’m anal about it, I go in daily and delete all those pending spam comments and add them to the Blacklist so they’ll get blocked next time.

Which is all fine and good. But. I’m getting tired of having to take out the trash every day. I have Beth ragging on me to do that here at the house, I don’t need it online too. I don’t want the trash here in the first place. Blacklist can muzzle it, but it isn’t keeping it out as antiseptically as I want.

Fortunately, I’ve found a solution: the Scode captcha plug-in. It looks pretty sweet. It sounds like it does exactly what I want. Me likey.

Unfortunately, I can’t get the fucking thing working. I tried installing it a few months ago and gave up after wasting something like 10 hours on it with no success other than fucking up the layout of my category archives and search result archives — a problem I still haven’t been able to fix.

This time around I’m at about three hours of working on it right now and I’m giving up early. The only success I’ve had this time is that I’ve succeeded in fucking up the comments both here and in Beth’s blog and they’re broken now so you can’t comment. Which I’m just fucking thrilled about, let me tell you.

So as it stands now, the spammers are winning, because my comments are now closed (by way of breakage) because I wanted them open. One step up, two steps back.

Pisses. Me. Off.

I’ll keep working on it later, but for now I’m just too fed up with it to continue. If any of you gurus out there have any ideas or can point me to someone who does, well feel free to fire away. Through email. Because, you know, my fucking comments are fucking broken.

Until then: No comments.

There’s another meme floating around out there, polluting the blogosphere. This time it’s “the literary meme.” This one was obviously spawned by a chain letter because you’re supposed to pass it on to three more victims people, who will in turn inflict it on pass it to three more, and so on and so on. With viral marketing like that we’ll be seeing this stupid thing for years.

I hate chain letters. Everyone in my family has already died a thousand painful deaths and my dog has had malformed kittens from me breaking them. The best way to break a chain letter is to send it to me, because I’ll send that shit straight to the trashcan. And now they’ve gone blogomemematic. Well, I’d be breaking this one too except it was Beth who stuck me with it and I want to make her happy. (Jim stuck it to me too, but he got to see U2 and I didn’t so fuck him twice already. And all you other fuckers who were at the Staples Center last Wednesday seeing U2 with Jim, fuck you bastards too.) So fine, I’ll answer the stupid thing. But I won’t like it.

You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book would you want to be?

Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women by Ricky Jay. Because Ricky Jay is The Cool (You’ve seen him as an actor, but I’ll bet you didn’t know he was a writer and card magician too, did you?) and while I like my women ssssssmokin’ hot, I don’t like them to be actually in flames.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

Yes. When I was about six years old I had it bad for Sabrina the Teenage Witch (the cartoon one, not that Melissa Joan Hart skag). I used to kiss her on the TV screen whenever she was on.

Yeah, I had lame game with women even then.

The last book you bought is:

I bought four in preparation for my Mexican vacation: 102 Minutes, Million Dollar Baby, Sahara, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The last book you read:

Sahara. I couldn’t stop complaining to Beth about how painful some of it was. Exposition out the wazoo and “aquiline eyes” and “aquamarine nose”s everywhere. And deus ex machina like I’ve never seen it before. But, um, I saw the movie yesterday, so I don’t have much room to complain, I guess.

What are you currently reading?

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And I’ll be seeing the movie as soon as it comes out too.

Five books you would take on a desert island:

1. 101 Ways to Convince Charlize Theron to Go To A Desert Island With You And Make Sweet Sweet Monkey Love All Day Every Day

And if that didn’t work, then:

2. How To Build a Boat With Coconut Husks and Palm Fronds Using Just Your Bare Hands.
3. Sail-Making For Dummies.
4. Sailing For Dummies.
5. Celestial Navigation for Dummies.

What book are you ashamed to admit that you haven’t read?

The Christmas Shoes. There’s a story behind it. (And in it too, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve never read it.)

At my old job they always made us do time-wasting “team building exercises” in the week leading up to our Christmas Party Annual Holiday Gathering, and during one of these sessions my manager Tracy played the Christmas Shoes song for my team, telling us that she really liked it and she thought we would too. She had obviously lost her mind and forgotten that I was in the room and that there were two other guys in there with me who think like I do.

The lyrics:

It was almost Christmas time, there I stood in another line
Tryin’ to buy that last gift or two, not really in the Christmas mood
Standing right in front of me was a little boy waiting anxiously
Pacing ’round like little boys do
And in his hands he held a pair of shoes

Repeat Chorus

Now, if this song touched your heart as much as it touched Tracy’s, then I apologize for this story. But as this song played in that conference room and it got sappier and sappier, we started snickering. And when it got to the line “…when Mama meets Jesus tonight” I muttered something about how the kid should save his money because “Mom doesn’t need any damned shoes — she’s dead already!” That pushed us over the edge. We couldn’t hold it any longer and we burst out laughing like loons. Everyone in the room was laughing, not just me and Joe and Sal. And “When Mama meets Jesus tonight” became code for the rest of the week for when management made us do something stupid, and it always generated gales of laughter.

Tracy took it in stride and wasn’t offended. In fact, she gave me a copy of the book for Christmas the following year as a way of getting me back. I never read it, instead I posted it prominently in my cubicle for her to see whenever she was in town. And at the end, when we were all laid off, I gave it back to Tracy as a goodbye present.

Because I didn’t want the stupid thing at my house.

Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 people) and why?

Nobody. Because I’m a dick.

Way down here you need a reason to move
Feel a fool running your stateside games
Lose your load, leave your mind behind, Baby James

Oh, Mexico
I never really been but I’d sure like to go
Oh, Mexico
I guess I’ll have to go now

We’re on the road and headed south of the border. We’re staying at the LAX Hilton tonight (free, thankyewverymuch, thanks to all the frequent flier points I socked away when I was traveling for work) so we won’t have to fight rush hour traffic in the morning to make our 7:45 a.m. flight tomorrow. We’ll be soaking up the sun in Mazatlan 15 hours from now with nothing on our agenda for the next 10 days but sleeping, snorkeling and siestas.

And now… As a courtesy to my spammer friends — because I don’t want them to waste their time trying to waste my time by spamming my comments with stuff I won’t be here to delete — I’m closing the comments here and at Beth’s blog until we get back next Monday.

¡Adios, amigos, estamos el vacaciones!