Elaine Smith Writes

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Tag Archives: Friday Find

TIALY!

Huh?

TIALY is an acronym my friend, Amy, and I use.  Amy had some wrist issues, once upon a time, and was using a dictation program to type.  If you’ve ever used a dictation program, you know that they are prone to errors.  This particular one, however, has entered our email and texting lexicon.  (I don’t mean the universal “our;” just Amy’s and mine.)

What Amy was trying to write was “This is hilarious.”

What the software heard was “This is a Larry, yes?”

It just struck us funny.  We laughed and laughed.  And then we decided that the comparative and superlative forms for conveying electronic amusement are:

LOL
ROFL
and…

TIALY!

None of which really has anything to do with this post, but I thought you needed to understand the headline.  And I don’t really have that much to say about this Friday’s Find, except that I find it hilarious.

It’s a term of art.  (‘Term of art’ is sort of the same thing as saying ‘technical terminology’ but, hey, we all know that I, for one, prefer art.)

It’s a term of art in the world of typesetting.

The term is CamelCase.

I don’t know why, but I find it highly amusing.  (Probably goes back to that old vaudeville tenet that K sounds are funny.*)

Anyway, if you haven’t encountered this term before it’s the term for what you see there—CamelCase —where there is a capital letter in the middle of a word.  Like ‘iPod’—a very famous example of CamelCase.

It’s called that because the capital in the middle reminded somebody of the hump on a camel’s back.

And because “camel” is funny.

TIALY!

A present for you

From me.

And whoever set this up, of course.

It’s just a little something of a Friday Find, in the spirit of the Tuesday Tip from a week ago.

I’ve heard from some friends in New Zealand, and it’s already Dec 21st there, so the Mayan Apocalypse seems to have passed us by.  Yet another of those oddly popular doomsday thingies that just didn’t pan out.

Of course, if you are still worried, still thinking maybe we haven’t quite made it through the 21st yet, this link is still appropriate.  Because, really, what else have you got to do?

Sit back.  Turn on your sound, if you aren’t at work.  And just do nothing for 2 minutes.

Go ahead.

Click on that link above.  Take a break.

We’ll all still be here when you get back.

Wasn’t that nice?  A little holiday from the holidays!

(Hang onto that link.  Life being what it is, I’m pretty sure it will come in handy often. )

Something wacky is happening

. . .in the Space-Time Continuum

I have fallen into a chasm that yawns between WordPress, FatCow and MailChimp.

Woe is me.

It’s Friday, and instead of bringing you a fantastic Friday Find–something useful or fun or inspiring–I am on a mission to discover, once and for all, why these blog posts don’t always email to my long-suffering subscribers.

Unfortunately, it seems to involve higher math.  Time zones.  UTC offsets.  Daylight Savings Time.  And, really, for a person who actually passed calculus classes, it is sad how bamboozled I am by time calculations.

Of course, it’s quite likely I’d be bamboozled by differential equations now.  To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I wasn’t then.  I’ve never really understood how I passed calculus. Although, I’m fairly certain it had a lot to do with one fabulous teacher, Miss Impagliazzo at Concord High School.

In the meantime, when I have to figure out times, I turn to one of the best inventions ever:  The Sun Clock which is a graphical representation of day and night and local times around  the world.  (If you want tables of local times, try the World Clock. )

But neither of those clocks seem to be helping me now.

All I know now is that my subscribers might have missed the squirrel post and/or the world in motion post, and MailChimp thinks it’s because the posts were published after the email was scheduled to go out.  But I think that the published time at which they are looking is UTC time and not Eastern Daylight Time, so they didn’t publish after the scheduled email time.

Except, you know, it’s like higher math–so I am not sure at all.  More research is indicated.

For those of you who don’t know, UTC stands for Coordinated Universal Time.  (Don’t ask me why its acronym is not CUT.  I guess they didn’t want to use a real word.)  It replaced Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as the standard for time in 1986.  So far, my search has revealed that UTC is based on atomic measurements rather than the earth’s rotation.  Thus, it is supposed to be more accurate.

I’m just trying to get this blog to people’s inboxes every morning.  So I don’t really need the precision of atomic seconds.  I need a schedule that could be described as “around 9-ish.”  How hard is that?

So far, everyone is confused.  WordPress asks me what time zone I’m in.  So, you’d think it would understand that when I schedule a post for a certain time, I mean in my time zone.  Research, however, has indicated that they might mean UTC time.  And the email service says they need about 5 hours between posting and the scheduled distribution time.  But what time zone are they using?  And my web host is just confused.  (Join the club.)

I’m thinking that some of this problem must be that WordPress is using UTC time in the scheduling and disregarding the local time zone.

So….today, we are experimenting.  This post is scheduled to publish at 4:10 am on July 27th.  The email is scheduled to go out at 9 am.

If the WordPress time and the MailChimp time are both local, there are 4 hours and 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it should work.

If one is UTC and the other local, there are only 50 minutes between publishing and emailing–and it might work.

If….oh, forget it!  Let’s just see what happens.  And today, while you’re reading this–if you’re reading this–I’ll be trying to get somebody to tell me what is happening in which time zone.

If you’re not reading this, I’ll be doing the same thing but you may never know it.

And if, by any chance, you have ever wondered why I don’t write sci-fi time travel stories, I trust the reason is now clear to you and that you are properly grateful.

Morning Pages and Forward Motion

A Friday Re-Find

It’s been 20 years since The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron was first published.  Almost 4 million copies have been sold.  (I bought at least 5 of them myself.  They make great gifts!) So, it seems like most of the readers of this blog will have, at least, heard of it.

It’s worth reminding you about it, however.

Of all the self-help books I’ve read in my life–and I have read a few!–The Artist’s Way is the most transformative.  You are reading this blog because of Julia Cameron–(and because of my good friend Hope Nunnery ,who first gave me a copy of Ms. Cameron’s book).

Hope and I embarked on the odyssey of the 12 week workshop outlined in The Artist’s Way with the idea that it might improve our acting skills and help us with some of the things we felt were holding us back in our acting careers.

Hope is now a recording artist with a fabulous and critically-acclaimed CD to her credit, and I have a completed novel, a sheaf of short stories, and an award-winning full-length play.

I can’t speak for Hope, but that is not what I expected when I began doing my morning pages and going on my artist dates.  But it has been a wild and fulfilling journey.

I get lazy sometimes.  I forget to do the morning pages, or I lose confidence in them.  What constantly astonishes me, however, is that every time I go back to that practice, I also regain forward motion in creativity and in the practical aspects of getting the work out into the world.

So, I suggest–if you haven’t already read/done The Artist’s Way–give it a try.  It’s a book designed to be used as a 12 week workshop.  You can do anything for 12 weeks.  Go to JuliaCameronLive.com, and get an overview.

If you’ve done it and forgotten about it, dig out your copy.  Refresh your memory.  Do those morning pages, and see what happens.

You could be amazed!

 

Lizards are letting me down

Friday Finding

The lizards over here at Casa Lagarto are not holding up their end of the bargain.

See, we have a lot of lizards here at the Casa.  Chameleons and geckos and skinks…and a truly shivery nekkid-looking thing that bears more of a resemblance to a snake than one would think would be quite safe for a lizard.  Other than the nekkid-looking thing, I am quite happy for the lizards to hang out here. (As long as they stay outside.  That’s part of the deal.)

Lizards are good for eating bugs.  And bugs…well, you know.

Oh, sure.  There’s that cycle of life thing and the food chain and all that.  But bugs, to me, are kind of like the garbage dump.  We all know we have to have them, “but not in my backyard.”  (And the garbage dump doesn’t generally display the vampire tendencies of the mosquitoes.  So there’s that.)

But lately, we’ve had an awful lot of grasshoppers.  And not just any grasshoppers, mind you, but the Eastern Lubber Grasshoppers–otherwise known as the Georgia Thumper.  These things are huge.

You want to see a picture?  Click here for a shot taken by Scattergun UK and posted on Flickr.

That shot doesn’t provide any reference point as to size, but take it from me.  They are HUGE.  Like, I’m not sure a fight between Godzilla and a Grasshopper in a Japanese horror movie would end with Godzilla taking home the title.

(Okay, okay.  They are not that huge.  But they are bugs!  It adds a certain ick factor.)

And they are decimating the plants.  The leaves on my canna lilies are all raggedy-looking.  I think they’ve started in on the hydrangea, and I knocked one out of the camphor tree yesterday.

There doesn’t seem to be anything you can spray to control them.  You’ve got to take them out one at a time. My husband is on grasshopper patrol.  But, you know, you can’t spend all day lying in wait for insects.

And I would have thought that the lizards would have done more to prevent this problem.

I’m disappointed in them.

 

 

 

 

 

 


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