Pocket Universe

I blog so rarely that sometimes I think, “I wish I had another blog, so that I could avoid posting to two blogs at once.” Well, my wish has been granted: I am now a contributor to Garden of WiiDS, a Nintendo-oriented blog created by a friend of mine. As much as possible, I will be making some of my videogame posts there. You may want to check it frequently, especially if you are into classic Nintendo games (as I’m sure none of you are).

My dad just had coronary bypass surgery. My daughter starts kindergarten this week. My wife and son are starting home school, and I need to clean out the former computer nook to make room for the new home-school area. I got a new TV, along with a stand that I haven’t put together yet. And my blog posts have been sporadic at best.

So with all this going on, what’s the first thing I do? A site redesign, of course!

To be fair, this new design has been in the works for quite some time. Ever since my upgrade to Movable Type 3.32 nearly a year ago, I realized that my old format wasn’t taking advantage of the new features. I set up a test blog to try out some design ideas, but the TypeKey comment authentication wasn’t working correctly. Since reducing comment spam was the main reason I upgraded, I didn’t want to switch to TypeKey until the problems were fixed. It appears to be working now, but if you have trouble registering or commenting, please email me at andy@babybates.com.

In case you’re wondering, I took my new color scheme from Mark Rothko’s painting Red, Orange, Tan and Purple, which can be seen here. You may be interested to know about how Rothko has influenced other people.

As for the other life updates, I’ll give you the quick rundown: My dad had coronary bypass surgery last week, after one of his stents began clogging again. The surgery went well, and he is recovering nicely and should be returning home today. Meanwhile, my mom is doing pretty well (or as well as can be expected, considering the cancer), but she has been sleeping a lot lately, which concerns me. I am hoping that it might be related to blood sugar or medication.

Molly starts kindergarten on Wednesday, and is very excited about it. Meanwhile, Marcy will be starting Trevor in home school. There are many reasons that home schooling would be better for him, personality-wise. We will see how things go over the next few months, but we are all very excited about this new phase.

And finally, through an abbreviated version of One Red Paperclip, I turned an iPhone into a new HDTV. The Xbox 360 looks amazing on it! I’ll post pictures once I get it set up.

Ah, it’s been a long time since I’ve used the old “Metablog” category, hasn’t it? After a long and arduous process, I have finally updated Movable Type from 2.64 to the ultra-modern 3.32. Unfortunately, the process has not been without its share of problems.

The primary impetus for this upgrade was the amount of spam clogging this site. I had a blacklist plugin that would filter out spam, but I had to constantly babysit it, adding new spam entries and deleting old comments on a daily basis. If I ever fell behind, it became an arduous process to weed out the spam while simultaneously keeping the gems of opinion from my few trusted friends.

Luckily, my web hosting service came to my rescue by moving my site to a new server without telling me. This resulted in a broken site. After I figured out the problem and fixed it, my site worked again, but the blacklist database became corrupted. I had no way to mass-delete comments. I could delete them one by one, but at ten seconds apiece (and that’s being generous), I was looking at over three 24-hour days of deleting, since I had something like 25,000 comments to go through.

In more recent versions of Movable Type, the comment system has become more robust, with authentication being the primary method of keeping out the digital riff-raff. So from now on, you will need to register a Typekey account before you can comment. I hope it doesn’t cause you too much inconvenience.

Sadly, in the process of upgrading to 3.3, I somehow lost all my old comments. I am still trying to find out how to get them back. I guess it’s good because now I don’t have to plow through the old comments to delete them all, but bad because I lose all of your wit and wisdom. For that, I am sorry. Hopefully I can figure out a way to salvage them. But until them, please enjoy the new, spam-free site! I will try to keep posting in a timely manner, so keep reading!

I�ve always liked the idea of a pocket universe, an object that appears small, but actually contains an entire self-contained parallel universe. It is limited in size, but contains unlimited potential.

With that in mind, I have changed the name of my blog. While appearing simple to the outside viewer, it has endless possibilities with regards to content. The original name was just a placeholder anyway, and this new name seems much more lyrical.

Please celebrate in whatever manner you deem appropriate.

As I look back, I notice that it has been over two weeks since my previous blog entry. Since the calls and email messages have been pouring in, I thought I would provide some sort of explanation (although not an excuse) for why I haven’t posted in so long.

Many factors have conspired to keep me away from my regular blogging. Primarily, things have been very busy at work, as things usually are at the end of the year. When I’m busy at work, that affords less time for extraneous web-surfing, and therefore less time to post cool things I’ve found. Besides that, the busy Christmas season always leaves less time for other activities. And really, it’s not like anyone wants to hear about my adventures shopping for gifts (not that that would stop me from posting about it, mind you…). And of course, with holidays from work, that means less time at the computer, so I don’t think about posting as often, if at all.

But if I really want to be honest, I would have to concede that there is a more important reason that I haven’t posted in so long. Three little words: World of Warcraft. It may not seem like much, but in future postings I will go into detail about how wonderful this game is, and why it is so immersive and addictive. As an indicator of how much I’m going to be posting about this game, I have set up an entirely new blog category just for it. The only reason I haven’t posted about it so far is that every time I sit down to write about it, I find that I would rather just play it. But now that I have gotten numerous experiences under my belt, I am ready to share some stories with you, so look for more postings in the near future. You have been warned.

There are moments in life when everything changes. Sometimes the changes are so subtle, so seemingly unimportant, that we don’t recognize their full significance until much later, if ever. Other times, the change is immediate and pervasive, where it feels like the world is suddenly spinning on a different axis, and you realize that nothing will ever be the same again.

This is one of those times.

Prior to today, you have lived your life in blissful ignorance. From time to time, you may have paused and said to yourself, “I wonder what Andy is thinking about? I wonder what interests and obsessions matter to Andy today? And, more importantly, will he still care about them tomorrow?” Perhaps you have been fortunate enough to talk to me, either in person or through some sort of mass-communication medium. And then, with a little patience and lots of concerned questions, you may have been able to get me to talk, if only for a brief moment, about what I’m currently interested in or fascinated by.

But like a brief ray of sunlight on a cloudy day, the moment is gone, and you are once again alone in your own world. Perhaps your life has been made a little richer, a little brighter, but the moment is all too brief, and you are left thirsty for more. But now, thanks to this website, you can at last slake that thirst. You can drink from the fountainhead and bathe in its cool waters. Here, you can always come and have life’s critical questions answered for you, questions that have plagued mankind since the dawn of time: Has Andy seen any good movies lately? Has he found any interesting websites? Is there something that he wants to do, to make, or perhaps, to buy? Has he bought any new DVDs, and if so, has he watched them? And most importanly, what makes him such an amazing, unique, and charismatic person?

Together, we will explore the answers to those questions, as well as questions that you never even thought of asking. The journey begins here; let’s make it together.