Canadian Living Magazine just had a special issue of slow cooker recipes. Canadian Living is a regular monthly publication with recipes, and articles on cooking, decorating and the domestic arts. I usually ignore the regular issues, although I guess it would be ok for a middle-aged metrosexual to browse. Canadian Living also publishes several cookbook specials every year. The cover on this one advertised that it had 135 slow cooker recipes, and tips and tricks, and when I flipped through it, there were several interesting recipes.
Shuffle
Today I changed the names of many of my top level categories, shuffled and renamed some sub-categories and shuffled a few posts into different sub-categories. I didn’t like some of the category titles, and I wasn’t writing anything new in many categories, so I reindexed the material and changed the index.
Spam continues
The spam drought ended over the weekend. The gambling and pills people started sending comments – all blocked by MT Blacklist. The porn stars started sending trackback pings. A few got through but I have cleaned them up already, and updated the blacklist with their latest domain name and some other new strings. I installed an MT Plugin called DisguiseTrackbackURL which is supposed to make it impossible to identify the correct URL to ping for Trackbacks without actually opening the Entry in a browser. It sounds promising and it should work will work unless the spammers decide to read the default java script and train their bots to add the extra characters. If they still spam me I will have to think about customizing the Disguise script.
Hospital, January 2005
Getting back to n., and his latest stay in the hospital, here’s the rest of the story of the days between the start of his breakdown and his discharge from the psychiatric unit.
n, again
I haven’t finished the story of n’s admission to the hospital last Friday, or the story of his time in the hospital. I will leave that for another day and just skip to the news today (Thursday January 27).
Spam Drought
There hasn’t been much spam on my blog for months, because MT-Blacklist was keeping it out.
Fame
Claire doesn’t get a lot of space in my blog. She’s succeeding in school, learning and growing. It isn’t all rosy. She feels anxiety and stress, but I see her life flourishing.
She has been co-writing a play with her friends Caitlin and Jamie, and they applied to produce the play at the 2005 Winnipeg Fringe Festival. They call themselves the Angry at Apples Company. The play doesn’t have a name yet. I don’t understand the rules, and it involves a lottery. They were drawn yesterday, and they are in. Claire is planning to take credit as a co-writer, and to produce and stage-manage the play. As I understand it, she is not planning to act. I don’t know much about the play, and Claire isn’t talking. But she hasn’t had the Spanish Inquisition yet. I don’t know if she expects the Spanish Inquisition …
MT 3.15
Within a month of the last MT upgrade, another upgrade. This time, to fix a vulnerability in the program. The details are at MT’s site, access through the “powered by Movable Type” link in the side column. Well, I’m getting my money’s worth out of my FTP client. I like the program, I like the company’s diligence at fixing problems. I do get bored sitting around while the FTP client uploads whole directories of unchanged files in upgrade packages.
Brezhnev of the Vatican
Some European countries (England) have laws that curtail freedom of speech to protect religious groups from criticism. There is a BBC an article that a Polish Court convicted a prominent journalist of insulting a foreign head of state. He compared the Pope to Brezhnev. I haven’t been able to get the offensive text. He may have meant that the Pope is isolated and dependent on the Vatican bureaucacy and a few personal assistants, and losing touch. That argument has some merit.
The head of State was the Pope who is the head of state of the Vatican City, which is a separate state under International Law. Poland doesn’t seem to have laws that specifically protect the Catholic Church and other religious groups from hate speech or other lesser forms of criticism. However I am not sure how those laws might apply to criticism of the Pope or his performance in the Vatican.
Breakdown Coming
N continued on the same course for another two weeks since I last wrote about him on January 9. The more drugs he did, the more things went wrong. The more things went wrong, the more drugs he did. He called me asked me to drive him to the hospital last Friday (January 21) and he was admitted to one of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry wards. I don’t think I can deal with everything in one post, and I will talk about what has happened after he left CFS care on January 6, through to noon on Thursday January 20 in this entry.