I finally moved my blog a few days ago, and I checked it seven different ways to make sure everything was working and links from the old site would redirect to the new one—but I forgot to check the old home page, which stayed broken.  Hope it didn’t drive away too many new visitors!

I mentioned before that I was thinking of moving my blog—well, here it is.  Nothing should have changed except the name and the URL.  Like I mentioned last time, I was getting tired of the name Commentarii Mei because it’s hard to pronounce and doesn’t really fit the theme here anyway.  Buttered Ham comes from a Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where there’s this really fat man that Mike and the bots keep making fun of.  At one point, the Fat Man (the other characters in the movie even call him that) flags down a waiter in a restaurant, and one of the bots says in his voice, “I want more butter on my ham.”  Of course, ham and butter don’t make you fat, so ever since then I’ve thought of “buttered ham” as the perfect symbolic food for the low-carber.  If you tell people you put extra butter on your ham, they’ll know right way you’re not into any of that low-fat silliness.  So the name combines good food with one of my favorite TV shows, which is doing pretty good for me when it comes to inventing names for things.

September was a real bear.  I’m not used to being truly busy.  I mean, I’m always busy in the sense of having plenty of things to do, but I’ve always got time to do them if I’d just get organized and buckle down.  But September started with vacation, and then classes started at St. Rose, and we were trying to get the garage cleaned out and worked on, and I was trying to make the chicken house easier to move, and I was installing and learning some new software on my computer, and I needed to update some web sites, and the gardens needed harvesting, and some other things came up, and the word busy started to really mean something.  Everything that had to get done got done, but I’ve got a long list left for this month.

So I’ve gotta get better organized and get more done.  I’ve always liked the idea of keeping a good schedule, making todo lists, having an organized desk, and things like that, but I’ve never been good at making them stick.  It would sure make life easier, though, and I’d have more time to write here.

I’m still using Ubuntu on my workstation, and still happy with it.  There’s one bit of weirdness: if my DVD burner has trouble reading or writing a disc, the operating system will lose all ability to talk to it, or even recognize that it’s there, until I reboot.  That’s unacceptable.  I’ve changed the cable and updated the firmware on the drive (which was a real pain since the firmware updater is a Windows-only program), but it happened again since then.  So that’s one thing I’m going to have to track down.

I’ve also been trying out some other software.  I was using the web-based social media site PeopleBrowsr.com for Twitter, but it caused my browser to start using 100% of one CPU, so I started using TweetDeck instead.  It doesn’t have quite as many features, but it doesn’t hammer my browser, so it wins.  I hardly ever tweet anyway, but I’m hoping to change that this month.

I switched from Firefox to Opera for a while, but I switched back today.  Opera is very nice—it’s fast and renders well—but it’s not as flexible as Firefox with all its extensions.  Most things about Opera work very well, but if you wish it could do something differently, you might be out of luck.  With Firefox, you can probably install an extension that’ll let you do what you want.  For example, in Firefox, I use the Tab Mix Plus extension to let me do a bunch of extra things with tabs, and I have it configured so double-clicking on a tab closes it.  Very quick and simple.  In Opera, closing a tab requires right clicking and scrolling down a menu, or pressing Ctrl-W, neither of which is nearly as handy.  It’s possible that I could make Opera close tabs differently by tweaking some setting in a hidden configuration file, but that’s just one thing like that.  Yesterday, an update of Opera made flash video stop working, so that was the last straw—back to Firefox, at least for now.

I’ve also started putting my photos on Flickr.com instead of on my own site, and moving the St. Rose photos over there too.  I was running out of web hosting space, and hosting them on Flickr should be better anyway.  That way people can find them in searches on Flickr, and find their way back to the sites from the pictures.  I just make sure to keep copies of everything, since I don’t assume a site like Flickr will still be there in ten years.  There were other photo sites before Flickr that didn’t work as well and died out.  You never know when something new will come along and wipe out something established online.

I’ll be back tomorrow with a post on our new street-ready chicken house!