I’m also doing some other ebook related things, but I thought I’d mention this on my blog because a lot of my friends are authors, writers, and &c, and they’ve been turning around and telling their friends, &c, &c, and it’s become clear I should link up those two efforts. I’m currently extending and redesigning the cuneiverse website as well.

So, you have a long, carefully contrived, SEO-friendly title for your pages (or really just a minimally descriptive one), but you don’t want that to show up in the navigation menus. There are a variety of complex ways to fix this, but one of the easiest is to use code like the following:

< ?php 
    $pages = get_pages("parent=0"); # returns parent pages
      foreach ($pages as $x_page) {
        $option = '<li><a href="'.get_page_link($x_page->ID).'">';
        $short_title = "";
        $short_title = get_post_meta($x_page ->ID, "nav_title", TRUE);
        if ($short_title == "")
                $option .= $x_page->post_title;
        else
                $option .= $short_title;
        end;
        $option .= '</a>';
        echo $option;
  }
 ?>

This usually ends up in header.php, and is a good patch for the problem. There are a couple of plugins that attempt to work around this by detecting whether or not you’re in the loop (the loop being the name for the main part of post/page printing), but invariably widgets screw this up somehow, and this solution seems to work a bit better for me, especially for a navigation header (hence the name.)

Examine the contents of this bag.

Rubber Duck Regatta in Cal Anderson Park’s fountain tonight at 7pm. I’ll hold another next week as well.

There are a variety of duck vendors in town for those who wish to ‘prepare.’ Archie McPhee’s come to mind. Check your bathtub for suspects as well.

There will be round robin with ducks, and also heats for any sort of random things that people want to enter into the competition.

The rules:
1. ducks get put into the fountain
2. ducks float downstream through all the rocks and bricks.
3. eventually, a duck reaches the end.

Isn’t that just… ducky.

This will happen again in a couple of weeks. A more exotic web page to follow after we try this and see what kind of web page it needs.

No question now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
–Animal Farm

The last week or so, obviously, have been somewhat transfigured by pandemic paranoia. Pandemic is ancient greek for either “all peoples” or “freak the fsck out,” it’s hard to tell. This can be easily distinguished from epidemic, which is greek for “upon peoples” and endemic, which is greek for “within peoples.”

Here’s a handy table for disambiguation of various words with demic in them, described in terms of internet memes:

So, with this out of the way, we can proceed upon our merry way. It’s been an exciting week, I have been interested in public health and related things (epidemiology, etc…) for a long time so I’ve been watching the news, websites, twitter, and any other mechanism of public information I could get my hands on.

As for myself, I’m sort of guardedly watching the news (considering I’m traveling soon to Texas, where both US fatalities have occured), but am mostly concerned about the Northern hemisphere flu season. That said, there’ve been a lot of people coughing in this coffee shop today.

rice rice baby!

home page

books

restaurants

Since it’s April 1rst yet again, please enjoy LOLCat Wasteland.

Have Fun.

One of the things that this project has made me aware of is the importance of caching. A number of the free, public services have occasionally been hit by surges in usage (apparently frequently coming from iPhone apps that weren’t making good use of reuse) and I’m writing an article about this.

In the meantime, largely grasping to consciousness today as I ended up finishing work last night at around 4:30 am. But hey, at least I’m not in a space station that had to be evacuated due to potential debris strike.

(Spoiler follows)

I’ve often thought that this reflects the nature of the series as an endless cycle — the first edition of the gunslinger reflects one stage of the cycle, and the revised edition, which has been edited to be a coherent whole with the entire series rather than a collection of short stories, reflects the reality of the book ‘the gunslinger’ in the next cycle of the series.

In general, I think this parallels the end of the series. The gunslinger is a tool of the tower, the last of his kind frozen like a fly in amber until things start to go wrong, then released to solve the problem. The same problem occurs time after time, but with variations on a theme.

For some reason, this idea of the gunslinger as a tool of the tower held in reserve from some iteration of events really appeals to me; I think in part this is because I enjoyed the The Talisman books (the series also includesBlack House, which I greatly recommend.) The books are similar in structure and central conflict, Talisman is in some ways a summary of the Dark Tower books.

To follow through on the metafiction/cycle metaphor, the revised book is (to me) a different run through the cycle than the first. It would be really interesting if the variations on a theme were made explicit, but that’s too large a task for a single author, I suspect.

We will publish all non-emergency legislation to the Web site for five days, and allow the public to review and comment before the President signs it.

Unknown what effect this will have, but welcome to the future again everyone.