As you’ve no doubt noticed, I’ve been fiddling about with things around here. It all started when an update to the Jetpack “after the deadline” option caused a Javascript error that kept me from putting up new posts. Before I realized that was the issue, I fiddled about with and somehow broke (or so I thought, anyway) a few other things. Of course, had I just waited a bit I could have saved myself some anxiety, ‘cuz they’ve now fixed Jetpack (assuming you’re reading this right now, anyway – we’ll see what happens when I go to publish).

So, anyhow, the old theme was something I cobbled together back in November of 2005 (I’m rather astounded by the fact that it was over eight years ago), and while I’ve kind of added shit to it over the years, it really doesn’t support a bunch of more modern developments that have been made to WP over the years. So I figured I’d go with something newer, and being too lazy to do it from scratch, I decided to go with an “off the shelf” solution.

This is good, I guess, but there are a bunch of things that no longer are here or that work differently in ways I don’t like, and that I’ll either have to live with or do some more fiddling about (and, no doubt, fucking up).

For one thing, the “more” button no longer loads the comments for that post. You have to actually click on the post title (or the comments link).

I also don’t like that there’s no comment preview under the “recent comments” thingie (and though the Gravatar shows up, which is cool, if you don’t have one it shows a broken image thing, which is not cool). And I need get my retirement countdown back so I can continue to count down the days until I retire (and then probably die, with my luck).

The html tag buttons do not appear to show up in Chrome, either. I’ll have to see what I can do about that. They seem to be OK in Firefox, though. And I found a comment editor thingie that seems to work (it now should show a “modify” link when you submit a comment, which brings up an Ajaxy edit form – though I don’t think that sucker includes an html tag bar, so you’d better either get those right the first time or learn you some html).

I will continue fiddling over the weekend, if I can pull myself away from Need for Speed (haven’t played in two days, and I’m getting a bit anxious).

Some bad news yesterday, as my stepson got laid off from his job. I feel both sad for and a bit envious of him. Not that I want to lose my job, of course. Some real panic and terror would set in mighty quick – I don’t have all that much of a cushion when it comes to paying the bills (not to mention work pays for my Internet, which I clearly can’t live without), and I don’t think my age makes me the ideal candidate that prospective employers are looking for.

I wouldn’t mind some paid time off, though. It’s ironic, because I was looking over my vacation time accruals, and I need to take about 23 days of vacation by the end of this year to keep from losing anything. That’s almost five weeks – and that would only get me back down to the max. Clearly, I don’t take enough time off. I think I’ll make that one of my goals in my next annual evaluation.

I was happy to see that my first name isn’t among the Top 10 Republican names (Tanner is the big winner there – roughly 60% of Tanners are both Republicans and attend religious services weekly, and a minority of Tanners have a college degree though there’s surely no correlation there).

At first I thought these were last names, because I personally don’t know anybody with a first name of Tanner.

You can do a search for your first name here. It’s kind of interesting, in some cases. For instance, ‘Patrick’ is roughly evenly split between Republicans and Democrats (slightly red), while “Pat” is just a tad bit more blue.

So you’d think that people who registered with nicknames (or shortened names, anyway) would lean left. But no, “Sue” is red while “Susan” is blue (and I think we better stick with “Vernon” ‘cuz the Verns out there appear to be good god-fearin’ Republicans.

John, BTW, is the second most common name for registered voters. I figured Mary would be #1, but, no. So what’s the most common name?

Beats me. I haven’t found it yet.

Update: Found it – it’s Michael. Didn’t see that one coming.

It’s still pretty cold around here, but they claim it’s going to get up to 39 today (and tomorrow, too). If that’s the case, I need to dig out my mailbox so I can put the new one I bought up (the door seems to have disappeared, and it kinda fills up with snow).

Speaking of snow, there’s more in store for us next week, they say. Nothing major, I don’t think (but that can change in a hurry). We’ve had just under 115″ so far this year, which is about 9″ above average. For the season we average something like 123″ so I don’t know if that means we only have another eight to go, or we’re gonna get another 20.

Or more. I should be heartened byt the fact that it’s March and “spring” is less than two weeks away (plus Daylight Saving Time this weekend! That means more daylight after work, which for me justifies the loss of two hours of my weekend – one hour springing ahead, and another hour spent changing all the goddamn clocks). But we’ve had some nasty snow storms around here in March (and April, even – hell, we had eight inches of snow on Mother’s Day one year).

March 1993 comes to mind. We got something like 43″ of snow over one weekend – three feet of it in a 24 hour period. And it was wet, heavy snow (I remember every shovelful – good thing I was still young back then).

Let’s hope we don’t get another one of those this year.

Oh well, time to get this week over.