I did not keep any of my resolutions for 2011. Moving on!
My main resolution for 2012 is to call out anti-feminist concern trolling when I see it. I’m defining that as “criticizing successful women for raising the bar ‘too high’ rather than criticizing the reasons that few women reach a given achievement.”
I think that will keep me busy. Let’s give that framing language tag a workout!
I am taking an official and indefinite hiatus from blogging. I have a new job that’s a big change from what I’ve done in the past, and I’m very excited about it. However, as it would be inappropriate for me to blog about politics, I think I should abstain from all blogging for a while until I figure out where the lines are. Plus, I’ve gone from having a little bit of free time to having no free time.
Unfortunately, as I will not be using Python regularly, the introduction to Python for astronomers page I started will languish.
Rest assured, I will still be found on twitter, and I promise it won’t all be bitching about NextBus.
Edit: I am also turning off all commenting, so I don’t have to constantly fight spambots.
I finally made good on my promise to make a False Equivalency Watch tumblr.
It’s weird, because I’m not sure I entirely “get” Tumblr. I read everything through Google Reader, so to me it doesn’t matter whether or not a blog is on Tumblr. But Tumblr seems ideal for very narrow topics and short posts. I keep telling myself that it’s False Equivalency Watch, not False Equivalency Analysis, so hopefully I’ll keep it moving.
I don’t really get much reading done nowadays, but there are several great things I’ve seen in the last few days that I want to share:
Enjoy!
Indeed, I managed to “Publish” instead of “Save Draft” when starting a post for, like, the end of July. I blame the iced tea I had at lunch for putting me over the edge, caffeine-wise! (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, no worries. But dang, RSS feeds don’t let you forget your mistakes!)
I hope I don’t do the reverse and accidentally delete the paper I’m working on. I’ve had a couple of catastrophic data losses in my time, but none of them were directly my fault. So while we’re already here, let’s share some of the stupid things we’ve done! Bonus points if you really thought you were being clever in the process.
I’ll start: years ago, I was deleting pictures on my camera, and accidentally deleted the only picture of my husband at his thesis defense. (An incident which I’m sure he’d forgotten about until now. Hi, dear!)
I’m on vacation now, and using my iPhone for the vast majority of my web-browsing, tweeting, email, and blogging. (Indeed, I am typing out this draft with my own two little thumbs.) When I was pregnant, I got my iPhone partly for that reason — so that I could stay connected when traveling without lugging around a laptop and a baby.
Alas, tonight I was trying to post a comment from my phone onto a Blogger blog (the excellent Stand and Deliver), and said blog was using a Captcha verification in the comment form. Standard form nowadays, really. But the image itself is unreadable on my phone — it shows just a small question mark in a box. When I try clicking the handicapped logo, for another (audio?) version, I get an error message saying that the video cannot play.
When did this happen? It is incredibly aggravating, considering how many blogs I read are on Blogger and use the Captcha system. How am I supposed to comment on blogs from my phone? Meanwhile, E and I are mortified to realize that our own shared blog has this same problem. And again, while I can type most of this post on my phone — doing just a few last touch-ups with my parents’ computer — filing a bug report to Google from my phone is non-trivial. So blogging it is!
This is version 3.0 of my blogs. First, there was Angry Stanek, which had a surprising number of readers who did not know me in person. By “surprising”, I mean, “more than one”, but I took what I could get. For nearly four years, I ranted and raved (. . . mostly ranted) about anything and everything that caught my attention. I tried to stick to my rule of only complaining about things that I was actively trying to fix, and I did write a lot of angry letters to various legislators, in addition to my angry posts. But by 2007, outrage fatigue had set in. Even watching The Daily Show felt like a chore. I stopped blogging, and started doing yoga.
The Beckyan Deli was conceived as a place for Eli and I to share recipes, and various travel and life stories. (Although, if I’m to be honest, I really wanted Eli to blog about the financial meltdown, because I thought he had an interesting perspective on it. I knew he was never going to start his own blog, but I figured he wouldn’t be able to resist a joint blog for long. I was right!) Since then, we’ve posted a bunch of recipes. We also had a kid, and pictures and stories of him are . . . on his Flickr stream. Posting pictures to Flickr is much quicker than sitting down and writing a blog post about it, and all people care about is the pictures, anyways. Everybody’s happy!
But lately I’ve been feeling the blogging itch, and the shared blog just wasn’t doing it for me. I didn’t want The Beckyan Deli to be too scattershot, and I wasn’t sure how much Eli wanted some of my weirder rants (oh, just you wait!) on our shared space. So while I may still post a recipe on The Beckyan Deli, everything else — photography, feminism and the media, sports — will be here. I can’t predict what topics I’ll end up focusing on; I’m just going to go where it takes me.
As I get things up and running, I thought I’d quickly note what tools and sites I am not using for my blog.
This blog is not hosted by GoDaddy.com, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
I am not using the iNove WordPress theme. I’ll probably break down at some point and write my own theme, as many of them get confused when I try to make www.rebeccastanek.com point to a splash page instead of a blog. And I had some specifications about colors, headers, and columns. I liked iNove quite a bit, but next to the post’s author’s name is a little cartoon icon. Of a man. That cannot be changed, as far as I can tell. I’m not shy about complaining about these sorts of things, but the author’s homepage is in Japanese, so I’ve no idea how to contact him.
But god knows I’ve complained about this before.
Hello! I had plans for a big introductory post, but I wanted to wait until I was satisfied with the theme, and had all my categories mapped out, and a favicon, and . . .
Screw that. If I wait until that’s all done I’ll never start blogging again. And I need a test post up anyways so I can see what happens when I screw around with various default page settings.
Because I don’t have enough to-do lists running around, here’s what I need to do for this:
And that’s just off the top of my head at 11:30 on a Friday night when really, I need to get to bed. Eh, as long as the RSS feed works, we’re good.
(Edited to ask what the hell is going on with the unordered list not giving me bullets?)