Trilobite

The Free Software Foundation has a saying: “Free software” is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of “free” as in “free speech,” not as in “free beer.”

A lot of people on the internet refer to this statement every time they talk about something being free, and instead of using the word “free” on its own they say “free, as in speech” or “free, as in beer.”

Today I found out about Vores Øl beer. It’s free beer, as in speech. The recipe contains guarana beans, so the beer has a bit of caffeine in it. If anybody wants to try making a batch with me, I’m ready to learn about beer making!

My dorm is right downtown and pretty cheap so there are always lots of travellers staying there. Today I was walking down the front steps and passed through a crowd of Spanish (or maybe Portuguese) teenagers with digital cameras taking movies of a black squirrel eating a peach. Three of them were holding up their cameras and walking very carefully towards him, and all the rest were hanging back looking nervous and curious. I thought it made a funny scene. It made me think of the vorpal rabbit from The Holy Grail.

I miss our little squirrel. I hope he’s doing okay. Celine took Thesia, Sheera, and Fizi to see him the other day and thought they saw him from a distance, but he didn’t come out to visit.

I’ve switched to a new blogging program (Blosxom). This one does lots of neat things that blogger.com doesn’t, like organizing my posts by category. I still have to work out a few kinks but everything should be pretty much the same as the old Trilobite.

The blog was offline for a few hours today. I had planned to take it offline permanently, but Celine convinced me otherwise. She reminded me that even though I haven’t felt like posting anything for a while, it’s still nice to look back at all the pictures and remember the things we’ve done.

Blogger.com are being a bunch of weenies and I think it’s time to switch to a new blogging program. Expect to see some changes around here in the near future…

More posts about the house: November 1st, 7th, 15th, 20th, 23rd, and 26th, and December 7th and 19th, 2004.

The other day Christine said she visited the blog and saw the great big empty space. At first she thought the page was being slow to load, and then after a while she thought her computer had hung. Finally she scrolled down and found the “top” of the page. I’ve edited all the pages of this blog by hand to remove the stupid tags blogger.com has inserted, but it’s pretty annoying to have to do this every time I post anything.

I am sure everybody is starting to get really tired about me complaining about this. Sorry. I’ll stop now.

Well, it’s not as bad as I thought at first, or maybe it’s worse. I can’t decide. I’ll be able to tell when blogger.com gets around to answering my support request. If they send another stupid form letter telling me how to fix common mistakes made by mouth breathers, then I’ll be really mad.

It turns out that blogger did not change my template without asking me. What they did was to start adding <div style=”clear:both;”> tags to the expansion of <$BlogItemBody$>. This not as bad as I originally thought because it means they did not edit my files without asking me. It’s worse because there is no way I can change it. So from now on, you will have to scroll down to the bottom of the menu on the right hand side before my post starts.

I always thought blogger was a bit annoying, but breaking my blog this way (as well as the blogs of anybody else who has a menu on the side) shows a complete disregard for the time and effort that their users put into their blogs. I mean, seriously, what the hell?

What the!?!? It looks like blogger.com changed some of my files without asking or telling me, and now the top half of this page is blank! Grrrr. . I’ll have to see if I can figure out what they did. Idiots.

Anyway, I was about to post this:

I think I’ll have to change the description of this blog from “check back every few days” to “check back every few months!” I posted some old pictures of the house. Look back at November 1st, 2004. (I’ll add some more soon.)

Peter upgraded some software on the computer this blog lives on, so this post is a test of the new setup.

In other news, Celine’s father is going to Vienna in a couple of weeks to be the president of an International Atomic Energy Agency symposium on uranium production.

Celine and I are both working on new posts for the blog, so check back in a few days or so.

Squirrel has weaned itself from soya formula.