..random

Mina shook her head in serious disagreement 17 times in a row yesterday – I was asking about people she loves; apparently she just hates everyone, because by the time I got to the end I had run out of people she knows by name and had started naming animals.

Max just told his mother to leave him alone and go be with daddy.

I got an e-mail from a distant relative in Kyushu who runs a beauty salon that T, Adam, Inaba and I visited 12 (?) years ago when we went to visit my cousins Kana and Aya in Saga Prefecture (Saga was where my grandfather on my dad’s side grew up, and is the Northeast Thailand of Japan – the locals move out to work shitty jobs in the big city, and the only people moving in are either going back to work on their family’s farm, or to get away from people in general.) Anyway, when we visited the salon, they just happened to be shooting a commercial to be aired on a local TV station, so we got to be in it while getting haircuts and shouting the name of the store – “HEADS!” – at the camera.

So the owner of that shop is either a distant cousin or uncle (which makes him close enough to kill for under Sackett law), and he emailed me out of the blue yesterday. He’s recently into sansevieria plants (AKA mother in law’s tongue), which are not so popular in Japan, so he’s coming this June to check out some of the farms and collectors here in Thailand. Maybe we will hook up.

Max had to take an entrance exam for a nearby preschool yesterday (his current school, which he loves going to now, is closing at the end of March). They test out the little kids by giving them various little tasks and challenges like drawing, puzzles, logic games, motor skills testing, simple questions, etc. Max would not enter the room without mommy, but aced all of the tests. He apparently did some of them twice, by choice, because they gave him too much time to complete them. Sounds scarily familiar.

Nam thought up a brilliant substitute for tenkasu today: Rice Krispies!

This was sufficiently genius for me to acknowledge that I am truly lucky to have married her… For the ten thousandth time or so.

😉

WordPress Multi-blog and Notepad++ FAIL

One thing MT was a lot better at was support for multiple blogs, because it was designed with this in mind from early on. To enable multiple blog administration and creation from a single installation of WP takes a bit more work (multi-blog was only integrated[and rather half-assedly at that] in the most recent version of WordPress, v3.0). In fact, it had me tearing my hair out when I found out the only way to enable new blog creation in subdirectories (instead of subdomains) was to uninstall WordPress entirely and start all over…

So I did that, and started getting funky php errors when I modified the wp-config file per the codex instructions. It took me two cycles of re-installation and 90 minutes of pure frustration until I got suspicious of my text editor. Until now, Notepad++ has been my lightweight editor of choice. Unfortunately, it seems a recent upgrade (v5.7) somehow affected quality and it was somehow corrupting the php file I was working on, which was returning an error in my browser.

Everything is all better now. From now, I’ll be setting up Adam’s blog, plus anybody else who wants one here. That’s another nice thing – I used to have Adam and I set up on Movable Type, and everyone else on Blogger FTP accounts, but now it’s just a single platform for all.

Note: I liked Zemanta so much, I’ve installed the plug-in network-wide.