• Finished the semester with my first real 4.0 (not counting last summer when I took an intro course that I didn’t actually need and got an A).
• Replaced the front driver-side window motor and the window glass on the Beagle. The window motor was dead, and the Teagle has tinted windows, so I figured I might as well swap them all out. I’ll do the rest of the windows over the next few weeks.
• Fixed the burned-out lights in the Beagle’s dash. Hooray for having a soldering iron!
• Fixed some buggy HTML in my blog’s sidebar. Firefox and Chrome still displayed it right, but stupid Internet Explorer choked on it.
• Watched Duplo learn how to walk.

Edit: Okay, apparently I don’t actually know how to embed videos, even though I’ve done it before. I’ll try to figure it out and then update this post later.

I eventually scrapped the third blog (which started out as an accident, but I then decided to leave it scrapped). There’s now a gallery there instead, but I have yet to do anything with it. I’ll get to it eventually, I’m sure.

But I still feel uneasy about the division between the English blog and everything else. I post there infrequently enough that I don’t have anything even resembling a regular readership, and part of the point in writing (or so I’m told) is to have people read what you write. So I’m toying with the idea of merging them and then simply using categories to, well, categorize the content appropriately.

And on an unrelated note, I’ve been getting tons of spam comments in the last several months. My filter is rather amazing, though, because only a few out of nearly three thousand have gotten through. Still, it annoys me to have to check the filters and occasionally moderate comments, so I’m considering requiring everyone to register before posting comments.

I’m guessing that a lot of people don’t really care much about the issue of merging the blogs or keeping them separate, but I’m sure that some people will have an opinion about having to register. Would this be a bad thing, because lots of people dislike registering for stuff, or would it be good, because then you don’t have to fill in the comment form every time?

Of course, I’m not even sure it would cut down on spam. It would probably just shift the battle from fighting spam comments to fighting spam accounts, which is currently a problem on the forum, though one that seems to be under control.

So, if you have any feedback, let me know.

I’ve finally gotten around to installing a gallery*, and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the borders on the nav menu to go away. I’ve been over the template and the style sheet several times, and I just can’t figure out where they’re coming from. I’d be forever in the debt of anyone who could take a look at it and figure it out.

*Technically, this is not the first photo gallery I’ve installed. I tried installing Gallery 2 first, but its style sheet and templates are a frigging nightmare to modify. Plus it’s the biggest piece of open-source bloatware I’ve ever seen. Right now the only thing it’s got going for it is the lack of weird borders on the nav menu.

I’ve torn apart the main blog page and put it together in a much better way, and I’ve torn apart the CSS and some of the template pages to simplify things and make a few tweaks. Those changes haven’t altered the appearance much—most of them have merely simplified things and made it easier for me to change things in the future. However, last night I started on a more important renovation, and I just barely finished it: I have finally replaced the unsightly mess formerly known as Arts & Letters with a much more sightly mess powered by blog software.

This is a big step for me. I finally have a site with a consistent look and feel, and now the only thing this section lacks is more content. The Photos subsection is still pretty sparse, but I can start adding digital photos right away (it might be a while before I get around to scanning old photos). I’ve still got some plans for the English section, but it may be a while before I get around to that.

And for old times’ sake, here’s a very special treat: an archived version of my site in its infancy, back in the days of Tripod, banner ads, and cheesy little Bravenet widgets. Scary.

But for now I’m just worried about ironing out the kinks in my new skin. I’m pretty pleased with it so far, especially since it’s basically the product of one day’s work.

I apologize to all those who will have to unsubscribe from the old blog and subscribe to this one instead, but the old installation was messy—I was running two blogs on one installation thanks to a plug-in called Multiply. I thought it would be nice to have everything on one installation, but it caused a lot of other complications (like the inadvertent death of the Arts & Letters blog). So hopefully the move will have a few different advantages.