The Comments Gremlin

Thanks to a helpful colleague's strategy to address the comments glitch, I'm a little closer to figuring it out. Removed all...well, most... of the widgets, which I'd been meaning to prune way back for yonks anyway. I woke up this morning mortified at the thought that sloppy blog housekeeping would not look too swooft at SXSWi.

But there it is, and by process of elimination, it doesn't seem to be the widgets. Restraint is called for when I can find the time to reinsert a few. Any votes on what to keep? What to remain in the dust bin? And how would I know, if nobody can leave comments?

I have a hazy memory of problems with changing my e-mail address at work, after I got messages from friends that their posts to my old address bounced. The university is no longer supporting the old, and I was reassured by the help desk person that there was a forwarding to the new address, but I wonder if that fragile link was a tasty morsel for the gremlinkin.

So even if comments are still looping around in the net, at least I can formulate the next question to ask. OK, so maybe I'm not so mortified. Just impatient.

Mercury in retrograde did me in

You may have heard the astrological term "Mercury in retrograde." It's the perceived sensation of Mercury going backwards when it isn't really, or the expectations of planets going a little wobbly, or just maybe my own klutzyness. As to what that does to us wee humans scurrying around on a dirty, crowded planet trying to make it, M in R manifests in every machine you use breaking down.

The hopeful bit is that this cataclysmic zig-zag is brief, to the Universe, at least, because it only lasts about two weeks before we convince ourselves that the ol' Winged Messenger has made a U-turn and headed back toward the hometown goalpost.

Two weeks is an incredibly long time to turn your electronics and tools of the trade into lumps of dead plastic and obscenely expensive rare metals. This particular interim it took down my blog comments, HD converter, VCR, DVD player, hot water heater, and I turned my TV off in frustration because all my favorite programs (I don't have cable/satellite) are on the ONE freakin' channel in town that flipped the switch and went totally to digital.

These little challenges don't normally get me down when they behave and present themselves in an orderly fashion, one after the other, fixing one glitch and moving on to the next. But this dime-gracing, zippy god of communications didn't give me a chance this time. They all happened at once and pretty much shut me down.

Still haven't solved the issues, but it's a gorgeous evening in Austin, and I'm taking some tuna steaks down to my neighbors grill for a little Armadillo Arms potluck dinner.

Good thing Merc's playing nice for the moment. I'd think twice about eating tuna if he weren't...