This video demonstrating the stability of a brown owl’s head is seriously the best thing:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go stand in front of my bathroom mirror and pretend to be a brown owl for the next half hour. TTYL!

I spend less than 20 minutes a month on the phone, and those minutes are usually spent doing either of two things: 1) ordering food, or 2) trying to get directions to find someone at a pre-arranged meeting place. I hate talking on the phone for pretty much anything that can be done more efficiently through sms or email, and I really resent most people who call me when I’m not expecting their call and it’s not an emergency. So obviously it’s not a surprise why this recent comment by villanelles at dawn on Ask Metafilter explaining why phone calls suck really resonated with me:

Because phone calls are incredibly presumptuous! You’re basically inviting yourself unannounced into their home or wherever they may be at the moment. If phones had been invented after email they’d be regarded as the greatest social crime imagineable. Phones are useful for many things but I don’t think you’re crazy for preferring email for catching up with someone, it’s an excellent way to communicate a large amount of information. Email (or a text) says “Here is what I have to say, consider it and respond when you can,” a phone call says “TALK TO ME NOW, TALK TO ME NOW. I AM IN YOUR HOUSE TALK TO ME NOW” Not everyone thinks this way though so you’re going to get some friction, but that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.

Related hateful things: people that leave me voicemail even though my voicemail message says I never ever listen to my voicemail so please text or email me instead; people that call you multiple times when you don’t or can’t pick up instead of just texting or email to let you know why they’re calling and why you should return their call; people that make long phone calls on public transportation; people that make any phone calls in restaurants.

I mentioned in my last post that Movable Type doesn’t have pagination built in, which is only slightly untrue—someone at Six Apart did actually put together a guide to enabling pagination for version 4.3 onwards, except that a) it’s a pain in the ass to get working, and b) what it’s actually doing isn’t pagination-as-you-expect, but using search scripts to do the job. What? No. And again, it’s unacceptable that pagination doesn’t just work out of the box, since it’s a feature everyone now considers basic.
Anyway, I wanted pagination for my front page here and in my archives (which will be up at some point), so I spent a few minutes yesterday getting Alden Bates’ Paged Archives 1.4 plugin working on my 5.1 install. The only thing I really had to do to get it work the way I wanted was have it spit out the page numbers/links within <li>, so I could style them within an unordered list. All I had to do for that was replace lines 230-231 of pagedarchives.pl with:

$pagelist.=$spacer.'<li><a href="'.$filename.'">'.$pagetext.'</a></li>' if($ii != $pagenum);
$pagelist.=$spacer.'<li class="pagination-current">'.$pagetext.'</li>' if($ii == $pagenum);

Last week was the tenth birthday of Movable Type, the content management system that powers this blog. I’m currently on version 5, and have used every single available version over the last nine years—my license key is so old that it predates Six Apart’s hiring of Employee #1, a.k.a. Anil.
All this time later, Movable Type is still solid in many ways [1], but looking back at its history is basically one object lesson after another in what not to do [2] when creating something you actually want people to use. For instance, it’s both tragic and hilarious that years after both Blogger and WordPress started paying professionals to design gorgeous themes, Movable Type was and is still stuck with hideous default themes. It’s celebrating its diamond anniversary and the goddamn thing still doesn’t have pagination built in—a feature people now expect as standard behavior, that WordPress & Blogger made default years ago, and that Tumblr has had since launch. I wonder how many people switched away from or never chose it because of the lack of pagination, which is killer for upping page views. Oh, and it still doesn’t have a native mobile version of either frontend or backend. What?
It’s weird that I feel weird about the fact that I still really like using Movable Type to build client sites, right? But it still works really well, and still meets my needs more often than any of its competitors. I wonder if anyone’s as sad as I am that when I publish this post, I’m going to get an error back that says

Ping 'http://www.movabletype.org/update/' failed: HTTP error: 302 Found

I can’t believe it’s been over two years. I miss Jarvis. I’m still upset he had the nerve to up and die on me; in my heart, I really expected the two of us to grow old together. Sounds silly, but it’s true.

I don’t think I’ve said this in public before but I’m beyond grateful for all of Jarv’s friends, who followed his adventures over the years on Flickr, and I’m so glad so many of them got to meet him in real life—I wish they’d all had the chance to. When my heart was breaking, it helped immensely to get all your notes and know that he’d made other people’s days cheerier too, that I wasn’t the only one missing him terribly; it still does. Thank you all so much for letting a small fat dog into your lives, and for sharing your love for him with me.

Batman’s always been my favorite superhero, which is a little weird if you think about it. Batman’s not a superhero in the way we generally understand superheroes to be—he doesn’t have any powers, he’s just a dude with very obsessive tendencies who happens to also be incredibly smart, a terrifying fighter, and rich enough to make whatever he wants a reality. One of the most important things that makes Batman the most dangerous human in the DC Universe is that he constantly invests his money into R&D, making all kinds of devices, both big and small, to fit his needs: from the Batmobile, to armored suits fit for any environment, to his Batcave computer that does everything you can think of and then some. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, it was the latter I was always most jealous of, but computers then were large, expensive things, and there just wasn’t software available to me at the time to do most of the things I really wanted to do, other than write papers for school. Only Batman really got to have one.
It was nearly unimaginable then but today, some sixteen years after buying my first just-for-me computer, I have a device in the palm of my hand that lets me read books on the subway, watch tv shows in bed under the sheets, insert kittens into photos to make my friends laugh, and most importantly to me, instantly communicate with people I care about all over the world. Every day, I am Batman, and so are you, and none of us will ever be able to count the thousands of ways in which Steve Jobs was responsible for making our lives so much richer. Thanks, Steve. I miss you so much already.