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Took the BatPup and went along to the Arts & Sciences evening at the Baron & Baroness's place tonight.

The Baron told me some more of his strongly-held opinions on the unsuitability of Linux for ordinary users, and I began to see the pattern: he's had a run of bad luck with drivers and so feels that only Windows is going to work without pain.  I managed to impress him with the Add/Remove Programs feature and Aptitude/Synaptic, because his biggest experience with Linux was with Fedora, which either lacked or didn't sufficiently advertise such features, leading him to believe that installing any software at all required a familiarity with makefiles and command lines.  Showing him how easy it was to install and configure some software may have convinced him that Ubuntu, at least, is not a complete dead loss.  However, unlike most people I know, he's had uniformly good experiences with Windows, and even with Outlook and Exchange, so he'll never be converted now.  The damage is done, poor poor boy...

Meanwhile, I gave our Rapier Marshal a tutorial on WordPress, and she did her first blog entry.  She was pleasantly surprised at how easy it is, once you've fixed your password, so I expect she'll get to work pretty quickly and use it as intended.  This is a Good Thing, since writing reports is a chore and anything that makes it easier must be worth it.

Also, helped the bookings officer for the upcoming College War add a booking form to the College site.  It's only a simple fill-in-the-form-and-it-emails-the-bookings-officer sort of thing, but it's better than nothing.

Meanwhile, the BatPup played with people and charmed their socks off, from the looks of things.

A good night, but it's now late and I need my ugly sleep.

The Politarchopolis website's Events page is now working nicely. It's rather spiffing, in fact. Now where's raven_ so I can show her how to add events to the list...?

Got woken up by a Boy Wonder entirely too early today. Usually he's lovely; we have a queen-sized and a king-single mattress on the floor and he sleeps between us, so when he needs input he rolls one way (Mummywards) and when he has output to deal with he rolls the other way (Daddywards - I keep the spare nappies on my side), and most of the time we hardly need to wake up to deal with him. But he got disturbed by the BatPup I think, or had a burp of at least 3-4 on the Burptor Scale (where 1 is barely a hiccup and 7 can take out windows all up and down the street) percolating in his complicated innards. Whatever; he woke up early. Bleagh.

We did, however, manage to get off to the Farmer's Markets in plenty of time, which is good. The Beloved is becoming quite intent on turning us all into locavores and since it means bloody good food, I'm magnanimous in my tolerance. She's decided to cut out processed food as much as possible, meaning no choccies from the Hansel & Gretel near my work, so I bought her some v. v. nice raspberries -- sadly not all that local, being from just outside Orange, but sold by a friend of her family so that'll do nicely -- and she agrees that this will suffice as a chocolate substitute for Valentine's Day.

Apart from that: the house has remained tidyish, so when The Beloved suggested inviting our nice-but-normal neighbours over for dinner, it wasn't too painful to get the place into shape, even with the necessity of wrangling a BatPup and a Boy Wonder, and with an EDoD who seems to consider invitations to help clean up her own messes to be somehow beneath her. (She seems to have lost all grasp of Enlightened Self-Interest lately; she is apparently unswayed by explanations regarding the number of hours in the day, the necessity of getting certain work done, and the difficulty of scheduling Daddy/Daughter Fun Time when there's no Daughter willing to assist the Daddy in getting the house in order. I can only assume this is some pre-teenage rebellion thing that's about as interesting as rat shit, and I want her to get Over It as soon as possible.) So we invited the neighbours in and they were perfectly nice, although I think a little uncomfortable with the degree to which the aforementioned EDoD was pushing her parents' patience. (Sigh. We love her, we do; we just want her to have some other settings than "off" and "eleven".) I'll have to invite them to my rapidly-approaching fourth birthday party so they can be company for any other non-loonies I may invite.

Ah: other thing. I've just about fixed the big feature in the Politarchopolis website that has had me stumped for months. Shortly it will be possible to upload even descriptions -- feasts, tourneys, meetings, fighter practices -- and have it display much more information about them. The existing method was a real kludge, and enhancing it doesn't bear thinking about. The new method is much more adaptable, and will be a sharp improvement. I shall have to find out if my deputy wants some work to do over the next week...

Anyhow, that'll do. I'm knackered. I want to go to bed and maybe get some unbroken sleep. Good night!

Here I am at the Pancake Parlour, making good use of their free wireless broadband, working on the baronial website. Today was a bit pants, to tell the truth: too much shouting at an Elder Daughter who shall remain nameless, too much sweating in the heat. Those two things are related; the EDoD's apparent gimlet-eyed dedication to the cause of being the world's youngest teenager means she doesn't take "no" for an answer, especially when it's the short form of "no, we don't want you to swan off and do your own thang, honey chil', cos there's babies to sit and a house to delouse, and the way you do a Harold Holt every time you're invited to clean up your own prodigious mess suggests that it's not going to get clean if we just wait for you do do it". So when it gets hot, and tempers get shorter than a midget dwarf under a midget dwarf pressing engine turned up to eleven, she tends to attract attention of a non-funtacular variety.

All of which is a long way of saying that I had to get out of the (now-clean) house to do some work somewhere with airconditioning and No Daughters.

Sadly, I realise now that my digestive system has aged, or my standards have risen sharply, since the halcyon days when the Pancake Parlour was my venue-of-choice. I had a long stack (four pancakes) with icecream and canesnot, and I regret it now. I may go home and have some nice cold water and then do some washing up, because otherwise I'll die of failure to obey Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law, which can be fatal in extreme cases.

Still, I got some of the events-handling code in the site working, so that's good. Might have a dramatic improvement in the calendar shortly. We'll see. Gotta go home and hug my daughter first.

Poo.  Trying to do my weekly update of the Politarchopolis website, and the whole of sca.org.au is suddenly dead.  Can't even get a timeout message, and FTP doesn't work either.  Might have to go to bed before midnight!  Weird!

I realised an important lesson: Mediocrity Is Freedom. If you've gotten into the habit of doing a half-arsed (or even quarter-arsed) job, then anything at all you do to improve is automatically better, even if you only make it up to about five-eighths-arsed.

Case in point: I'm nominally in charge of the baronial website for the local branch of the SCA. A combination of slackness and other calls on my time has meant I've done nothing on it for months. So this weekend I set myself a goal: I will do precisely one hour of work on it per week, each Sunday evening. It doesn't sound like much (because it isn't; it's three-sixteenths-arsed with a good tailwind) but it's better than the certifiable lack-of-commitment I've put in heretofore. So last night I updated a couple of files and fixed some CSS, and also sent out a reminder about the baronial officers' blogs that people can use if they wish. This morning I've done a little tweaking here and there to fix a bug someone found, and set up a few more officers with their spanky new blogs, but that's it. I've also found a lovely new edititrix (her words, not mine, eh raven_?) to help with the most irritating part of the job.

So I'm happy, and the barony, lulled by a form of Stockholm Syndrome, is happycan be reasonable expected to be marginally less unhappy too. Everyone wins!

I've been getting useful stuff done. The baronial website is up and running with the essential content. You can use it to contact officers and see what's happening in the barony, and as of tonight it has a photo gallery too. The photos are from my predecessor in the job, a man of boundless enthusiasm but less than optimal PHP programming skills. Fortunately I was able to rewrite the underpinnings of the site and make it work quite tidily, so I didn't have to wade through his awful, awful spaghetti code to make it do anything.

Still to do: the officers' reports section. Basically, I want to create a simple blogging system for baronial officers, so they can let their superiors higher up the food chain know what they're doing. Any posted entry can be made public, privileged or private, and thus be visible to the whole world, the relevant superior officers, or only the author. Think of it like a private LJ for the baronial committee, where everyone you answer to is on your f-list. It shouldn't be hard to write or use, at the rate I'm going.

(And isn't the food chain an odd analogy to be using? I heard it at work on Friday; the boss was talking about the food chain at hospitals, where the nurses and doctors on the wards have one set of interests -- say, reducing the number of corpses they produce -- whereas the board members and CEOs have a different set -- say, cutting costs. I just had this vision of a snooty hospital director swanning down to ER to grab a couple of interns and a night nurse to barbecue for supper. Yummy!)

The cleverness of my work on the baronial site, by the way, is that everything I do there will also be useful on flurf.net without much extra work. So I hope to get a photo gallery of my own up and running soon, using the same logic as the Politarchopolan one. And when the officers' reports system is working, I'll be able to reinstate our old pre-LJ blogs. There's a lot of content sitting on Cephalopod, my external hard drive, that needs to get back onto teh intartubes where it belongs. Some time before the first anniversary of me replacing the old flurf.net, I hope to get it there.