Pizza Diavola

More fluff. I’ve been withdrawing a bit–after some heated conversations, I’m thinking it’d probably be the better part of wisdom to pull back from election ‘08 conversations and try to set some boundaries for myself. I don’t do a very good job of arguing with people politely and that’s a problem for me.

How do you manage blogging (reading, commenting, and writing), work, and other aspects of real life? Lately I’ve been thinking that there just isn’t enough time in the day. There isn’t enough time to work, read the news, read online, read books, participate in comment threads, write, cook, exercise, keep up with friends, shower, and sleep. How do you apportion time and stay on top of everything? This week was unusual in that I was out four out of five nights (work on Monday, friends on Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday) and events at work required frantically trying to catch up on new projects while keeping abreast of the ones I was already on. Still, I don’t expect things changing much. So how do I go about squeezing everything into one day?

Photos below the cut. I miss photography. It made me look at the world differently and spending time in the dark room was soothing. After I get my 35mm fixed, I’d like to start taking pictures and printing again. For now, though, I’m stuck with the camera on my phone. It’s surprisingly convenient, because I always have it on me and it’s much smaller and lighter than my point and shoot digital, which is unreliable and erratic these days, and the 35mm.

20 minutes later: OK, is it just me or is anyone else having a hard time posting photos in WordPress’ new template? The old layout used to be intuitive and nigh on idiot proof for uploading photos and inserting them into posts and now I’m having a hard time doing it with the new layout. It’s also stupid that there’s no way to batch upload photos or even upload them at all in the ‘manage photos’ tab on the dashboard. It makes no sense to only allow photo uploads through the ‘Add media’ link that shows up in the writing a post window.

5 minutes later: Great. Upload photos, open the ‘manage media library’ in a separate tab, click on the images to get their URLs, then insert the photos into the post using their URLs. Preview post to find out that due to the width constraints on the text column of this template, the photos get chopped in half. Briefly consider resizing all images in Photoshop and making them links to full size versions of the images. Give up and open a Flickr account.

10 minutes later: Flickr has a nifty photoblogging setup, where it takes care of all the image resizing and linking to full size images for you. However, it doesn’t look like it’s set up for posting a whole bunch of images in one blog post, which is what I want. I’d like to do a ‘week of random images’ thing rather than a photo post a day. ARGH.

5 minutes later: finally got the stupid ‘Add media’ interface to work, sort of. I think it takes care of the resizing problem because it has options to choose posting the photo as a thumbnail, medium size, or full size. It’s going to require a better internet connection than the one I have now, though, because when I try to use the interface, it freezes. I may have to give up and start paying AT&T $30/mo for DSL and dealing with the headache of a router.