September 2009 Archives

Yep, another entry within 7 days. I know, it's rare, but it happens occasionally. I'm usually the type to post about random celebrity affairs, but I feel that this is appropriate:

Sorry, I just had to do it. Anyway, yeah. With all the madness between Kanye West and Patrick Swayze, it's been a little strange this weekend. Especially between Twitter and Facebook. I can't turn on my computer or blackberry without finding something about either Kanye, Lady Gaga (still haven't seen her performance), or Patrick Swayze (btw, for those who haven't gotten it yet, he died, and he will be missed).

So my Tuesdays kind of own. I didn't do it on purpose, but I have no class until 1:15 (pm). It's pretty rad, actually. And even then, all I have is a physics discussion, then English (which is interesting), and then a break until 6pm when I have a 3 hour Debate class, in which currently we are just going over the various regulations and such. Once that's over, we'll migrate to meeting on wednesdays at 5:50, and actually debate. I really enjoy my Tuesdays. Most importantly, though, I can sleep later :D

Wait, so I am actually enjoying an English class? Yes, yes I am. It's all about analyzing how different people perceive literature scientifically. For the last few classes we've just been talking about whether or not it's possible to study literature from a scientific point of view, and how everybody has a different "lens" through which they read literature. Our class on Thursday ended with a rather enthusiastic discussion about whether or not art is dying out because all possible ideas have already happened, and people have to look for new, crazier ways to be "artistic" (read: lady gaga). I, of course disagreed. There are always people that tend to have crazy ideas about what "art" is, exactly, but it doesn't mean that everything's already happened. We're constantly discovering new technologies, and with that comes new ways to use the technology, hence new art. What the synthesizer did to music is just one example. Computer animated movies, for instance, are becoming more popular with Pixar creating such masterpieces as Wall-e and UP. Not to mention 3D movies. And who knows what'll happen in the next 10 years. One argument was that music today is using samples from older music, and we don't have a distinct style for the 2000's, which is bullshit. In about 2015, the style for the 2000's will have become apparent, just like the style of the 90s has become apparent. It doesn't matter that music is using samples from older music. Music has always been inspired by past music, and in the days of classical music, plenty of themes would be reused across all sorts of works. Not to mention the whole concept of "remixes" that has been around for a long time now.

Anyway, I'm done. I said I would stop doing these sort of closing paragraphs, but whatever. This is one of those useless closing paragraphs. And Scott, if you're reading this, you need to blog too, man.

So today I decided I wanted to try to revive this blog for my longer postings. LouisC.com will still be used for all sorts of random bullshit I find on the internet, but here I plan on posting, like I always have, about day-to-day stuff that I do, as well as some useless shit I find on the internet, but more in depth.

One thing you've probably noticed, is the new design. It's a default Movable Type theme. I'm way too lazy right now to redo the CSS to make it my own quite yet, but I'll get around to it sometime soon. This is all because I've made the switch from Wordpress to Movable Type. Basically, it all comes down to speed and security. Wordpress requires updates all the time because of new, crazy bugs that tend to be utterly ridiculous. I used Wordpress in the past because MT required a fee and WP was a brand new thing that looked amazing. However, I can barely recognize the code anymore. It's a completely different beast, and Movable Type is just so much more feature rich, even before you get into the plugins (which, admittedly, WP has more of). Because MT's pages are mostly static (and designed to be mostly static, unlike the silly WP-SuperCache plugin), they should load at least a little faster.

The trickiest part of the switch was getting the database over intact. MT and WordPress are very different behind the scenes, and MT doesn't really offer a database import. Basically, you export everything from WP to a file, and then upload the file (it's Enhanced RSS or whatever, not mysql) to MT, which then makes sense out of everything. There were a few entries that were misplaced, but I grabbed the original times from WP and fixed them. Also, I needed to delete a few comments. They were very insignificant, otherwise I would have put more effort into fixing the timestamp (which MT wouldn't let me do for some reason).

So that about wraps it up. To comment here now, I believe you need to log in. Movable Type supports logging in via Wordpress.com, Facebook, AIM, Yahoo, Google, whatever. It's a nice deterrence against spam, so yeah. I should be able to post again soonish. My twitter updates are in the tab on the left side of the screen. If I don't update in like a week, feel free to poke me there, or by leaving a comment here.