Tiny Tragedy (a play in three acts)

Act I
October
I ordered a lovely print off DeviantArt when they were having a free shipping sale (even to Canada!). My print arrived, and all was good, except I didn’t have a frame or anything for it, and I didn’t want to just hang it naked. 12″x18″ is a hard size to find, apparently, though this may be because I didn’t go to any real framing stores because I couldn’t afford them. I just looked all over, and then kept an eye out anywhere that sold frames.

Act II
Present day
I was at Michaels Arts & Crafts (in Hamilton) for an unrelated purpose, and while I was there I found a 13×19 frame. Joy! I figured that was close enough; I could centre the poster inside it, and if I was lucky, the black paper inside the frame would match closely enough to the black background of the print that the frame would look filled in when it was hanging on a wall. A while later, I found a 12×18 frame! More joy! It was even 50% off! I put the 13×19 back, and bought my 12×18, feeling very good. I was going to be able to hang my print!

Act III
I got home, carried all the other stuff into the house (the trip was actually to head to IKEA with my Christmas gift certificate to get a table from the front hall) and then ran into the living room. I tore open the wrapping on the frame and unlatched the back. This was going to be so great! I pulled the poster from the protective plastic and carefully placed the poster into…

… into the…

…frame…

It didn’t fit! Tragedy!

The poster is 12×18, but the frame most decidedly is not. It’s more like 11.5. The 12×18 designation isn’t an outer measurement, either, since the frame itself measures about 13″ wide.

Now I have a fake 12×18 frame and have nothing to put into it, and I have an actual 12×18 print without a frame. *sad face*

Flickr or Self-Hosted?

I’m trying out taking a photo every day for January. So far so good, but I haven’t done anything with them. We’ll see how long this lasts. So far, most of the photos are boring.

I’m trying to decide between posting them here in my Gallery, or posting them in my Flickr account.

Do you prefer viewing photos on Flickr or on a personal website?
Do you prefer using Flickr or a personal website to post your photos?

If I use Flickr, there are many, many ways to integrate my gallery with my WP blog. Plus it’s super lazy and easy to upload and sort photos on Flickr. With groups and tagging, there’s even a chance that more than 3 people would see my photos! Not that my photography is awesome or anything, I just like comments.

If I keep my photos here, I’ll have to change to a new host. I’ve been with this host for years, and I’m ridiculously brand loyal, but there’s just not enough space to start hosting lots of photos. Upgrading to a new package here isn’t very beneficial, so it would pretty much have to involve switching to a new host. This blog is on Modhost.com. Everything else I own (except SKS) is on DreamHost because of the practically limitless space. I just don’t like the DH control panel interface. I much prefer cPanel, otherwise I’d have packed up off this server years ago.

This sort of ties in with my website amalgamation post, in that I’m still trying to determine the direction I want to go with my website(s).

What do you think? Flickr or self-hosted Gallery? I even made a poll! Come to RaspberryPaws.com to vote!

WordCamp Toronto

Anyone interested in going to WordCamp Toronto with me on March 27-28th?
(Their website doesn’t have all the info on it yet, unfortunately)

It’s like a conference about WordPress, blogging, and networking. I’ve never been to one and I want to go. It would be even more fun to go with a buddy, though!

Website Amalgamation?

Long, random thoughts that have been floating around in my head for a while.

I have several websites. RaspberryPaws, CaitlinThompson, ClutterCubed, and KittenFoot, to name a few. RP is my personal blog. CT is my so-called “official” website (for when I’m all famous and stuff, eh?), C3 is my public decluttering blog (128 feed readers!), and KF was supposed to be my cosplay portfolio/gallery website (but it sucked and died).
I have 15 domains total, but in this post I’m not talking about the ones I have for my mom, the ones I bought because of a ‘great’ idea that I never had time to pursue, the one for Josh that he never uses anymore 🙁 *cry* or Con-G, or the ones like KittyHats.com and SpunkyKittyStyle.com that both redirect to SpunkyKitty.

Ok, fine, I’m a total packrat in all aspects of my life, including domain names. That’s not the point of this post (really).

I’d like to compile at least the first four together somehow. I’m just not sure how, yet.
When I post comments in blogs, I sometimes have a hard time deciding which domain to put in the optional URL field. Sometimes I want to promote my decluttering blog, but sometimes I wouldn’t mind if people looked at my personal blog here. CaitlinThompson.com is kinda languishing, but it’s the URL I stuck on my twitter account when I created it. It got a whole bunch of hits when I got that retweet from Adam Savage, but the content is not very relevant anymore.

I like the general idea of what Gord has done, but I’d like more information on the main splash page.
I could easily compile all the information together into one site under one URL, but I’m loath to lose the names RaspberryPaws.com or CaitlinThompson.com. I haven’t yet decided if that’s irrational or not. KittenFoot I’m thinking of killing entirely anyway, since it’s the most useless. I’d rather have a cosplay section on an existing site than a standalone cosplay site.

Maybe I’ll set up CT as the “main” site. I could have it display its current info (plus hopefully something that doesn’t suck), and excerpts from RP and C3 posts. I’m not sure I could do that without getting dinged for “duplicate content”, but I’m sure there’s some way around that.

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Tales of encouragement/woe? Let me hear it!

DTAC Recap

I had lots of fun at DTAC yesterday!

I drove down with yesterday morning and met up with everyone there. I parked my car at the Kipling subway station and we took the subway downtown. It’s way cheaper than parking downtown, and way less stressful. Well, usually less stressful. 😛 More on that later.

The con was really fun! It’s really mainly a LobbyCon, where most people just hang out in the hallways and don’t pay admission. Admission is only charged if you want to get into the Dealer’s Room or into the panel rooms. If you just want to hang out and have fun with fellow cosplayers, there’s no admission enforcement.
We got to meet up with Dr. Holocaust again, which is always really fun. He’s such a nice guy evil supervillain.

We met up with Mark from ConBravo! and got our half of the joint Con-G/ConBravo! printed flyers. They look really snazzy, and I’ll have to scan one in later to show everyone.
We gave out lots of those! I don’t have exact numbers, but “lots”. At least a few hundred, anyway, plus the ones that the ConBravo! peeps gave out. Plus we still have loads leftover to put at The Dragon and whatever.

paid admission to enter the Dealer’s Room and give flyers to the dealers there and talk to them about being dealers at Con-G 2010. In terms of benefiting Con-G, it was worth the $10 to get in, but in terms of being allowed into the Dealer’s Room adding to my con experience it wasn’t worth the $10. 😛

While we were there, though, we picked up volumes 1-16 of the Fullmetal Alchemist manga that will be the second half of Con-G’s donation to the Guelph Public Library.

After the con was fun too. had to leave early, but I went out to The Old Spaghetti Factory for dinner with Draco, Tom, Other Caitlin, Aesees, some guy I forget (sorry, dude!), and Mark.
Dinner and the company was awesome! Leftovers for lunch today FTW.

After dinner was kind of a mess.
We went back to Union Station ~8ish and hung out chatting for a while. Draco was originally going to take the subway back to Kipling with me (since I’d have to carry all the Con-G stuff) and then I’d drop him off at his place and then go home.
Mark offered to give us a ride to Kipling, and Other Caitlin and some other guy (a different other guy 😛 ) a ride to one of the GO stations. He set out with Aesees to pick up his car (her car was closer, she’d drive him to his car and he’d come back for us) at 8:25 and told us to meet him outside in about 10 minutes.
Toronto being what it is, about 15 minutes later Other Caitlin, Draco and I went outside to look for him. In a span of a bout 2 minutes, not only did we not find him, but we were accosted 3 people who just needed “a few dollars for the bus home”, including a guy who yelled and swore at us. Great. As we went back inside, we saw that guy being talked to by security.
We went back into Union to wait, but of course none of the people left there had Mark’s cell number. It was getting later and later, with periodical sweeps outside to see if Mark had arrived. The guys did the sweeps after that, since they at least tend to only get accosted for money.

By 9:30 we were getting really worried. We wanted to leave (taking the subway/GO respectively as originally planned) but we didn’t know what had happened to Mark, and didn’t want to just leave him hanging if he did eventually show up. I had texted and Christian for Mark’s number. Christian replied that he didn’t have it.
We planned to do one more sweep, then the subway people would leave, and then the GO people would leave at 9:45 when their train arrived. Tom would hang out for about a half hour after that (if it came to it) to keep and eye out for Mark and let him know what was happening.
On our final sweep before enacting that plan, Mark arrived. By that time it wouldn’t actually save any time for the GO people, so they stayed to catch the train at Union and Draco and I went with Mark.
We both got his cell number.
Apparently what had happened was a huge cab cluterfuck when they got Aesees’ car and had t wait 10 minutes so they could pull out of the parking lot without getting smashed by a cab. The Mark got his car, and was promptly pulled over the the police because his right blinker was out. He got talked to for a while, but I don’t think he got a ticket, just a warning. That’s why he was so ridiculously late.

We drove around for a while looking for Draco’s place, since no one had a firm idea of how to get there from Union by car. We saw a big fire (?) on Dundas that had 5 fire trucks and 2 police cars. We didn’t actually see a fire or anything, though, but I heard on the radio this morning that there had been a big fire on Dundas last night.
replied about this time with Mark’s cell number, lol. ^_~
After Draco was dropped off, Mark took me to the Kipling station a little while after 10, and I went home, arriving by 11pm. 😛

It was still fun, but I wasn’t planning on the extra adventures. ^_~ I’ll post photos later when I get the chance.

Sick

Home sick in bed.

Feel like crap. Sad, cold, painful crap.

Unsafe for me to be in a car, let alone drive one right now. (Now there’s a lovely mental picture for you)

No fever (97 degrees, WTF?).

Josh thinks I’m reacting to my flu shot, but I think it’s too late for that to be happening since I had that done early Friday.

I think it’s something I ate; something that hates me. All I ate yesterday was some bacon and eggs (bought fresh that morning), some Pringles (which I’ve been eating for years) and a bowl of Alpha-Bits (also been eating for years… and also on weekday mornings for the past couple weeks).

I’m curled under the duvet and have the mattress heater cranked up, but I’m still freezing. Also WTF.

I need to feel better soon since I have 130ish samples coming in from the West alone today, plus whatever from Ontario. ie. More than can be done in a day, so I need to get back ASAP.

Blurgh.

Sleep now.

Pray. For. Mojo.

Family Tree Software

Has anyone made a family tree site, and/or have any suggestions for some cheap, simple software for creating one?

I’m considering making a site for the Brown side of my family. Every year we have a Christmas Reunion, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of everyone (people marrying/changing names/having kids/etc.). We do a gift exchange, and it’s hard to keep up with any changes. For example if you’re told you got “Jennifer Michaels” as the person to buy a gift for, you may not remember that it’s the person you know as Jenny Brown who recently got married, or that Alex Brown is a 4 year old girl, and not the 13 year old boy you were thinking it was.

Ideally, the software could have more than one user, so I could enlist the more tech-savvy of my relatives to update their own info. PHP and SQL is preferable.

I’d like to make the go-to site for the Who’s Who in the Brown family, but I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. I know there are several commercial sites out there that will host a family site like this, complete with a family tree showing how everyone is related, but since I’ll likely be alone in this, I don’t want to pay $50/year out of my own pocket for a site that’ll likely only be accessed in December when people scramble to try and pick an appropriate gift for the exchange. Plus, I don’t really want another site to have to follow all the time (like Facebook, blurgh) so I don’t want to have a gallery, or individual status updates, or any of that other social media stuff.

Contacting Professors

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to go about contacting professors and seeing if they are interested in taking on a Masters student?

Is it better to just send a polite “request for information” type email, or a “Hello, I’m Caitlin and I’m awesome and you should be my Masters Advisor, let’s meet to discuss this” email?

To toss a wrench into the works, my university grades were less than stellar. I had an 89% overall GPA at Seneca, with a 92% for the last year, but my UoG grades are… not as pretty. Which, if you’re wondering, no, I don’t like admitting. I’m hoping my shiny smile and real world experience will make up for that part (and have it on good authority that one of the current PopMed MSc students has a 0 on his transcript, so it’s not all about the grades, despite what the Grad Calendar says).

—– long back story follows, if it’s tl;dr, please just reply to the above, thanks! —–

I was out for lunch with my awesome boss and her friend from UoG the other day, and this friend gave me three (!) names of profs to contact about being an MSc Advisor. Holy crap wow, she’s now my new favourite person. 😀

I was feeling a bit down on the whole Masters thing, since going to the info day and poking around the Graduate Calendar was rather discouraging to how I was envisioning this process. Ideally, I’d like to keep my full time job (because it is made of awesome and win) and go to school part time for a couple more years and at the end get a piece of paper with a higher degree than I currently have on it. I’m not interested in being the type of MSc student that’s chained in their lab for 16 hours a day for $20k a year (I already have a better job, thanks). And I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly interested in writing/defending a thesis. I just want to learn. (and get that dangling carrot)

Anyhoo, it was looking less and less likely that that was even a possibility, based on the rules and procedures in the Calendar and looking at what other MSc students were doing.
Then at lunch the topic swung around to whether or not I’d done a post-grad degree, and I said I’d like to. My boss said they were trying to convince me to keep my full-time job while I did it, and I quipped that first I needed to convince the school to let me do it that way. Friend-of-my-boss seemed confused that they wouldn’t, and I admitted I hadn’t actually talked to any profs because I thought doing it that way wasn’t actually feasible. She said that was exactly what some profs look for in a Masters student. We talked briefly about what type of MSc I was interested in (Epidemiology in the Population Medicine department of the OVC – in part due to my new interest in the dairy industry) and she mentioned there was an Epidemiology By Course Work MSc (which I knew) and gave me some names to contact (which is awesome), and said basically all I’d need to do is convince someone to be my MSc Advisor and then I could do it roughly the way I’m picturing.

So now I have to actually contact these people, and I don’t want to screw it up. Yikes! o_0