Author Archives: Alan V

Happy New Year

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So it’s 2012. That’s not allowed. How does such a year even exist? :(

life (both stats and life proper) have been updated. People didn’t change much in the last 3 months, so the stats update isn’t terribly interesting.

Life has been full of new music lately. My purchases over the past month have included Mylo Xyloto, Break the Spell, Own the Night, Redemption, Clear as Day, Don’t Waste the Pretty, and Kelly Clarkson’s iTunes Session.
I probably should branch away from American Idol contestants (especially since I haven’t watched the show since season 2, and don’t really follow it). There’s a lot of other great music out there.

Did some more work with the Investigations card game. I revamped the rules a bit (so it’s less like Memory now, with a grid of cards laid out), and hopefully it’ll be shorter to play now. A preliminary (and currently incomplete) website for the game is up at http://investigations.alanv.org. If you have some time, read over the rules and let me know if they make sense. :)

This break has been way too short. More time to vegetate needed. :(

Groceries

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There was a Christmas. It was nice. I got some iTunes gift cards, which I used to buy Kelly Clarkson’s new EP. We also got a really nice toaster oven to replace our crappy half-broken toaster (and so I can bake without heating up the huge oven).

Relatedly, I bought and watched Food, Inc. about a month ago, and it’s pretty much changed everything about how I eat.
I’m buying almost exclusively organic fruit and vegetables now (and generally buying and eating more of them than before). I’ve switched away from the “cheap” pork and beef to the turkey and free-range chicken. (Giant Eagle also has some grass-fed beef I think I’ll try soon.) I’ve started buying organic yogurt and free-range eggs instead.
Our grocery bill has gone up a bit, but for the first time in a long time, I’m feeling good about my purchases when I leave the store. Strangely, prices for organics are often only 20 to 50 cents more than the regular counterparts, when they’re not on sale. But I think buying fewer processed foods is what’s making the bill go up, since fresh produce is expensive (and also not usually on sale like the processed stuff is). It’s actually scary when you look at the labels on some packages, because something as simple as “corn meal” has like 10 ingredients. WTF, guys.

Good food is nice. I think it’s become one of the areas where it’s okay for me to pay a little more, because the quality of what you get is so much higher.

Not looking forward to going back to work on Tuesday. This break hasn’t been nearly long enough.

Birch Beer Cupcakes

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I made cupcakes. Recipe adapted from this one.

1/4c butter
1c white sugar
2 eggs
2c flour
1tsp baking powder
1/4tsp baking soda
1 1/4c birch beer

Melt butter, mix in sugar. Beat in eggs. Combine flour, baking soda, and baking powder, then mix into butter/sugar mixture with the birch beer.

Bake at 350 for 20 minutes. Makes 15 cupcakes.

I baked them in Pokemon cupcake liners, so I decorated them like Pokeballs with M&Ms as the centers.

Unrelatedly, Zeke linked me to this today. It’s SFW porn. It’s kind of amazing.
(Apparently the audio track is still present though, so mute your computer or something. I didn’t have sound on when I watched it.)

Life goes, still. Looking forward to the upcoming break. So much.

WordPress post format hackery

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So I’m in the process of converting Randomjunk over to a WordPress blog, since it seems the main thing I use it for nowadays is quotes (which used to be stored way down under my AIM subprofile that no one uses anymore).

After several hundred posts, I noticed that there was an option for post format, one of which was the “Quotes” type. Unfortunately, WordPress 3.2 mass edit does not include a way to mass update post formats. Therefore, to the SQL.

All of the posts I wanted to convert already had a tag called “Quotes”. Looking in the database in the wp_terms table told me the number of this tag.
SELECT term_id FROM `wp_terms` WHERE name='Quotes';
This ended up being 9.

I also got the term id for the post format I wanted.
SELECT term_id FROM `wp_terms` WHERE name='post-format-quote';
This ended up being 86.

Therefore, I just run this query on the relationships table:

INSERT INTO `wp_term_relationships`(object_id, term_taxonomy_id, term_order) SELECT object_id, 86, 0 FROM `wp_term_relationships` WHERE term_taxonomy_id=9;

I also needed to fix up the term_taxonomy table
SELECT count(1) FROM `wp_term_relationships` WHERE term_taxonomy_id=86;
gave me 337 rows, so
UPDATE `wp_term_taxonomy` SET count=337 WHERE term_taxonomy_id=86;

Done. Yay.