Anyone who’s been following the new Battlestar Galactica has undoubtedly crinkled their brow at one particular bon mot invented by the show’s writers: frack. The genius of this move is indisputable: take a gibberish word, add context, and let that off-color dollop of yogurt between your viewers’ ears transform it into an obscenity with a minimum of training.
Observe:
“The cylons look like humans now? What the frack?!?”
“This mission is a fracking nightmare!”
“Frack you!”
Ta-da! You can now enjoy primetime television programming, complete with actual adult conversations, cursing and all!
Let this be a lesson to the FCC that no matter how you try to regulate obscenity, the human brain can make anything into a dirty word. Until the time when they figure that out and implant us all with thought monitors, perhaps it’s time to update the classic treatise on the versatility of the human language?
The blog has been a bit stagnant for the moment, but I was dealing with transitioning from MovableType to WordPress. I’ve met Matt Mullenweg on a couple of occasions and I figured it was time I give his team’s software a shot. One word describes my reaction to WordPress: wow.
Matt’s tag line for WordPress has been “Code is Poetry”, and after seeing the software in action it is an apt motto. In the past, I spent a fair amount of time cobbling together a solution that would address not only my blogging needs, but also my resume and portfolio of personal projects. The combination of MovableType and server-side includes gave me a consistent look, but not a consistent way of working with my site. I edited the blog via the MovableType interface, and individual project pages with a text editor. Ugh.
With WordPress, all of that has changed. Now I can manage blog posts and pages all from within WordPress, all with the same look and feel. Not only that, but with the new K2 theme (still in beta) I don’t have to spend a lot of time mucking about getting a clean look-and-feel. A couple plugins here and there, and poof!, a nice looking website.
Now, that said, it wasn’t all easy. The script to import MovableType entries was a little shakey – I ended up having to whip together a script to explode the file exported by MovableType and import entries individually. I also had a bunch of non-XHTML cruft I needed to clean up in my old blog entries, as well as write a bunch of redirects in my .htaccess to ensure a smooth transition. Of course, there’s still work to be done – I’ll still have to tweak the CSS over the next little while to adjust the color scheme (but it’ll be way less work than I had to do before). And I’ll be installing the new version of Gallery to allow me to start hosting all my photos.
So, kudos again to Matt Mullenweg, Michael Heilemann, and Chris Davis. They have produced a truly beautiful combination.
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