I’ve been having a close look at WordPress lately. I’ve grown pretty tired of all the constant rebuilding every time you change a slight detail in MovableType — WordPress, on the other hand, is fetched from the database on demand and displayed dynamically.

I’ve set up a test installation of WordPress and I’m satisfied with it. I’ll switch to it in a couple of days. It can import entries and comments from MT, but it doesn’t have proper support for Textile 2 input yet. I’ll wait with the import until then. Unfortunately, this will break pretty much every permalink on the site. Sorry, can’t be helped. I should be able to redirect via mod_rewrite once the old MT entries are imported.

Now this has to be the most amusing spam I’ve ever recieved. Everything in it sounded so familiar, until I realized that it’s all random lines from Fight Club!

I’m evil. My job was to apply the formula. The continuation of our species matters more than you can imagine. It is the single most important thing we can do. It was cold and sweet.

(I’m loving the way you walk with me so quietly, contentedly.) The same thing we do every night, he replied. He wanted to know more. There’s something I should tell you.

(I’m loving the way you walk with me so quietly, contentedly.) But this was a long road, and should I walk down it, I might never come back. And for ten minutes, he was a hero. You can’t go up to the unit. Nobody’s allowed up there.

What are we going to do tonight? I asked. (Things were looking worse.) Are you getting pieces of this? A house full of condiments and no food. What is the answer?

…and I have no idea what they really wanted with that spam. There’s no sale pitch in it.

So this guy made a bet: he would eat nothing but baked beans for a month if Ashton Kutcher’s recent movie The Butterfly Effect made more than $40 million in its first 4 weeks.

I hope he enjoys his beans.

My female friends are disgusted, my male friends think it’s awesome and are rooting for me to get sick or starve, and my co-workers spent Friday dragging their desks to the far side of the office in an attempt to build bean bomb shelters.

I had a look at my Apache access logs and found a whole bunch of lines like these:

216.133.xxx.xxx - - [06/Mar/2004:18:36:02 +0100] “\x870″ 501 -
220.130.xxx.xxx - - [06/Mar/2004:20:58:33 +0100] “Y\x14\xdc\xa4N\x90T\xe22rRY5Q” 501 -
67.68.xxx.xxx - - [07/Mar/2004:01:04:54 +0100] “e\xc6\xed.\xfeE\xa8+\xcc\x0f\xe3\xbeu\xe3″ 501 -

Tons and tons of them. They clearly have a common pattern — groups of three letters/numbers separated by slashes, sometimes with additional characters in the letter groups.

Does anyone have any idea what this junk is? The first one appeared in the log on Feb. 27th, and the log is crawling with them since then, with IP addresses from all over the place.

I’m guessing it’s a recent worm, given the current virus war between stupid asshats who appear to have an average age of 11½.

So it’s that time of year again — the annual book sale at the end of February, when everybody and their grandmother and their grandmother’s dog and their dog’s grandmother stampede through all the bookstores hunting for cheap books.

Here’s my catch:

• XML Programming
• XML, DTDs and XSL Transformations
• Linus Torvalds, Just For Fun
• Antony Beevor, Stalingrad
• Per Nilsson, A Style Guide for Men

The Style Guide is fun to read. It contains tons of information every gentleman needs: instructions on how to fold your shirts, what your business cards should look like, the proper opening of a champagne bottle (with or without saber), what to never wear together with a smoking or tuxedo, and so on, so further.

It’s all written with a sharp tounge-in-cheek sarcastic style that keeps you smiling, and is filled with illustrations. The chapter on taking care of your clothes is called “Spotless” and starts with a picture of John Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, wearing a blood-stained suit (”Man, I shot Marvin in the face!”).

Also, picked up at SF-Bokhandeln the other day:

• Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
• Neal Stephenson, The Diamond Age

Yesterday I ordered another book as well: The Complete Manual of Typography by James Felici. I leafed through it at Akademibokhandeln, and realized that I must own this book!

I’ve studied graphical design for three years in school, and I found typography to be an interesting subject within graphical design. It’s a very important part of the layout, since the text is usually what you will spend the most time looking at.

Due to the lack of actual tail in the picture, I feel obliged to note that the post title is actually a song by Accessory.

This entry is mostly a test of Clagnut’s very nice CSS drop shadow.

Can’t quite get it to work. I’m guessing something else in my style sheet is colliding with the drop shadow CSS. I’ll work on it.

Update: All done. Finding the conflicting CSS was made so much easier with the help of EditCSS, an extension for Firefox. With it, you can edit the CSS of a page and see the changes right away. I just deleted one block at a time until I found the one that conflicted, and removed the conflict by making it refer to the parent instead of the paragraphs inside the parent.

It still doesn’t work in IE, though. But I don’t see that as my problem.

I finally did what I’ve been thinking about doing for a long long time: start with a martial art. So tonight I tagged along with Breki and started training wing chun.

It’s quite fun, and I got into it faster than I expected — the bong sao was easy to learn (though getting good at using it is a different matter), and I get the impressions that all the moves are pretty easy once you get the hang of it. I found the footwork to be a bit more complicated. I wanted to move around, but in wing chun you keep your feet pretty much rooted in place and move your upper body instead. That will take a while to get used to.

I instantly felt that a martial art was the right thing for me. I’ve never really been interested in going to a gym or starting with some sport, but wing chun clicked for me right away. This will be fun.