rhymes with milk

I was about to write a post that I’ve been thinking about for a while now. Prompted by Avatar (then subsequently watching an Esurance commercial) I was going to come up with a list of cartoon females that are inexplicably attractive, then make some sort of commentary about how they’re actually very disproportionate and otherwise strange looking.

As I was doing research I unearthed a whole community of perverts that fantasize in cartoon. Deviant Art alone is full of half-nude insanely sexualized versions of some of these characters. There are no less than a dozen forums I stumbled upon that collectively had hundreds of posts just about that one time Aaron Diaz may or may not have drawn that one nude image of Kimiko Ross or if that was just fan art.

I should have seen all of this coming. How could I have been so naive as to assume the internet could be mature about a subject like this?  As I have come to figure out, the internet is anything but mature (don’t worry, it’s SFW).

Anyway, this all really turned me off from doing the post I originally set out to do, mostly because it could possibly but not-too-wrongfully associate me with those sad, sad men in a way I would not be okay with.  No thank you.

BTW, I was totally unsure which of the blog’s three main categories to put this post into. When I first came up with that list of categories, I assumed those three would pretty sufficiently define any thought I might ever want to put on here. I guess I never assumed I was going to be blogging about sad internet cartoon porn. Again with the naivety thing…

There are a few things in my life that I’ve had to come to terms with recently:

1. My thighs are much too big to ever fit into skinny jeans.
2. My head is much too big to fit into any sort of hat, even those worn by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the ’80s.
   
3. My feet are done growing, and will therefore never fit into the size 12s Andrew Childress wore in 4th grade.

Depending on your sources, I wear what is approximately the average shoe size for American males.  It baffles me when I buy socks that are supposed to fit shoe sizes 6-12 (mine are definitely in that range) and they’re about three inches longer than my foot from heal-to-toe.  I guess they “fit” my feet, but they sure as hell don’t fit properly. My best friend when I was 4 years old wore his knee-high tube socks with the last 4 inches drooping off his foot as if he didn’t tug quite hard enough when he put them on that morning.  The image still haunts me.  I can’t deal with baggy, slouchy, loose socks.

This is why I exclusively wear women’s socks. Even with small feet, these socks are so tight you think that you might not be able to get your foot all the way in the first time you try.  Then there’s a moment when your heal overcomes the crux and your foot virtually pops into place.  It goes home, safe, sound, and snug.  It breaths a sigh of relief.  It jizzes in its pants.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

I now have audio!

This is actually a plugin (the WordPress Audio Player, which only a few days ago came out with what I hear was a much-needed update), which is something WordPress does really well (plugins, that is). Finding, installing, and activating plugins is never more than a few convenient clicks away.  But of course, as has been my luck with this theme so far, it wasn’t as easy as that for me.

After installing and activating, I uploaded the above mp3 via FTP* and created a new post with the suggested [audio song.mp3] insertion format. I got a big fat error saying:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Flash is up-to-date and JS is enabled, so that wasn’t the problem.  Being that this is a fairly common error message to get with this plugin, I was able to find a lot of support in the WP forums. Many people suggested adding <?php wp_head(); ?> to the head section of the blog. This somehow triggers the plugin or something, and it fixed the problem for most people.  After adding it, a bunch of new code appeared in the head section of my source code, so I was hopeful that this solved it.

It didn’t.  Same error kept coming up.

And since it fixed the problem for most people, there was little support beyond that in the forums.  I downloaded another audio player that simply loads the WP Audio Player when you click on a link, and it had no problems.  Obviously it wasn’t a problem with my browser, Flash, or even my blog.  There was a problem with how the plugin was communicating with the theme (it actually worked just fine when I switched to the WordPress default theme).  Though most complicated PHP is over my head, I was forced to dive into the plugin’s main file ([PLUGIN DIR]/audio-player/audio-player.php) to see if I could spot where the error was being triggered.

Miraculously, I was able to decipher enough to figure out that the plugin was trying to add a small snippet of code to the page’s footer.  A light bulb went off when I saw that.  While doing research on what the wp_head() function does, I noticed somewhere that there was an equivalent wp_footer() function.  I put that into my footer.php file right before the </body> tag, and what do you know? I now have audio.

Slowly but surely this blog is coming together.

*WordPress also has a really simple media-upload tool built in which I would have used, but naturally I ran into roadblocks with it as well.  My server allows max upload sizes of 2MB by default, and after some research I was told to edit my php.ini file.  Using HostMonster’s PHP Config tool, I created a new default php.ini file and edited it accordingly.  It didn’t work.  I don’t know if I just have to wait for the changes to take effect or if it just didn’t work.  I guess I’ll try this if I still can’t upload bigger files by tomorrow.

UPDATE: I just uploaded a 6MB song, so apparently editing the php.ini file worked.

Welcome to the new year, the new decade, and the new Rhymes With Milk.

This last week has been full of reminiscing over the past ten years: the tragedies (9/11), the mistakes (Bush), the triumphs (Jon & Kate are off the air). Everybody has been very negative about it because they’re so fixated on all of the things that have gone wrong, so I’m done listening. I’m going to start looking forward, because this is bound to be a big next decade for me. I’m going to be my mid-thirties by the end of it. I’m probably going to be married, and have children and a mortgage. Who knows if this blog will still exist, but I sure hope it does.

In that vein, I’d like to layout some goals here. Not for the decade per se, a little more short-term than that, but still for the sake of posterity. Maybe on Jan 1, 2020 I’ll look back at this post and make myself feel sad about loosing my youth or something. Whatever.

Beyond posterity, I’m doing this for a few other reasons. I’ve set a lot of personal goals for myself over the last few years, and many have fallen horribly by the wayside for one reason or another. I’m hoping that publicly declaring them makes me more likely to pursue them. It might work, or it might not, but it’s worth a shot. Also, having a job has understandably distracted me from my personal life. I have fallen into a routine that essentially erases my weekdays, and makes me too tired on the weekends to do anything. For example, I have been “working” on this revised version of Rhymes With Milk since around August, and most of it got finished before I got my job and during my 4 day Thanksgiving weekend. It shouldn’t take me that long to do a relatively simple* website design, especially when it has been the top priority of my to-do list for that whole time. If I plan to get anything done ever again, I need to force myself to find the time to do it.

Anyway, here go the big ones:

1. I want to ride my bike. A lot. I am declaring it now, I am definitely going to ride all 120 miles of the Triple Bypass on July 10th. I’d also like to do the 100 mile Centurian the following week, but their website has too little info so far for me to be sure of that just yet.
2. I want to blog. When I stopped back in April 2009, I hated blogging. I stopped the Daily Picture Project, then I haphazardly put together an ugly and difficult to manage photoblog here on rwm which just drove me away from it altogether. These last few months, though, I’ve had a lot to say and nowhere to say it. Not that I have grand ideas that I think the world needs to hear. I just didn’t have a medium for exploring and processing subjects that I was interested in, or a place to record memories. This comes back to that posterity thing I was talking about earlier. I’d like to remember this decade, so starting today, January 1, 2010, I would like to start blogging, regardless of the fact that this site isn’t complete yet (just do me a favor and don’t go to the About or Contact pages. Or the permalink to this post. Or the archives. Well, actually go to the archives because they’re pretty cool looking, but ignore the fact that they don’t flow well with the rest of the site. And ignore the link colors in the archive, which I messed up somehow. I’ll have to fix that. If only I had the time…)

   UPDATE: I just made a small adjustment to the archives and now they’re all outta whack. Don’t bother going there for a while…

*I’m just going to say right now that this website was actually a bitch to make, I learned a lot, and it really stretched my abilities, particularly in the realm of WordPress PHP programming. I didn’t add anything too particularly complicated compared to “real” WordPress themes, but I went into it knowing hardly anything about the WordPress back end and coded everything from scratch.  There was a lot head scratching and “What the hell is this stupid loop everybody is obsessed with?” talk for the first month or two. Oh how naïve I was.