For you iPhoners and other outwardly-mobile types, we now have a .mobi version of OOA. It’s at:
If you prefer to read Out of Ambit’s mirror blog at LiveJournal mirror (“Word Salad II”), we’ve got a mobile version of that too:
Have fun!
As the year winds down, it seems like a good time to upgrade OOA to a newer version of WordPress so that “blogging as usual” can resume after the New Year.
With this in mind, please note that, starting now, OOA will probably be acting strangely — or may go missing entirely — until the upgrade completes some time over the upcoming week. Also, the “look and feel” may change without warning as our webmaster Lee tests out new themes.
Thanks.
On the delightful John Scalzi’s last list of his 51 best personal writers’ blogs in SF and fantasy, OOA ranked 49th. Now it seems we rank 36th.
Well, coolness, but don’t ask me why. (And don’t ask me whether I’m SF or fantasy, either. I prefer to saddle the Great Divide and confuse everybody possible, including myself.)
Thankyouthank you, anyway, everyone. And to all of those of you who’ve just stumbled in here because we turned up in John’s post, welcome. Here you will find discussions of baking, astronomy, interesting video, weird noises, the occasional dose of medicine, and (gasp) even the occasional rumination on writing.
(It does say Out of Ambit, after all…)
[tags]Scalzi, Technorati, whatever, science fiction, fantasy, personal, blog, weblog, Diane Duane, Out of Ambit[/tags]
We interrupt this morning’s business (draining the fishpond to give it a much-needed cleaning and tend to the aquatic plants, and repeatedly going out to use the slingshot to scare off the starlings that are trying to nest under the roof above the window near my desk…) for an announcement about things that are going to start happening around here on the online end of things. Particularly this: now that DianeDuane.com is starting to look like something, I’m going to begin moving numerous other online bits and pieces over there…the main one being the weblog.
“Out of Ambit” has (as you may have noticed) been reincarnated as the WordPress blog you’re looking at now. The present Blogger version will remain where it is at outofambit.blogspot.com for some time, probably several months, until I can get all the old posts imported over here and get the WordPress edition looking and working the way I want. Then the Blogger address will probably be frozen, with a final forwarding post. The new OOA will have a lot less of the sidebar stuff that’s crept in over time (and which has made it slow to load): those frills and furbelows will mostly be moved into other locations at DianeDuane.com, where they won’t get so much in people’s way.
Meanwhile, the “Word Salad” blogs at dduane.livejournal.com and www.journalfen.net/users/diane_duane/ will stay right where they are, and “Out of Ambit” will link to them. And links to the other websites I care for (such as European Cuisines) will be added to all the weblogs. As Peter would probably say had he not been up all night writing, “Interconnectivity rules OK.”
None of this is going to happen overnight. I just thought it would be smart to give people a heads-up so that they won’t be unduly concerned when things start vanishing and turning up in strange new places.
Now back to the fishpond, where I will shortly be ankle-deep in mulm. (Isn’t that a great word? It’s used among fish-keeping people to describe the horrible glop that collects at the bottom of the aquarium. ‘Organic materials”, says one fishkeepers’ guide with an airy wave of its hand…but that definition covers a whole lot of ground. In an outdoor pond, it means rotted leaves, decaying water plants, infallen dirt, and, you guessed it, fish poop. Fortunately it doesn’t smell really bad, but it’s icky. In an aquarium you usually get rid of it by siphoning. In an outdoor pond, you drain the thing, and then bail or scoop out whatever remains…then scrub with a stiff brush, and rinse down, and bail again… What a lovely day I have ahead of me. Euuuuuuu.)
I’m going to be testing an application called BlogJet that lets you post to multiple weblogs while working offline. Let’s see how this goes…
It looks as if the import of messages (though not comments) from Blogger to WordPress has gone OK. So now I can get on with other things, like refilling the fishpond (it’s clean now, thank Ghu) and finishing up the last work on chapter 3 of The Big Meow.
(Insert here a small restrained “yippee”, conditional on how fast the aspirin starts to work. Dealing with the plants around the pond has left me with a minor crick in the back.)
Now that DianeDuane.com finally has a server, over the next couple of weeks I’m going to start stripping some of the less bloggish stuff out of OOA, including the ancillary blogrolls and linklists, and relocating them over on the website. So things here may disappear abruptly, or look very weird, while I’m restructuring stuff. Apologies for any inconvenience.
(sigh) The graphic above (which occurred to me very early this morning) is the only worthwhile thing I’ve gotten done today. (If you like it you can get one here: we have a tea one, too.) Everything else has been about sick cats. If you’re not a cat person, or feeling sympathetic, skip this blog entry….
Goodman — the all-white cat and the middle-ranked of our three males — found and ate something bad, early in the week, in his wanderings through the countryside. He came down with a terrible case of diarrhoea, went off his food, and initially stopped drinking as well: then the drinking picked up again, so we thought at first he was getting better.
But he wasn’t. He got very dull and lethargic, and was completely disinterested in food — so much so that when I offered him steak one night, he just stood there and stared at it.
When that happened, on Tuesday, I said to Peter, “He goes to the vet tomorrow.” And that’s what yesterday was about. Taxi rides, moaning unhappy cats, sitting around in waiting rooms full of greyhounds, waiting for blood work and other tests to get done, etc etc. Finally our vet told us that Goodman had enteritis — no surprise there — and he stuck him full of pain relievers, anti-diarrhoeics, and cortisone, and sent him home. “Bring him back tomorrow,” our vet said.
So we got up early this morning and did that. Goodman was already significantly improved over his condition just twelve hours before, though the diarrhoea was still a little bit with him (and we’ve had to follow him around the house with paper towels mopping up the occasional leak). Today he had some more shots, and we were given some diet food for him, and we came home again and relaxed a little in hopes that things would get back to normal.
Until we saw that Mr. Squeak, the senior male, who’s been working on extending his territory by the most straightforward method — by beating up on the male cat who lives down the road about a quarter mile from here — had started to limp. At first we thought it was a sprain. But a little while ago I got a whiff of him, realized that whatever else they may do, sprains don’t smell, and took a few minutes to check out his side more carefully. Turns out he’s got an infected bite or other wound buried under all that thick Norwegian-forest-cat fur, where he can’t get at it to clean it, and it’s paining him so much that it’s hurting him to walk…and enough that he won’t let us clip the fur to get at it and and clean it up. So now Squeak has to go to the vet first thing in the morning…get sedated, have the wound cleaned up, possibly stitched, get some antibiotics…
Ah well. In the good news department, for those of you who were asking, there are some more hardcovers of Wizards at War available in the bookstore. (There are some more advance readers’ copies as well, but I have to go into the store and add them.)
Oh, and for those who were asking how I manage to follow baseball season in Europe? It’s these guys — NASN, the North American Sports Network. They have a pretty fair schedule once the season gets going. (wry look) I wish that was right about now…
For those who might be interested, we’re in the middle of restructuring the Young Wizards CafePress store. Things are getting moved around, old designs are getting spruced up or dumped, and a lot of new designs are being installed to take advantage of the much wider range of products available since the store opened up in ’03.
Just added: a couple of T-shirts that appear in Wizard’s Holiday and Wizards at War — Roshaun’s “Fermilab” T-shirt and Sker’ret’s “Will Do Magic For Food” shirt. Also, there’s an entire section devoted to various sorts of Wizard’s Oath material, which people have repeatedly been asking for.
(Also: CafePress is just now rolling out its API. As soon as I can figure out how, I’ll install an RSS-fed box on OOA so those interested in such things can see what’s new in the store without blog posts being required.)
The first of the Transcendent Pig items are up in the store now. Some more stuff will go up later after I’ve finished remasking the image for output on white things.
For those of you who were asking, I should have the masking issues on the black T-shirts sorted out by this afternoon — check the YW CafePress store then.
There’ll also be a few other items — mousepads, etc (including the new WizPod design). I’m still undecided about the merits of a TP chef’s apron. 😉
More later.
For those inquiring about the new Transcendent Pig items in the YW.com CafePress store: the T-shirt will be ready in a day or so. (The basic design is here.) The “Got Pig” mug is there already, but I may do another design or two.
All praise to Ursula Vernon, whose work this is! (And yes, of course she gets a cut of the profits. A significant one.)