I’ve updated my site, theoretically making it more secure based on the information over at BlogSecurity.  It looks like things worked, although if you see a glitch somewhere, please let me know.  I haven’t checked all of the comments pages, and there’s something annoying going on with the funny animals theme.  If I set that as the default, I get a bunch of headers errors on the back-end.  It is fine on the front, however, so I am ignoring it for now.  What else?  It would be nice to know how to change the default values in WordPress for the various variables.  The ones of most interest to me are stylesheet_url and stylesheet_directory, which I had to hard-code to the new locations based on the BlogSecurity advice.  Oh, and my google rss links aren’t working at the moment.  Grrr.

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I am going to be updating my site throughout the day during breaks from work, so if things aren’t looking quite right, that is because I’ve just hopelessly mangled the code.  Also, I am disabling my theme switcher widget, so you’ll all be stuck with whatever theme I am working on at the time.  So sorry.

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For other children, Marco-Polo and other games involve quickly determining who is "it" and then playing.  For my children, these are games of shouting "1!-2!-3!-4!-Not it!" and then arguing constantly over who was last.  This continues for thirty to forty minutes, or until everyone involved in the game has hurt feelings and nobody is speaking.  Kids are great.

 "I really would like to outfit them with shock collars."   This is my wife, having just called the kids to dinner seven times.  They feel, apparently, that if they dive underwater when being spoken to, that they do not need to listen.  I think the shock collars would be a bit drastic.  We should fill the pool with dirt and create another garden.  Then ground the kids until they are 23.

We have been discussing having more children, so figuring out a parenting style that works, injuring neither us nor the kids, would be good.  At present, our parenting style is great from the kids’ perspective, but leaves us fuming and at risk of strokes.  More children?  No!– we are not planning on getting knocked up, but rather trying our hands at foster care.  Surely, getting kids who are grateful to have a stable home life is how you end up with well-behaved children, right?  Or do we still need to figure out this whole parenting thing?

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From a distance, it looks like a leaf-hopper on steroids.  Up close, it is actually a predator. 

At ¼ to ½ inch, it is not that big.  Looking closer, it has front legs like a mantis, and a rostrum like a Pirate Bug, but even at 1/4 inch, they are way too big to be Pirate Bugs.  What the heck is it? 

It’s been way too long since I’ve had a biology course of any kind, and these guys are popping out all over the place in the back yard, catching bees, wasps, moths and anything else that flies or hops close enough to the flowers that they’ve staked out.  They grab their prey with their front legs, then stab it with their rostrum to suck out all the tasty juices.  Yum!  At least, that’s what it looked like when I watched one grab a small wasp this morning.

I will have more pictures up shortly, showing them in what they seem to like to do best: mate.  I have seen one eating, a few sitting around with their front legs folded in prayer, and the rest have been going at it like bunny rabbits with their big women.  Bug porn!

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Here’s another simple WordPress widget that I’ve thrown together.  It allows you to set a limit to the number of blogroll entries displayed, sort them by all valid sort fields and apply a sort order.  It is essentially just a quick way to get at a few of the wp_list_bookmarks() function.

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So I’ve been self-employed for a month now.  Other than the whole hassle of getting insurance and a very slow expense report reimbursement from my first customer, it is going well.  No more dealing with the idiocy of Autonomy’s U.K.-based management team is very nice indeed.  Now if I could only find insurance other than COBRA.

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Hello Kitty, fighting police corruption across the globe!

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I’ve just started using WordPress as my blogging platform and really like the widget plugins.  I also like the idea of letting users skin my blog using a theme switcher.  The first one I found was Ryan Boren’s Theme Switcher.  Unfortunately, it is not set up as a widget, but rather as plugin you manually add to the sidebar code.  That is just too much work for someone as lazy as me.  So, here is my slightly modified version as a standard widget.  You can add it to your wp-content/plugins directory, then go to Presentation-> Widgets and add it to your sidebar.  If you click on the configure icon, you can add whatever title you want (the default title is ‘THEMES’) and change from the default list to a dropdown.  Have fun.  I really didn’t do much work on this thing other than to grab some code off the ‘net to turn it into a widget. If there is somewhere that I should post it, somebody please let me know.

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I’ve updated my site. Yay! I forgot to do a screen capture of my old site. Boo! Anyway, here is the new and improved Oliphant Parts blog, running on WordPress rather than Moveable Type. It looks cleaner, although I haven’t decided if I like it yet. And to make things more exciting, I changed hosting providers, so half the time I get redirected to the old site. This should be fixed over the next few days, hopefully.

Interesting . . . one of my photos of Emmett is appearing all over the place (here, here, here, here, here, here and here). It looks like people like stealing my stuff. At least most aren’t like this genius here and try to take credit for the shot. It’s kind of fun tracking my stuff, although maybe it’s time to add some watermarks.

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