General

Running in a dream

As sung by Tom Petty (RIP).

Last night I dreamed that I was jogging along this lovely mountain trail. The sky was clear, but it wasn’t hot out. I had views that were nice, but not vertigo-inducing, of a bluff above, of alpine forest and a wide, flat valley below, where a lush savannah lay. Above the trail were a series of boulders that seemed to be shaped, possibly human-made. I remember clambering up to see what it was all about and recall water, so maybe some kind of reservoir? The dream was being a tease on this part.

In the savannah, I saw a hippo. Why a hippo, only my brain can say, and it ain’t talking. The hippo was the size of a house. There was also a house-sized chicken, though its proximity to the giant hippo was unclear. There might have been more chickens.

The bluff above made me think of the one in The Lion King, arching up to the sky, except instead of anthropomorphic lions capering about, there was a herd of giraffe gathering. I could see several of them hunkering down in a way that suggested they were getting ready to leap off the bluff, not like lemmings to their doom, but because they could fly. Of course.

This was a dream about my recovery from surgery.

This site, January 2005

Before I installed WordPress on this site, I coded up something in HTML for people to enjoy in the interim.

Here it is:

I believe that’s supposed to be a trademark symbol at the end that didn’t translate properly. But the page loaded superfast.

I remain an internet dork.

6,040 posts (as of April 29, 2026)

I started this blog with my first post on February 4, 2005 and as of this post right here, I now have 6,040 entries. I knew I was getting close to 6,000 but then kind of forgot about it until I saw another blog post talking about blogging (how meta), which made me check the stats here.

This averages to around 287 posts per year, or a little less than once per day, though if you check the posts widget on the sidebar, you’ll see my volume increased quite a bit starting around September 2015, when I began posting 1–2 times per day because I declared anything that popped into my head fair game to record here.

My posting pace started flagging a bit in the last few years for various reasons as life and other things distracted me, but I’m working on getting back into that “post anything” mentality, because some of my best/weirdest writing has come out of that.

I really want to end this with typing cat again, but I will resist.

Or maybe I’ll use a different typing cat instead!

My Classic Editor experiment ends after one day

It turns out I am so used to the default block editor in WordPress that the Classic Editor now feels alien and strange.

Going forward, I’ll adopt a compromise position by using the Classic block to emulate that old school feel when I need it.

For example, this paragraph is using the Classic block. I can go completely bonkers™ on formatting here if I want. And sometimes I do want.

And now, typing cat:

Trying the Classic Editor plugin in 2026

For a long time, I resisted using Gutenberg with WordPress. It’s the default block-based editor used for crafting your artisanal posts about kittens and retrocomputing.

Reducing every paragraph to a block that could be shuffled about was not very useful to me, since my site is an old-timey blog that is just lots of text and some photos and drawings. I don’t need sexy layout options and the need to move content around in convenient blocks has only ever happened a few times over many years.

I also disliked that Gutenberg turned paragraphs into monolithic structures, where only basic formatting could be applied. Sure, I could make things bold or italicized. But what if I wanted to make my text red because I had something alarming to say? Gutenberg doesn’t allow that.

So I’m trying the Classic Editor plugin. I’ll see how it feels to be doing WordPress again, pre-2018 style.

I need a new logo (2026 edition)

What the title says. The text logo is…fine, but it’s not even actual text, it’s an image of text. And it’s a little plain. I feel like I need to go all 2005 retro for this.

Although it does disturb me a bit that 2005 is now retro.

Here is one I whipped up in Canva a few years ago that I did not use, because even I have my limits:

The HNIC theme I never thought I’d hear again

Thanks to YouTube’s sometimes erratic algorithm, I was offered a video of the 1968 Hockey Night in Canada theme. Back in Duncan and growing up in the 1970s, HNIC was a Saturday night staple in our home, with the living room TV always tuned to the game. I’ve heard the theme song probably hundred of times, but the last time I heard it may have been the last time I watched HNIC, which was probably the mid 80s.

Until tonight. And hearing it again, I not only felt that intoxicating pull of nostalgia you get from childhood music, but it also struck me what a damn good theme it is. The brass section just blasts the thing. No wonder so many think of it as Canada’s unofficial second anthem.