Okay. That took way too long, and I’m still not done, but I’ve finally reached a stopping point after spending all week updating my gallery (mostly just taking pictures of my non-digital art and organizing the crap out of everything). I also realized 2 really annoying flaws of Coppermine:

1. The order of pictures in albums has to be set globally, and you can’t set a custom order for the few that don’t match the majority (it’s currently only a per-user and per-session thing … wtf).
2. There’s no way to rename uploaded images.

This meant that in my flurry of activity, I forgot to name files in the order I’d originally created them, and as a result had to delete my whole portfolio, rename each file locally, and then reupload. And lose all my descriptions, view totals, and ratings, which = blah. Hopefully this post will bring back some of what I’ve lost?

All I need to do now is scan a couple autographs and export some jpegs on-campus (my laptop doesn’t have certain expensive fonts and is too slow for the trial version of InDesign), and then take pictures and scan a few things at home, and then I should be done. Oh yeah, and see if I can find any of my art that’s mysteriously not where I thought it was …

The Dante’s Inferno Test has banished you to the Seventh Level of Hell! Here is how you matched up against all the levels:

Lucky level #7 lol. Click here to take the test.

I just found out I’m one of the winners (5 total) of the most recent Hanson street team contest! My prize is the new coffee mug, and for the longest time I thought I didn’t win (as usual) ’cause I wasn’t emailed. But then I randomly checked the street team forum ’cause winners are almost always posted in the news and there hadn’t been anything yet for this contest, and lo and behold the “Street Team Podcast Subscription Contest Winners!” thread was staring back at me. After clicking and realizing I’d just won my first fan club contest (in 3 years of being a member), I proceeded to have a teenie moment

I’m glad I kept the Taking the Walk banner in my sidebar the past couple weeks, despite not being the best graphic ever or “going with” my blog. The $40 membership fee is finally paying off too — a free $25 coffee mug is something I’ll actually use!

So the long-awaited fourth studio album from Hanson, The Walk, was released in Japan on Wednesday and, like BWO and the rest of the Hanson fan world, I can’t stop listening and will be until I can pretty much recite the tracks from memory lol (specifically “Georgia,” “One More,” “Your Illusion,” and “Been There Before”) See official lyrics here — happy new music week to me!

I feel like I’ve discovered Hanson again … I heard the synth-pop band BWO (Bodies Without Organs) at work yesterday thanks to “Sixteen Tons of Hardware” on the awesome Swedish iTunes radio station, Soundic Radio, and I can’t stop downloading their videos and music. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I’ve been drooling over the lead singer, Martin, ever since the Open Door video Haha. Maybe it’s just ’cause he reminds me of Taylor.

Is it just me, or is this an amusing title for a book: Dying for a Hamburger: Modern Meat Processing and the Epidemic of Alzheimer’s Disease (I have a paper due on Tuesday about Alzheimer’s). But wait, there’s more — there are sections called “Mad Cows and Dead Englishmen,” “How Now Ground Cow,” and “Everything but the Moo.” And this is a serious book! Surprisingly, though, parts of it are relevant to my paper, so more power to Mr. Waldman and Ms. Lamb — they’re my new favorite people.

Half of the reason for this post is the new smilies I installed last night, and because 2 of them are Valentine’s Day-related, I figured I should use them now since I probably won’t anytime in the near future. And now I’m done with smiley overload

The rest of the reason for this post is the ice/snow storm we, like the rest of the Northeast, had last night. By midnight school was already closed, and there’s no telling what will happen tomorrow since the ice is still very present and frozen — I haven’t had 2 consecutive days of canceled school/work since maybe elementary school! Well, yesterday wasn’t technically closed, but I didn’t have to go to any of the required events, so yeah. I also learned my Scion doesn’t really work in the ice … despite the temperature being above freezing and lots of melting going on, it took me 30 minutes to hack my way through the ice on and around the car so I could run some errands, and then 30 more minutes to hack through different ice so I could get into the driveway … my wheels wouldn’t stop spinning trying to get back into my old space. So that sucked, and now my car is precariously parked on a sheet of ice — which I couldn’t have gotten through, no matter how hard I tried, with the crappy shovel I have — in the not very flat driveway, but I turned my wheels so that if it slips at all, it just goes into the yard Stupid ice.