Kara’s Blog

I don't make New Year's resolutions, but if I did, one of them would be to blog more often. I fell out of the habit last year because I was so focused on finishing my new blog platform. Now that I'm using it, I really don't have any excuse. Look how many posts I've squeezed into January! February should hopefully be even better.

Aside from the rash of depressing celebrity deaths, this month has been…

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was moving my website—well, all my websites—to a VPS, a Virtual Private Server. I’m pleased to announce that the transition is complete. In about a week, I moved over all my various software installations. Indeed, I even upgraded some shamefully old versions. And, as I mentioned previously, I have replaced my old blog script with a new blog written in Python/Flask.

Why I Moved

…

It has been too long since I blogged! This lapse isn’t the result of any one thing so much as a variety of factors. Mostly I’ve been reluctant to blog because of how frustrated I am with my blogging platform—a bespoke PHP script I made years ago. I have been plugging away at various replacements over the past few years, first in PHP, and then in Python.

Finally the replacement is almost ready. I’m writing…

At lunch today I was talking with a colleague. She’s cool; I really respect her attitude towards pedagogy and also like her as a person. But our conversation on the environmental dangers of cows led us to talking about lab-grown meat, which then led to a discussion of whether food grown in a lab is any better or worse for someone than food grown in a farm. And my colleague mentioned that she thought the…

So I came home tonight from a long night at work, only to see Twitter full up about the shooting at a Umpqua Community College in Oregon. My initial reaction was weariness—I was tired, already not in a great mood, and here there was yet another mass shooting.

My second reaction was anger.

I’m angry that a country where this happens would dare to utter the hypocrisy that it is the “greatest country on Earth”…

So, recently I blogged about my friend Cassie getting married. I gave Cassie and Marian a knitted blanket for their wedding gift (I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t spoiling this fact before I wrote this blog post!). It’s my first full-size blanket, and I am so impressed with it I’m not even going to attempt false modesty, OK?

Look at that. Gorgeous.

Prior to this I knit a baby blanket, which…

Dear Snapfish,

This is an open response to your email of September 14, 2015, in which you ask me to buy something from you to keep my account open:

To keep our promise of unlimited, free photo sharing and storage, we ask our customers to make at least one purchase every 12 months. To keep your Snapfish account open, please place an order by October 14.

You even helpfully include a link to “special offers”…

As I write this, I’m very sore, because I spent several hours last night dancing. I had the privilege and honour of not just attending the wedding of my friend Cassie but of being in her bridal party.

I’m starting to get the hang of this wedding thing, I think.

Cassie is one of my oldest and bestest friends. Although there was a lapse during our childhood after I moved across town, we reconnected at…

Mailing things overseas can be frustrating. Once you package everything up and send it away … you wait. And wait. And wait. And hope that your decision to go cheaper rather than faster doesn’t mean your package is now bobbing around the Atlantic Ocean, or stranded on a shipping pallet in Heathrow airport, soon to be rerouted to New Delhi instead of Norfolk. That’s how I felt when I sent two packages a month apart,…

Initially I wasn’t going to bother upgrading to Windows 10. I currently dual boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu and use the latter almost exclusively. Mostly I use Windows 7 for SMART Notebook, and to play the occasional Steam game that will run on my 8-year-old laptop. Of course, I use Windows nearly every day on other computers. I’ve noticed that I feel somewhat uncomfortable on Windows 8 computers—the interface changed enough from Windows 7 that…