My First Acrobatics Lesson

I had my first acrobatics lesson this evening!

It was much more frustrating than the first aerials class. (How did I get to be 26 without knowing how to do a handstand?)

Tonight, we did pretty much all adagio work…

…Imagine, if you will, someone lying on their back. Their arms straight up in the air, and their knees bent at close to right angles. Then, imagine another person, the person you are imagining is me. My hands are on the other persons’ knees, my shoulders are in their hands, and the rest of me is doing a handstand (with ample spotters ready to catch me (: ). Moh. Unpossible!

…Consider the possibility, of being balanced at the waist, arms outstretched (although I was kinda wobbly). Unpossible!

…And this other balancing thing, where one person bends at the knees, the other person stands on their thighs, and they both lean back and no-one falls over (much) (I didn’t!).

…And a thing where you link one arm with a person, roll across their back, and then catch their other arm on the other side (Not as unpossible as the first two (: )

And that was my first acrobatics lesson!

I’m entering a world of pain..

I started an aerials course yesterday (six weeks/1.5 hour sessions – it’s spread out).

It’s pretty fun stuff (: We do a combination of trapeze stuff and tissu stuff. Tissu is neat – it involves climbing up long sheets of fabric, and having the fabric hold you in place (Yesterday, we learnt how to climb up and get back down again; and we all suspended ourselves with fabric looped around our hips). Trapeze is the kind of thing you’d expect…except wobblier!

I can..uh..really feel my arm muscles growing..really fast..and may have spent most of yesterday afternoon asleep or in a nice hot bath (;

Classes are run by the Wellington Circus Trust, in any case (:

Ultimate Tag Warrior 3

Woo!

Apparently, I haven’t done a release of my plugin for a while. I just had a look at a diff between the new version, and the old version, and it’s terrifying trying to figure out what has changed (:

At the moment, I’ve only made a WordPress 2 version. If you need a WordPress 1.5 version, let me know and I’ll make the little changes that it needs.

Moh! The first bug has been found! If you’re installing for the first time, in ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php, find PRIMARY KEY (ID)and replace it with PRIMARY KEY (tag_ID)

– You can specify the text to display when there are no tags through the Options > Tags page
– The plugin isn’t requesting option values anywhere near as often (although this is less problematic in WordPress 2.0.1 than it was in WordPress 2.0)
– The plugin does a bunch o’ internal caching which has knocked the number of database queries way down
– I’ve made a couple of changes to streamline new installs (People hosted by Yahoo! had a database permission issue which prevented the automagic updating taking place; along with a couple of other stray issues that people used to ask about (: )
– There’s a lot more type checking/character stripping of user data (side effect of this, is that you can’t have apostrophes or quotes in your tags any more)
– I’ve included some examples for theme-type stuff you might want to do – adding the tags to the title in the header, creating a tag cloud page, a tag archive page (the one that lists the posts for a tag), and an interactive search page (it requires UTW 3. If you don’t have wordpress installed in the root folder, you’ll need to adjust the path to the ajax receiving page.. it’s near the top. You’ll see it)
– You can have embedded tags – if you are using Flock, Ecto, or any other not-wordpress way of adding posts, you can use [tags]comma, list of, tags[/tags] syntax to add tags to a post. [tag]single tag[/tag] can be used within your posts, and will magically turn into tag links when the post is displayed. (You can do this using the wordpress post adding screen too (: ) You do need to enable this on the Options > Tags page.
– There are all sorts of little stray bug fixes here, there and everywhere – Tidy tags works again; ampersands are no longer a problem in feeds; the tag box doesn’t have extra close div tags; and this plugin should no longer conflict with the Static Front Page plugin.

Download here | Support forum here

Look out for broken things!

I’ve just upgraded wordpress again, and dropped in a new theme (isn’t it fetching?). Do let me know if there are things which are broken.

(Oh yeah… I’m running a new version of UTW as well. A happy consequence of which is my new tag search page. Isn’t it sassy? I haven’t finishedstarted the documentation changes for it; and there are still a few stray little features that I want to get finished before releasing; but it’s looking like some time in the next couple of days.)

Smoked Salmon is Delicious

First, make a delicious cure: 1/3c of flakey salt, 2 tablespoons of sugar, the finely grated zest of a lemon, lime and an orange (optionally, half a grapefruit as well) and a bit of white pepper are combined together. The zest has enough moisture to sorta damped the sugar and salt. Next, take a piece of salmon fillet, and press the cure mixture on to the non-skin side. Gaps are okay (: Don’t panic if there are gaps.

Wrap the salmon in a sheet of tinfoil, then put it in a dish in the fridge (You want the dish because a bunch of liquid will be pulled from the salmon, and while foil usually does an admirable job of containing the liquid; it’s better to avoid having it dribble through your fridge if it doesn’t (: ). Leave the salmon for 2-3 hours.

Once it has finished curing, remove the cure mixture. I usually put it under cold running water d: Pat it down with paper towels so that it’s dry. It sure looks delectable at this point.

Almost finally: Preparations for smoking – Get a disposable foil roasting pan, and put a layer of wood-pixie-dust in the bottom (I got a bag of manuka-pixie-dust from the supermarket a while back..) It doesn’t need to be super-deep. Put the salmon on to a wire rack (like a *cough*uncoated cake cooling rack*cough*); then put the rack on the roasting pan (I have a rack which is longer than the roasting pan so that it’s nicely supported, about 4cm above the woodchips). Then build a tent to loosely cover the salmon from more tin foil (Another foil roasting pan, upside-down would probably work pretty well too).

Finally: Smoking – put the roasting pan on the barbecue for 15 minutes.

Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9.2

Looks like there’s an interesting bug which is doing odd things to comments. I’m not seeing it, though; but if you are, let me know! Thanks (: We found the bug – it only appears if you display related posts. Updating to version 2.9.2.1 of the plugin will fix it. (I’m pretty sure I fixed a bug in the AJAX tag-adding bits too – it looked like it would have been broken, in any case)

Sometimes you take steps forwards, and then you take steps backwards.

In the WordPress 2.0 version of the plugin, I’ve moved the tag-entering bit back to how it was previously – the way I had it, to get it to work was a flakey-flakey thing which caused problems which far out-weighed its usefulness.

I’ve updated the help (I think!), to include the last few versions worth of changes.

And fixed a few other bugs here and there (:

Support Forum | Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9.2.1, for WordPress 2.0 | Ultimate Tag Warrior 2.9.2.1, for WordPress 1.5