the World of Webmistress Ming

Whole lotta hair-cutting going on!

Before, the straggly mass:

After, the cute curly bob:

Mom and Mim--and that's my grandmother racing the tricycle

Up at 4 a.m. (again) and wasting time on the Internet:

You scored as Emergent/Postmodern, You are Emergent/Postmodern in your theology. You feel alienated from older forms of church, you don't think they connect to modern culture very well. No one knows the whole truth about God, and we have much to learn from each other, and so learning takes place in dialogue. Evangelism should take place in relationships rather than through crusades and altar-calls. People are interested in spirituality and want to ask questions, so the church should help them to do this.

Webmistress Ming, in the (9-month-old) flesh, having a bath in her grandmother's kitchen sink. September, 1955.

Oh, my dear ones: points if you get the movie reference.

Suffice to say that "It looks like the sanctuary was hosed down with Pepto-Bismol" isn't just a silver screen cliche.

I have just received what has to be the World's Most Tacky Wedding Invitation.

To set the scene, let us remind everyone of the context. My niece is to be married next month.

She was beaten up regularly by her older brother, until they sent him to a re-education camp in Utah.

However, the brother in question is an USHER.

Look what we have here: the blog is back!

Her Geekness has been updating the CMS that serves the site, and finally got time to sort out issues with a balky module.

Can I just say I love Drupal? 12 sites updated in less than an hour; add 20 more minutes to research and sort out the image issues.

Whee! On to the great conversion. Gotta make money to keep this operation online!

Dedboy, also known as Martini Boy, turns 50 years old this week. He's not happy about it, but I thought a few balloons might cheer him up:

Martini Boy Gets A Gorillagram

Okay, I tried.

Heartfelt flag entry on the eve of Independence Day.

The REAL news is what my husband told me last night, over dinner (and after I'd extracted him from the Democratic fundraiser).

"I want you to quit." he said.

Oh yes, there was more. About "is it a hobby or is it a business?" and so on and so forth.

I sat up straight and tried giving him my big-ass plan for carrying on the site network for the next six months.

It fell flat. Remember, this is the guy who wants us to double our housing expenses to move into the city's most exclusive house ...

Tomorrow, early--and I DO mean early, as in a techie's pre-dawn arising--I will set out my flags.

It's an ingrained habit, and has little to do with ideology, politics, terrorism or patriotism. Simply put, I was trained to fly the flag, and now that I am old, I will not depart from it.

Tomorrow morning, when I wake up, our neighborhood will be silent. If it's like most mornings, dawnlight will just be breaking over the horizon.

While morning comes early in my latitude, old webmistress habits die hard: 4:30 a.m. is a great time to be alive.

If it didn't hurt so much, it could be addictive: riding error logs on a new server.

Think of it as a free-flow fix-it session. Bad links, hotlinking referers, php error messages, missing files, bad config--they all show up in the error log. Hit refresh every couple of minutes, find the problem, jump to Google for the solution, implement it; repeat.

Since I'm performing the sysadmin equivalent of surgery to separate conjoined twins, this will be an all-day process.

But it's fun. One of the best parts of wearing the sysadmin hat.