And later, when you’re sitting down at your computer to, oh, actually write, you can’t find any of it, or at least not that one thing you really need right now.

I am much, much more organized than this in my day job. I have to be, considering the mountains of code and documentation that flow past my eyeballs on any given week. If I can’t find stuff easily, I end up in a world of trouble.

So I needed a tool that met these requirements:

• Readily accessible from almost anywhere
• Full text searchable
• Regularly backed up so nothing gets lost

Duh. WordPress.

I set myself up a private, password-protected blog, buried way down in a subdirectory on one of my domains. It isn’t visible on the Internet unless you know exactly where to look, and you have to enter the password to read anything.

I can even post from my cell phone, so no more envelope scribbles. (The Centro has a keyboard built in, which makes typing notes a lot easier.)

I’ve been using WordPress for more than three years now, and I can’t believe it has taken me this long to realize how handy it is for managing notes.

We haven’t found a Wii Fit in stock in any local stores yet, but we’re hoping to get one sometime this week. In the meantime, we’re playing the tennis, bowling, and boxing games in the sports package that came with the console. John even managed to work up a sweat while he was boxing! I think I was holding back a little during my boxing match because my opponent’s avatar looked disturbingly like a cartoon version of Jesus. The guy John was fighting looked more like Bob Newhart.

We also bought the Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean games. If we didn’t already look stupid enough with boxing, just wait’ll we start swordplay. :-)

I haven’t been this impressed with gaming technology in, like, ever. And I think the Wii Fit is going to flat out blow me away.

I’d love to hear any Wii software recommendations anyone has!

One of the biggest jobs is keeping all these floors clean, so today when we were in Target we succumbed to the lure of the Roomba. We didn’t get the fanciest model, though. I’m not entirely clear on what the more advanced versions do that would make them worth the extra money.

We charged the Roomba for a few hours and turned it loose the instant the indicator light turned green. The cats were FASCINATED. They kept following it from room to room, and Delilah even challenged it a few times. She stood her ground and stared straight at it, but at the last moment she was forced to leap out of the way. Smart move, kitty. :-)

John recently sent me this YouTube video of a cat riding a Roomba. I don’t think our guys are that brave yet, but if anybody gets bold enough to try, my money’s on Rosie. She’s our daredevil!

I’ve been working on my pseudonyms’ web sites lately to get them ready before any submissions go out, and I followed a bunch of links to various WordPress template sites. Some of the themes were absolutely gorgeous and captured just exactly the kind of mood I was hoping to create, so I happily downloaded them and applied them to my sites.

Stupid.

Very stupid.

The prettiest templates I downloaded had seriously nasty hostile code embedded in the footer.php file. And how did I find this out? Hitting the sites from somewhere other than home. I usually don’t set up my personal security software to filter that kind of thing, but that’s not the case for everyone, certainly not corporations.

Now what do you suppose would’ve happened if I’d left that code in there and an editor who was reviewing one of my manuscripts tried to hit the site from her office? Her corporate web filtering software would’ve blocked my site, and the same thing may have happened when she tried to hit it from home, the library, or Starbucks.

Zoinks.

Lesson learned? Only download WordPress templates from trusted sites, like the WordPress Theme Directory. They automatically reject any themes that contain weird code like I found in footer.php. Still, it doesn’t hurt to take a quick browse through your theme files, even if you don’t know PHP. Any long strings of characters inside parentheses (basically a huge encrypted string passed to a function call or nested function calls) is probably a sign that the template designer is trying to do something sneaky, and you’d be well advised to steer clear. Pay particular attention to anything like base64_encode.

If you’re reading a long discussion online and you see a message that fits the following profile, you’ve probably found a sock puppet:

• It’s the person’s first post. They’ll usually claim to have lurked on the site for months, but this discussion is what finally got them to post. Uh-huh.
• Their profile/link doesn’t point to an established online presence. It may link to a throwaway email address or to nothing at all.
• They know WAY too much about the discussion to simply be an interested bystander.
• The writing style is similar to that of someone who’s already posting in the thread.
• They’re weighing in on the side that isn’t doing well.

And if it’s one of these perennial Romancelandia bloffles, the sock puppet will always finish off by swearing she’s about to go out and buy the beleaguered authors’ books. I saw a post like this just yesterday in the über-thread on the SBTB site.

I’ve said privately to a few friends who are old hands at the web and its precursors that I have a certain admiration for infowars when done well from a psychological as well as a technical standpoint. It’s possible to do this in a way that achieves something good. Or I can at least admire the sock puppeteer’s or meme farmer’s SKILL.

But this vanity-defending crap in Romancelandia? Hell, no.

When I’m at work and I need to resolve a problem I may not have encountered before, Google is my friend there, too. I’ve lost count of how many techie mysteries I have been able to solve quickly because I had such a wealth of information available to me.

I read today about a poll to determine the seven wonders of the world, the results of which are to be announced today. People were allowed to vote using the Internet and cell phone text messages. It occurs to me that the wonder of the world most likely to make a massive difference for centuries yet to come is the very one they used to cast their votes. And it wasn’t even in the running!

Well, no more of that. I put Peter’s Custom Anti-Spam back in, and I added Bad Behavior and Comment Timeout. This should knock down spam levels considerably. Comment Timeout looks particularly useful, because most of the posts that get spammed are over six months old. You can set comments to auto-close after whatever interval you choose.

The Bertrand Russell book listed on my sidebar is extremely cool. FWIW, it’s not the book that prompted my last Grammar Grump. I doubt I’ll find ANY snark-worthy grammar in this one. Just a hunch. :-)

iTunes: Winter Dreams, by Sean Grace

After years of watching flame wars on email loops and in the blogosphere, I’m convinced there are people in the online writing community who are unbalanced enough to do something like forge a career-damaging email in a rival’s name. I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but I don’t think it can be ruled out, either.