tekHedd – the blog

I made a special trip to the store today to buy more charcoal and lighter fluid.

Yes, I know lighter fluid is both wasteful and environmentally unsound, and I should use a charcoal lighting chimney arrangement made out of large coffee cans and a grating, but I don’t like crappy coffee enough to chase down the cans, and furthermore it wouldn’t be considered wasteful if 9 out of 10 people alive today weren’t. Also, it’s fun to play with flammable fluids. Really fun. Whoosh.

So, as I was saying, I bought more charcoal…the hardware store is the closest business of any kind, and they have the Kingston charcoal with BBQ flavoring. Curious to see how that turns out, but it certainly smells good.

And I wonder: I sure do go to a lot of trouble to make my food carcinogenic. Why does it taste better when it’s partly burned?

A small change for the excellent Quotes Collection plugin that removes an “ORDER BY RAND()”, which tends to suck all of the randomness out of my site pretty quickly:

function quotescollection_get_randomquote($exclude = 0)
{
        $offset = rand( 0, quotescollection_count() );
	global $wpdb;
	if($exclude && is_numeric($exclude))
		$exclude_condition = 'AND quote_id <> '.$exclude;
	$sql = "SELECT quote_id, quote, author, source
		FROM " . $wpdb->prefix . "quotescollection QC
		WHERE visible = 'yes'
		".$exclude_condition."
		LIMIT " . $offset . ", 1";
	$random_quote = $wpdb->get_row($sql, ARRAY_A);
	if ( !empty($random_quote) ) {
		return $random_quote;
	}
	else
		return 0;
}

There’s an additional query, but it doesn’t have to allocate a random number for each quote in your database. Which is nice. Hope this helps.

In fact, I’ve had a very nice week, but I haven’t had anything interesting to write about. So, to the casual blog browser, it looks like I’m still pissed off about Easter. But I’m not!

Spring is great. I’ve always been a big fan of the rebirth of all of the plants. (Hey look, it says here that pretty much all of the Christian Easter symbolism is actually Pagan Eoster symbolism. Who knew!? Oh, wait, you mean my parents did? And the preacher? And that lady that taught Sunday School? Hmm, I’m not pissed but somehow I feel like I should be!)

It’s not just rebirth of plants, it’s the birth of new plants, and that means Plant Sex. I’m not saying I have allergies exactly, but something awful is happening in my nose, for sure. Plants having sex all willy nilly. I mean, it’s fine with me that they’re getting it on. I’m in favor of sex in a general way, just specifically do they have to do it in the air I’m breathing? Cause that’s kind of gross. Or kinky. Really depends on how you look at it, I guess.