In the midst of the seriousness that is normally domesticat.net, I present a thoroughly silly and amuzing pop quiz. Examine this photo carefully: the kitty in the laundry

Your question: based on the tail in the picture, please identify the name of the cat, and whether the laundry is dirty or clean.

It's official: not only am I an adult, I'm also really, really boring. Upon discovering that I would have the house to myself for all of Wednesday (due to Jeff's attending a conference out of town) I felt that I should do something to celebrate.

So what do I do? Do I go wild, dance naked in the streets, party until the cows come home, stage a wild drunkfest at my place, and frantically run around that evening trying to hide the evidence of the day's debauchery?No.

Proposal for Contract For New Website Owners, herein to be referred to as "You Must Be This Tall To Ride This Ride" or "Hey Idiot" for short.Whereas, the population of coder-type folk have noticed an alarming increase in personal websites, and

Whereas, given that the population of the planet is only allowed a fixed amount of intelligence spread across all personal websites and,

Whereas, the likelihood of security failures increase as the number of personal sites (running on scripts beyond their maintainers' technical expertise) grows, and

I usually try to stay off of bandwagons. They always seem to have large amounts of scratchy, smelly hay, and you come away from the bandwagon trip just wishing that you could get a shower and not see any of your bandwagon mates for a while; a few hours with 'em and you realize that you really need something else to talk about.

But I'm jumping on this one—Verisign sucks. Sure, there's the whole thing about hoopla.com and Verisign totally fubaring things and not being willing to undo their mistakes…but I've got my own gripe to add.There's a domain I've wanted to register for some time. (Some of you can probably guess what it is, but I'm not going to repeat it here so that I don't inspire others to go questing for it as well.) I got disappointed when I did a search—turns out that .com, .net, and .org for this particular word were all taken.

A note for those of you who have written to me recently: I think my subconscious is starting to kick in. I deleted a swath of what I THOUGHT was unnecessary email from my comments @ domesticat.net folder, and as a result I managed to delete a few actual emails that need replies. If you don't hear from me, that's why.

Two down. Seventeen to go. (You know, I'm going to look really stupid if it turns out I have to write more than seventeen pages for this admin interface, what with my decision to do a public countdown and all. Virtually guarantees I'm going to fall flat on my face.)

I'm still flush from my victory dance, having checked off the "edit your options" page not ten minutes ago. The way I have permissions set up virtually dictates that I have three separate pages devoted to the editing of authors. One is for the normal user, who does not have permission to edit all authors. The "edit your options" page contains rather innocuous bits for updating, including things like homepages and IM accounts and passwords and password-retrieval bits. The other two are for the power user—a person who has the power to edit the accounts of others. First, they'll have to be presented with a list of all authors, and then they'll have to be able to select a single author to edit.That secondary editing page will be a lot like the page I wrote today, except it will contain toggles for permissions.

Ah, but that's for later.

See, what you don't realize is that you should be impressed that I actually managed to get anything done at all. Why, you ask?

Good things: calls to Andrew and Joy, watching movies with Jeff, cuddle time with the cats, and oh yeah, code-fu.

Notice I didn't say that it was my code-fu. In today's case, it isn't. More correctly, it would be a large bit of whimpering on my part and twenty minutes' worth of code-fu on Gareth's part. Never mind thef act that I spent multiple hours tracking down a code problem that turned out to be a correctly named variable in the wrong scope.

It's the kind of thing that'll drive you to drink. Questing for missing parentheses I can deal with, but this was sheer and utter madness—and all this for multiple log files! Oi, the things I do…

So what got accomplished today? Not much, in truth. The big part was getting the pesky variable problem solved (and, as I check the scoreboard, I see that the current score is Gareth 347, domesticats zero). I did, however, finish up my first full page of the admin section today.