Sorry to bust in yet again on the gleeful fun that is Ask Domesticat, but I have a small little feature change to Quarto (and, therefore, the entire site) that I think some of you might want to take a look at.

Yep, registered users can now set all posts and comments on 'cat.net to the timezone of their choice. Just because I'm in Central time (GMT-6) doesn't mean you have to be. However, you won't see any changes if you don't set up a time zone; Central time will be the default choice for the lazy amongst you. In other words, status quo.

Funny—it doesn't look much different around here, but oh, at last, at last I get to say the words I've been dying and itching and wishing and dreaming of saying for a long, long time now:

Welcome to domesticat.net, powered by Quarto.There is a lot left to be done. A few of my entries were categorized through the usernames I originally used to post them, but those were less than a hundred of the ~640 posts I have archived on this site.

Trust me, it's funnier if you know what's been going on the past 24 hours or so.  The short version is that those of you wanting to jump the gun and position yourself for the goofy madness that is the Quarto unveiling can go to the registration page and sign up to be a registered commenter.

("But, Mom, do we have to?")

Tonight I understood that things were Really Going To Work. As in, were Really Going To Work, in the cosmic, hit-over-the-head fashion that's completely impossible to ignore in the way that things like the success of internal-combustion engines are hard to ignore. True, everyone but me has known that things were Really Going To Work for a good deal of time (and have been waiting on me to see the obvious) but about an hour ago, I finally got it:

Was today a good day? I'm unsure. I spent far too many hours beating on code, and at the end of the day I had very little actual progress to show for it. Judging by the line numbers, something around an even hundred lines of code today. But they're good, solid lines, and they really and truly work.

The conversation with Heather, shortly after a breakthrough:

Right.  So.  Another day of coding, y'see.  Did you know that after a day of messing with things like timezone conversions in PHP, your brain takes on the consistency of mashed potatoes?  It's pretty impressive, in a frightening and appalling sort of way.  Much was accomplished today.  Quarto is intended to be based off of GMT (ok, ok, UTC), but I wanted to convert the GMT timestamps to whatever the administrator chose as 'local time.'  The only place that I'm leaving dates in straight GMT is in the usage log.