To Gareth:

I'm trying to figure out what I'm in the mood to listen to today.

eh, screw it. I officially declare this as yet another snarky Steely Dan Day.

It's never a good sign for the rest of the world when I declare something like this.

Oh, right. Hi, everyone. Miss me yet? I decided to stick to my guns and not post for a couple of days. If any of you had actually come over to the house and seen me, I would've attributed the muscle tics, verbal glitches, and general twitchiness to Quarto.

Ahab had his whale.
Quixote had his windmills.
I have a content management system.
But I will finish mine. 

A year ago, this was a quixotic task; something to be talked about in the realm of what-if with Jeff on a trip to Birmingham.  A movie—one or another—after all, we see many.

"What if," he said, after listening to me go on for quite some time, "you wrote something yourself?  Have you given that any thought?"

Well, it would be, if I had one left. Really. Last I saw of it, it was marching out the door with a suitcase and a beer, muttering an obscenity-laden set of phrases that sounded like "See you later!" and taking my code with it. That was after the cats napped on it for an hour or two this morning.

It was, apparently, squishy and warm. The cats like that.

Work on Quarto progresses.  Having firmly re-saddled myself a day or two ago, I settled in and got some real work done today.  Hence, the lack of entries (did you get lonely in the meantime?).  Probably most cheerworthy is the stunning fact that there is now something to actually <em>test</em>&mdash;in addition to user authentication and logging functions, I now have full user editing capabilities set up.

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?

Righto.  So let's take a moment out from the coding and talk Quarto for a minute or two.