I have been playing the sims the last few days. Before that, I was cleaning like crazy. It was weird. Anyway, the sims… last night when I went to bed, my eyes were a bit stingy and I think I’ve suffered permanent nerve damage in my tailbone. But that’s what it’s like with the sims, I don’t play for a long time, but when I do I play a lot and for several days.

Anyway, I have a question that’s long been on my mind. It’s about blog comments. It’s two questions I want to ask you really.

1. If you are a blogger, how do you handle your comments? Do you reply directly to people by email? Do you respond in the comments section of your own blog? Do you even reply at all?

2. If you are a commenter on many blogs, how do you like your comments handled? Do you like them to be acknowledged in the comments section? Do you go back and check for responses? Do like to get emails if you comment warrants a response?

I ask because I go back and forth. As a commenter, I don’t always go back to a post to see if my comments are acknowledged, I read too many blogs. Many blogs have “Subscribe to this post” features and I really like that. It allows me to get email follow up comments on any posts on which I comment, if I so choose. Some people get soooo many comments, I don’t really want an email follow up for each one. I like the conversational tone of acknowledging comments in the comments section, and I like the idea that other people can see your response. In the past, this is how I handled all comments.

On the other hand, there are blogs that acknowledge my comments with emails and I really like that too. I’ve gotten to know certain bloggers better, simply because of an established email relationship. I tend to do that a bit more now, email responses to commenters. I always try to send an email response to a new commenter no matter what, just to say “hi!” But I miss the conversational tone my comments used to have back in the day.

So its a quandary to me, how to handle comments. I was curious what you guys thought, what you prefer.

In the last couple of months I have lost more weight. Not by any effort on my part. I shouldn’t mention that part because I know how hard it is to lose weight, how much work it takes. Saying that I went down a pant size with no effort is going to make people want to slap me. I would want to slap me. In fact, hang on, I’ll do it for you. Consider me slapped.

During those darker early months of 2008, I lost my appetite for a while, and I couldn’t make myself eat anything. After I got my appetite back, I waited to see if I put the weight back on when I started to eat, but it’s been a couple months and all my pants are still too big. So, I need new pants. You’d think having Too Big pants would be plenty comfortable. But it’s not. I have to wear a belt to keep them up, which is pinchy. And they make me feel, well, dumpy in the seat.

There was a fatter time in my life when I thought I might learn to enjoy shopping, when I could shop in any store I wanted. But you know what? I still hate it. I am a creature of habit. If I find a shirt I like, I buy more of them in different colors. I used to wear the same type of Levi’s, I had several pair, never bothered with anything else because they fit and were comfortable. Losing weight forced me to try new paints, but I still gravitate to the same stores over and over. Gap, Old Navy, American Eagle Outfitters and whomever sells Levi’s.

Imagine my despair to find that my style of American Eagle Outfitter’s jeans seem to be discontinued, the remaining stock all the wrong size. The biggest problem is that I actually got compliments wearing those jeans. If someone compliments in a pair of jeans? Well, I immediately go out and buy more of them. I don’t think anyone has every complimented my jeans before, come to think of it. So that was a Big Deal.

The Gap didn’t have anything I wanted in the proper length. I don’t even understand what Old Navy has done to their jeans, and everything in the Levi’s store is all fancy and skinny legged. Or sooper flared. Obviously I’m not a fashion plate.

I know what you are thinking. You are thinking “Shut up, Jodi! You have to buy pants in a SMALLER SIZE! Boo-hoo!”

You’re right. I’m shutting up.

via Kung Fu Grippe

or do I have to turn that off as well?

I will go dark in honor of River’s birthday. She of the environmental awareness and vegan diet. I considered eating a vegetable in her honor but then I was like all “ewww… a vegetable? No frakin’ way. Gross.”

Happy Birthday River!

I rarely complain when something goes wrong with my mac. Maybe because it’s rare for something to go wrong. Or maybe it’s because I can figure it rather quickly, so there is no time for a rant. But ever since installing Leopard, I have not been able to use my external iSight camera in Photobooth. It would not recognize it. Just gave me a black background with a “Camera Off”message. Since I can use it for iChat and for the webcam, I knew this was not the case.

Sometimes I could make it work by restarting my mac. About 50% of the time. However, if I closed the application, it would not work when I re-launched. It was frustrating and it’s been going on for months. Could not figure it out.

In researching an application that would allow me to color correct from within aps that use the iSight, I discovered iGlasses. It is only $9.95 and actually does other things I wanted, like rotate the image, for one. So I bought it, installed it and BLAMMO, now Photobooth works every time.

Go figure. I don’t know why, and you shouldn’t have to buy something to make it work. However, I’m just putting it up here so if anyone else is doing a search on the same problem, they might come across this and see how I fixed it. It was supremely annoying. I even wrote a complete and proper issue statement for my blog title. Hee!