Hooray! At long last, it finally works!

I’ve converted my blog to Movable Type. After a few mishaps — mostly involving me attempting to import all my Greymatter entries, or me fiddling with the database files and accidentally screwing things up, several times — it’s finally good to go. I still have a few templates to fill out and some things to figure out how to use (such as Trackback), but everything should be functional now. I ultimately decided not to import my Greymatter entries after all, but rather to leave them where they are, because I want those entries to retain their old URLs, and importing the files winds up screwing up the numbering. So my old Greymatter entries and my new Movable Types entries will live in the same directory, and hopefully I won’t somehow accidentally erase all my Greymatter stuff someday. Anyway, the numbering is starting over with this entry — or rather, with the previous entry; I figured since it’s the beginning of the month I may as well keep all the November stuff together, so I imported just the previous entry. Luckily, Greymatter and Movable Type use different numbers of zeroes in their entry URLs, so 0000001.html will not be written over by 000001.html.

One disappointment is that I can’t figure out how to use “oil me” when there are no comments listed. With Greymatter, you can set your comment line to display different things for zero comments, one comment, or plural comments, but it appears that with Movable Type, you can only use one thing. If someone can figure out how I could do “oil me” again, I’d appreciate it, because I always liked that little line. [Note: as you can see, I’ve fixed it. Thanks, Alan!]

Goodbye, Greymatter. I’ll miss your cute purple, green, and yellow color scheme, but I should be able to do a lot more with my blog now.

Anyway, back to blogging.

Wow. Last night was Halloween, and now it’s suddenly November. Funny how that works.

As I begin to write this, it’s almost 5:00, and it will be dark soon. Ugh. I don’t see why we can’t be on Daylight Savings Time all year round. Okay, so the mornings would be darker — at least we’d have more light in the evenings. This reminds me of college winter weekends, when I’d wake up at noon, eat brunch, do some classwork, and then suddenly it would be dark outside.

Last night, Matt and I went to the Halloween Parade in the Village. It was my first time seeing it, and I’d had no idea how huge it was! People were packed on the sidewalks and curbs like sardines. We stood at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 12th Street, right on the curb; I’m not incredibly tall, so it was hard to see, especially when a guy in a sombrero decided to stand right in front of me. Then there were the throngs of people trying to squeeze past us in the mistaken hope that they might be able to get through, and the guy in the space warrior costume with huge spiky shoulder pads who thought he could just slip on through. Eventually we got tired of watching, so we squeezed through as well, and got the heck out of there.

Even away from the parade, the streets were filled with revelers in costumes. It’s not every year that Halloween falls on a Friday night — and on top of that, the weather was great, so there were just hordes of people everywhere. It felt like Mardi Gras. I’d never experienced anything like this in Manhattan before.

During the parade, out of the blue, a college friend called me. He was visiting the States from China, where he works, and it was his last night here before going back there. So after a really good dinner, Matt and I met up with him and a couple of my other college friends at a party, then headed back out in search of a bar. Eventually Matt headed home, and my friends and I finally found a bar (where there were yet more people in costumes), had a round of drinks, and caught up with each other for a while.

The PATH ride home was even more crowded than usual, with yet more people in costumes.

Costumes, costumes everywhere, from early evening to late at night. This was the most I’d felt the presence of Halloween in years.

It was also my most enjoyable Friday night in a while, and — even better — my first alcohol buzz in about two months. All in all, a darn good evening.

As much as the PATH train drives me nuts, it’s exciting that the station at the World Trade Center site will be reopening in just over three weeks — a temporary station, anyway. “Temporary” means three to six years, until the permanent station designed by Santiago Calatrava is completed. Who knows what my life will be like at that point, or where I’ll be living.

For now, at least, it will be nice to have an alternative once again to the crowded Sixth Avenue PATH line. Getting to lower Manhattan or to Brooklyn will be much easier (I haven’t been to Brooklyn in a few months, but it will be nice to have a shorter trip anyway), and if I’m going home from a bar late on a Friday or Saturday night, I won’t have to deal with hordes of drunken ex-frat boys going home to Hoboken if I don’t want to (though I’d have to hop on the subway and get down to lower Manhattan first). It will all make getting into Manhattan from the sixth borough a little more bearable.

And since I can’t figure out how to work the following links into the previous two paragraphs, I’ll just present them separately:

Rebuilding Lower Manhattan

Lower Manhattan Development Corporation

Enjoy.
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