Zander’s Weblog

Or ‘Presque rien’ in the original French. Another gay coming-of-age story (yes, I’m watching them all–there aren’t that many). This one was a downbeat rather plodding slice-of-life film that used time shifting to try to generate some interest. But by the time the story catches up to where it started boredom has already set in and then–roll credits without telling us what happened! How avant-garde–NOT.

I just moved about 100 posts to WordPress–took about 3 hours. Here’s how. Create a couple of posts in WordPress and export your blog as a WordPress export (it uses RSS XML). Copy and paste (page by page) your MySpace blog posts to Word (save text only). Now make yourself a simple XSD (tags such as postdate, title, category, content) and add the schema to the Word Schema Library. Open your Word MySpace document, attach the schema and tag your document. Now create a nice XSLT that contains the tags from your WordPress export. Configure it to insert the data from your tagged Word document, which you have saved as Word 2003 XML (data only). Presto–you now have a WordPress XML version of your MySpace data, which you can import into your WordPress blog. Unless you are really clever you’ll have to do some touch-up on the imported posts, such as editing the post date and such. Best of luck to you!

Note: due to the interest, I have posted a copy of the XSD, XSLT, and tagged XML for your perusal. They can be found by searching the site for “myspace”, or by looking at my Pages widget (bottom right of home page). You still have to be a geek to do this. For example, my XSLT uses some JavaScript so I used MSXML 4.0 to do the transform because it isn’t picky about such code. Blah etc., rocking back and forth in my chair.

A collection of letters home to friends written by Carol Schmidt after her move, with Norma Hair, to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. The letters are from the early 2000’s although the copyright is 2006. Unfortunately, as a book, using the letters-home style quickly becomes repetitive and tedious–’we did this, we did that, we saw a parade, we heard lots of fireworks, we can’t speak Spanish, we don’t know what this means, we’re trying to sell our RV.’ What could have been a valuable resource never gets beyond being a very long postcard–the research is often paper thin, and many of the facts are wrong. For example, stating that Phoenix is in Mariposa county (it’s Maricopa, although I’m sure the people of Phoenix would love to have Yosemite).
If you are looking for a book with focused, accurate, well-researched information on retirement, social security, or moving to Mexico, this is not it. There isn’t even an index. On the other hand, if what you are looking for is a chatty travelogue that provides an impressionistic montage of what such a venture might feel like, this book may work for you if you are tolerant of the style.