To celebrate, we’ve got a puzzle which will show you the amazing cover art of David Ho.

Now, as much as I love this puzzle, there are occasions when the mouse behaves oddly and grabs the wrong piece. Sorry about that; I wish I knew how to fix it but the puzzle is enough fun that I thought you’d be willing to risk it. It seems to correct if you scroll the page up and down.

Here are the plugins I’ve used to customize my website.

• Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. It catches almost all my comment spam and rarely snags a false one.
• Audio player - Highly configurable single track mp3 player. Love it.
• AntiLeech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth.
• Comvatars - Shows avatar images on user comments to uniquely identify the author much like various bulletin board systems do. The Gravatars plugin by Skippy and the Favatars plugin by Jeff Minard must be installed and activated to achieve the full functionality. (I didn’t install Favatars, because it interferes with the comment notification plugin which I love more than pretty pictures)
• Digital Fingerprint - This plugin enables you to easily and quickly search the web for potential cases of plagiarism and content theft. It works by adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts that you select (or all posts if you wish). You can then easily monitor the blogosphere for your digital fingerprint in the hopes of finding potential content thieves and scrapers abusing your content.
• Event Calendar - Manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar. You can subscribe to the calendar from iCal (OSX) or Sunbird. Change settings on the Event Calendar Options screen.
• Gravatars - This plugin provides an administrative interface to control default gravatar options. Registered users can also (optionally) define local gravatar images that will override their gravatar.com default.
• LMB^Box Comment Quicktags - Inserts a quicktag toolbar in the blog comment form.
• LiveJournal Crossposter - Automatically copies all posts to a LiveJournal or other LiveJournal-based blog. Editing or deleting a post will be replicated as well.
• Photopress - Photopress adds user-friendly image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. Installs and uses a database table.
• Subscribe To Comments - Allows readers to recieve notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry
• Self Comment Notification Filter - Stops WP from sending me notifications about comments that I make on my own blog.
• Static Front Page - Sticks the page with a slug of ‘home’ to your front page. This is handy so that your front page doesn’t have to be a blog entry.
• TFS Core (Text Filter Suite) - Adds advanced text filtering functions which can mangle text in amusing ways. (I use TFS Pirate which is what makes posts all piratical sometimes.)
• WordPress Database Backup - On-demand backup of your WordPress database.
• Random Quotes - This plugin allows you to embed random quotes into your pages.
• WP-ContactForm - WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It helps cut down on email spam by allowing a way to contact you without having your email address posted.

Goodness…nothing like putting everything in one place to see how much I’ve customized my wordpress.

When people meet me and learn that I’m from North Carolina, the first thing that they say are, “But you don’t have a southern accent.” It happens so often, that you get major bonus points for not saying it. There are variations, of course, such as, “You must have worked hard to lose your accent.” This one always annoys me because a) I’ve never had one and b) southern accents are just as valid as any other accent. In fact, there are pretty strong signs that the accents in the Appalachias are closer to the way Shakespeare spoke (based on rhyming patterns) than your standard midwestern accent.

But despite the fact that I think the southern accent is not something which one should fight to lose, I’ve simply never had one. I grew up in Raleigh, NC in the heart of the Research Triangle Park. Dad worked for IBM, so we were surrounded by a bunch of transplants. Mom and Dad are from Chattanooga, TN, but even so, I wasn’t exposed to that much pure accent. I also had a speech impediment when I was little so I suspect that what traces I had were trained out of me.

There are times when my roots show. For instance, I have to think before saying “windowsill” or I will pronounce it “windowseal” because the two sounds are the same where I come from. In my childhood, “pin” and “pen” were the same sound. So, I know that my region has left its mark on my speech.

None of which prepared me for my latent Southern accent to turn up in Icelandic class today. We had a spelling test to make sure we were hearing the difference between sounds. Sitja and setja, for instance. I hear the difference with no problem, but today I learned that they sound the same when I say them. Holy smokes. It’s that darn “pin” vs. “pen” come back to haunt me.

I had already recognized the places where ye olde speech impediment was giving me trouble. I couldn’t pronounce the letter R when I was little, and rolling it for Icelandic? Ah ha ha, it is to laugh. I just really wasn’t expecting the vowel problems or at least, not that one.

Ironically, though I can hear the difference between those two sounds and corrected my pronunciation in class, I cannot hear the difference between U and Ú although I apparently say them correctly. It’s completely a mechanical thing. They require different mouth shapes, but lordy, they both sound like “oo” to me. I am completely unable to hear a difference.

At least having an American accent is acceptable outside of class. Everyone is just so excited that I speak any Icelandic at all.