Wikis, Ilsa and Me

In case anyone is curious about last night's photo, here is the unedited version. I took it a little while before sunset on Thursday. Even in real life, it was a freaky thing to see - but yes, it was just the sun shining through clouds. For my edited version I brightened the darkest parts of the photo, boosted the color saturation, made several copies of the picture in different hues, and pasted colorful bits from the copies onto one master.

I always intended to show it off as looking like a vortex, but it wasn't under I was considering the possibilities for April Fool's Day that the idea came together. I'm not big on pranks or hoaxes, generally. But fiction...yeah, that I can do. So think of last night's aberration as a fiction entry. I even changed my "About Me" profile for the day.

It's all back to normal now, but I saved a screen capture of the profile box as a souvenir of the day. For the record, Romana Jean and Alexander Scott are the names John and I picked out when we tried to have a kid, nearly a decade ago.

One of the things I did today was keep an eye on the Wikipedia page about April Fool's Day hoaxes perpetrated on April 1, 2006. The list kept growing longer, with occasional duplications and reorganizations. Finally, someone edited it down into a more managable page with the more significant hoaxes (tv, radio, newspapers, and major web sites), and relegated the complete list to a secondary page, already marked for possible deletion. Personally, I'd like to see it retained, as a document of the day's ephemera.

You know how easily I get sidetracked by stuff. In messing around with Wikipedia, I discovered that their Madeleine L'Engle entry was much improved from the last time I looked at it, but had some outdated info. So I made a few edits. Wow, that felt good, and a little scary. A reference to L'Engle's book Ilsa led me to a "disambiguation" page that referenced both the book and an unrelated porn movie, Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS. There was no actual entry for the novel, however - so I made one. It took hours to do! There were odd coding conventions to learn, and I never did figure out how to add a picture. Still, I'm happy with it overall.

In researching these two Wikipedia pages, I did some Googling of other L'Engle pages, and made several edits to my own L'Engle site, The Tesseract. Suddenly it was almost midnight, John was in bed, and I hadn't gotten around to cooking dinner. Oh, well. The sausage will still be good tomorrow.

Karen


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