I've got to be more careful what I wish for. Today in my Netflix queue I did see a message "We expect to ship your next movie Wednesday" (Wednesday being tomorrow). But the process by which it appeared had the unfortunate side effect of disappearing a movie from my queue.

First I had two empty slots with the "expect to ship your next movie today" message. Then two movies appeared shipping tomorrow, as usual, except one of them merely had the vague label "Shipping." Then it disappeared and was replaced by the Wednesday message.

Update: I think this is the first time I've ever put an update in an entry. It feels so right. Some time this evening the missing movie reappeared, shipping tomorrow. My faith is restored, as a disappearing-movie bug in Netflix's software would certainly be a more serious (or at least easily soluble) problem than the shipping slowdowns.

In the midst of all this Netflix-related content, I've finally gotten around to installing the Netflix Suite plugin for MovableType, so you can see what discs I currently have out. You can get this here. If you know me and also get Netflix, let me know and we can hook up the Friends feature.

While I was messing about, I tried my hand at hacking up MovableType itself. It has always annoyed me that the text boxes in which one edits entries and templates are so small. Trying to look at html code with a 20x80 character box is like walking down the street with a pair of binoculars attached to your eyes. Since others might have the same peeve I'll give some instructions for this. The usual caveat applies about my information being obscenely out of date, since I'm still on MT 2.64 and they're up to the low 3's by now. But H. has told me he doesn't think the size of the text boxes has changed. If the implementation of the gui-generating code hasn't either, we're in good shape.

The files you want to edit are in your cgi directory (usually cgi-bin)/tmpl/cms. The two files I changed are edit_entry.tmpl and edit_template.tmpl. If you look about 45% of the way down in the file you'll see a section that looks like this:

<td colspan="2" valign="top"><textarea<TMPL_IF NAME=AGENT_MOZILLA> cols=""</TMPL_IF> class="width500" name="text" rows="<TMPL_IF NAME=DISP_PREFS_SHOW_EXTENDED>10<TMPL_ELSE>20</TMPL_IF>" wrap="virtual"><TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT></textarea><p></td>

At this point I also realized I could get more height out of the box without doing any code-editing by customizing my page to not show "Extended Entry," which I never use. But that wasn't enough. So I changed the '10' and '20' numbers of rows to 30 each. To increase the width I deleted the 'class="width500"' attribute (I didn't want to try to find out if there is a class600 or class700) and put a value of 120 in between the empty quotes of the cols attribute.

Now that I look at the code a little less impatiently, your mileage may vary if you use a non-Mozilla browser.

In edit_entry.tmpl the section you want is close to the end of the file and looks like this:

<td valign="top"><font class="title"><TMPL_IF NAME=TYPE_CUSTOM><MT_TRANS phrase="Module Body"><TMPL_ELSE><MT_TRANS phrase="Template Body"></TMPL_IF><br><textarea<TMPL_IF NAME=AGENT_MOZILLA> cols=""</TMPL_IF> class="width500" name="text" rows="20" wrap="virtual"><TMPL_VAR NAME=TEXT></textarea></td>

Upload those files whence they came and you should be wallowing in lavish text boxes the next time one of the relevant pages loads.

Here I come with a Kempa-style search for a memory from my youth. I'm writing this before I make an attempt to research it, assuming that I'll find the answer without too much difficulty.

When I was in elementary school I sometimes had small boxes of Newman's Own Lemonade packed in with my lunch. There was some tomfoolery regarding the "virgin" nature of the beverage. At some point I noticed a paragraph of text on the back of the box, a totally bizarre narrative about running a marathon in Africa and having one's energy replenished by you-know-what. It was somewhat surreal and had many odd little details, and a rhythm to it, that combined in causing me to recite it in my head an unhealthy number of times. I remember a few things from it: the phrase "filched the nectar," and "Lemonade? No, Lemon Aid!" I could not figure out why this crazy piece of text was put on this product or where it came from. And that's what I want to know now.

* * *

Okay, that wasn't so bad. Here's the whole text:

The marathon in Africa … I'm halfway out and barely chugging. Mountain coming! Liquid needed! What's around? Water's bitter! Beer's flat! Gator, Blah Blah! … Fading fast. Then a vision – sweet Joanna! – tempting me with pale gold nectar … lemon is it? By golly! Lemonade? No, Lemon Aid! … Power added! Asphalt churning … Cruising home to victory! Hail Joanna! Filched the nectar (shameless hustler!) – In the market – Newman's Own!

It still has it for me--a unique insanity, the story so densely packed and yet so disjointed, so many strange images. It actually does remind me of the condensed thoughts one has when exerting oneself, as if a thought that requires more syllables also takes more energy even to think or speak internally. "Must...go...on..."

I always wondered if this were part of some series of stories by people inspired by this product, but I never saw any other ones. It turns out they were written by Newman and there were other ones on other products. You can find the rest of them here [warning: annoying and needless prevention of direct use of the 'back' button]. Apparently they also exist on the company's website, but I can't be arsed to go through a corporate site right now. Anyone else have memories of this?