I’ve made the leap from a self hosted MT install to a WordPress install on web hosting I’m actually paying (a tiny amout) for. Old webserver was run off a cable connection, which proved annoying every 6-12 months when the IP would change, but not a deal breaker. The deal breaker was the stability of the server going to hell. It’s hanging randomly, and given that it’s in the 34U rack that I still have in my parents basement, I don’t want to start making regular trips to rebuilt/babysit the 5+ year old machine (Duron 950mhz based server if memory serves).
Hello again
December 24th, 2008In the time of chimpanzees I was a monkey
August 11th, 2006Wow, I suck at this whole blogging thing. I’m actually rather amazed that I remembered how to access the backend of MT still and what my username and password was. Shocking.
I know I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again, but the whole reason I put this thing together was so I could write stuff down about my life so that when my brain turns to goo (or really, turns into more goo than it already is) I could sit down and reflect upon my musings from when I was still but a 20something. So that’s what I’ll sit down and do, at least for the moment.
Yeah, that’s another thing. I’m old now. Ooooold. 25 years old. 1/4 century old. I think 25 is only slightly less of a big deal than 20 was. I’m now half way to thirty, and by no means ready for that. And yes, 20 was a big deal, not 21. 21 was just about getting sloshed. Saying I was 20 for the first time was ODD. I was no longer a teenager, I was now (then) and 20something. Now I’m even more of a 20something, now I’m in the 25-34 age demographic, no longer in the hip and cool demographic all the marketers want.
And with that age, I’m finally finishing my edumacation. To think that I graduated high school 7 years ago now. And better yet, my little (11 years my junior) sister is just starting high school, and will be able to operate a motor vehicle before I know it. Further proof that I’m old. But alteast I’m almost edumacated. 1 lone semester left after a mad dash through the entire civil engineering program in three and a half years. Minors be damned. That first year of college (the one when I failed out) be damned too.
I won’t lie, that was probably the best and worst year of my life. Worst, because I failed out of school, and had to deal with my parents and the school on that matter. Best, because the reason I was failing was that I stopped doing homework, and then stopped attending classes, and then stopped taking tests about half way through each semster. So I had a lot of free time. I also had the greatest freshman dorm wing EVAR!@#!@#.
Yes, that emphasis is truly justified, the wing was awesome. It’s amazing that so many random people could be shoved into one space (Alumni 4 East, woo woo!) and get along so well. My roommate (Mike Heuser) was cool (and the only Physical Education/Training major to survive the program at Valpo, and then went on to get his masters in Physical Therapy), my RA (Brian McElwain) was cool, even when we broke his room. Everyone was just chill.
Well, except for me and Snausage, we were both maniacal, but otherwise, everything was cool. Ah Snausage, or Jason Randall to the lay man, Snausage being what his roommate, Nate Ruhter called him. Hong Kong Nate was cool too, having lived in Hong Kong (but born in Fort Wayne, Indiana if memory serves) had alllll the coolest gadgets, the most memorable being a mini disc player/recorder and a Dr. Nintendo that allowed pirated games to be loaded from a cd-rom unit that attached to the bottom of an Asian N64. The only problem for us was that no one had an Asian N64; we just had US N64’s. I don’t remember at this point if Nate didn’t have an Asian N64, had left it behind, or if it had broken, but for some reason, I do remember being a party to taking a screw driver and a lighter to the bottom of a US N64 to mangle the bits of plastic that were interfering the Dr. Nintendo. Nate also had precocious amounts of cds, each loaded with multiple games, all the standard international releases (Smash Brother’s and Golden Eye were eternal favorites), as well as the crazy ass all in Cantonese/Japanese/etc games, some of which appeared to be dating sims, which were especially entertaining when we had NO idea what was going on, and why this, that and the other things were happening.
The N64 that we had to maul was Brendan Aaron’s, who also had the banging (did I really just use that word?) entertainment setup, complete with surround sound speakers screwed into the trim around the closets. Brendan was also owner of the Mexican whooping bat, which was a pole of indiscriminate length covered with “Mexican” artwork, used to beat people silly. Unfortunately, the stick is no more, as it was chewed to death by his buddy’s dog at one point. Brendan (along with Brian, my RA) was a frequent victim of my shenanigans, including one incident that involved me stealing his computer (just the tower) and carting it off to my room, being told by Brendan to put it back, putting it back, and then stealing and sprinting down the hall with his gynormous 19”? CRT monitor, laughing evilly the entire time.
Then there was Brendan’s roommate, Denis Flac, who had to put up with all the sheninigans (which were generally well received on his part, as they happened to his roommate, not him), and for a brief time (a semester) had a radio show on the campus stations (WVUR) by the name of Iggy and Otar, on at some god-awful time, I know it was 2-4 am, but I can’t remember exactly what day it was on. I want to say early Saturday mornings. It was actually the first place my buddy’s music (Smellicanesis, aka Chris de Almeida) airplay (albeit on a 36 watt radio station with a broadcasting radius not much larger than the corporate limits of the city).
I was probably one of the few regular listeners to the program, and to this day still have an RealAudio recording of their last show, or at least the good bits where they went 45 minutes over their allotted time slot and had people cursing wildly on the air. The station at the time went off the air at 4:00 am and resumed broadcasting at some point later in the morning (at an hour at which I was probably never up), so Iggy and Otar were the last act of the night (morning). When they got their time slot, the station did two hour shows, with different hosts for every block, and everyone on once a week. The reason they lost their time slot was because the station was trying to go to a more consistent rotation, with many hosts having the same block for M-F or some variation there of. SO, with that explained, back to the story of the best show ever. They were usually well mannered radio hosts, not abusing the Safe Harbor (10:00 pm to 6:00 am) hours, as the school, being rather conservative, would have frowned upon that. They were also usually off the air at 4:00 am. But being that it was their last show ever, and they were the last show of the night, they didn’t have to end right at 4:00 am (especially as they were the only ones in all of Schnabel Hall by that point, let alone the studio). So they didn’t, they went considerably over, taking calls from most of the wing as the clock crept past 4, culminating in our RA Brian calling in and dropping the F-bomb, and then as soon as he realized that he had just sweared on the air, proceeded to drop every other profanity known to man. Hilarity ensued. I still listen to the clip from time to time. After the profanity episode, someone else called the show and pretended to be the station manager. Good times indeed.
Also speaking to the ubergeek that I was, I had a pirated version of Real’s recording suite at the time, and had my computer plugged into my stereo, and my stereo plugged into my computer, which worked out brilliantly for recording the best radio show ever, as I usually just used the connection from the computer to the speakers to supplement my small 2.1 Boston Acoustic (Dell) setup. Oddly enough, I just sold that same stereo system this summer. It was rather nice at the time, and really, was still rather nice today, I just never used it, because I use my pc for everything now (MP3’s, woo). It was a Sony 4.1 channel 50+1 Disc shelf system with 2 tape decks and digital optical in (oooo, shiiiiny). Also, seeing as it was made by Sony in the late 90’s, the AUX was just AUX, it was MD/AUX, as Mini Disc was Sony’s baby.
Wow, it’s crazy how much I have to say once I get going. And really, I have so much more to put down about that year of college, and everything that’s happened since, and before it for that matter, so I really should do this more often, and not just when I’m looking to kill and hour of time at work because no one has any work for me to do, which probably has something to do with my last day before going back to school is in 3 days (Yay most giantist run on sentence ever). So with that said, I’ll wrap this up and go home, as it’s now after 5:00 pm on a Friday.
Breaking things
February 5th, 2006So I had the template system on the previous install of MovableType pretty well figured out. Things were where i wanted them, and things seemed to work. Now on the new install, I’ve got no idea what they did, they’ve moved some stuff around in the few point release between installs, and so far, I’ve only suceeded in breaking things. This is not going well. But I’m finally fed up with the default template for the site, so I’m determined to get this site back to looking like it used to.
Fucking hate the internet
January 15th, 2006I do indeed fucking hate the internet. I just want to watch some streaming music videos before I go to bed (as god knows mtv doesn’t play videos anymore), but can i? No. MTV.com doesn’t work with firefox (or netscape, or anything but ie), so I try IE and they don’t have the video I want. So then it’s on to music.aol.com, who have the video I want, and they support firefox. Oh wait, they support the old (1.x) version of firefox. I’m up-to-date (1.5), so I’m not supported. So back to IE. Only god knows what’s going wrong with IE, as it won’t play anything. It just pop’s up the pop-up window in which the video is supposed to play, and renders the controls, but nothing happens. AOL’s help on the matter is useless too, that is when i can get far enough in failing to play the video to get a link to “help.” Their suggestions are restart and update your computer. My computer lives up to date. All MS patches, every video and audio codec known to man (thanks to the k-lite codec pack) and I just restarted a few hours ago. GOD DAMN. I think I’ll just go to bed.
New Year, New Insanity
January 14th, 20062006. I can’t believe that we’re now more than half done with the decade. I still think of the year 2000 like it was yesterday. I suppose that I’ll probably always feel that way about my high school and first college years. Because it really does seem like yesterday.
Got together with Brendan, a guy I’ve known since my first attempt at college, over break. Turns out that we’ve now known each other for 7 (SEVEN) years. I couldn’t get over that. That’s more than a third of my cognizant life. It’s just astounding.
In other news, I’ve wanted to add gallery (2) to one of my sites so I have some sort of interface on all the folders of pictures that it houses. The only problem is is that Gallery2 has the worst install directions for iis6/server2003 EVAR. I run a lot of stuff that was designed for *nix on a windows platform, and Gallery has by far the worst instructions I’ve come across. They assume that nothing more than IIS is installed on the machine, and their guide for configuring php assumes (what I assume is) 4.x, not 5.x which has been out for some time, as I broke my 5.0.4 install following the instructions for G2. It also doesn’t speak to what sort of hierarchy G2 needs in terms of folder structure for the install. Oh well, I’ll just have to try to stumble through it.
No news, is, well, good news.
December 26th, 2005Can’t believe I haven’t updated this in almost two months. Never seems that long, but then, the last entry was for Halloween, and now it’s Christmas. Oh well. Such is life.
This is how I roll
October 30th, 2005
Halloween, best holiday ever. EVAR!
I seriously love Halloween. I just get a kick out of it. I love carving pumpkins, eating pumpkin seeds, decorating, and generally scaring the hell out of people. Unfortunately, with my schedule this year, I won’t be able to get home for Halloween. My mother and I have a tradition of doing a haunted porch, which actually draws a crowd. My mother dresses up as a witch, and I dress up as a stuffed monster, and together we provide fright for all ages.
We have it down to a science at this point. I spookify the porch and the yard (cloth over the couches, tombstones, etc), stuff a few dummy monsters, and then the fun begins. My mother sits at the far end of the porch, and the kids have to weave in-between the monsters to get their candy from her. It’s always a game of which monster is real this year (what was great was my second freshman year my roommate came home with me and was a second “stuffed monster,” something we had never done before, quite a few people were more than surprised that night). My mother alone is enough to frighten (she’s got a witches cackle down pat) the smallest of children (or comfort them if need be), so I stay a stuffed monster in those cases. Where I get my amusement is scaring the kids that are “too cool” to be trick-or-treating. Those teenagers who no longer dress up, and are simply in it for the candy (even towards the end of my trick-or-treating years, I still dressed up) are my goal for the night, well, them and the parents of the small children. It really is a great feeling getting someone who doesn’t think they can be scared anymore.
My mother has been doing the witch thing for more than 20 years now (first at the door, and then we moved out to the porch), and I’ve been doing the stuffed monster bit since I gave up trick-or-treating (which was some time in middle school, that’s all I remember). The only time I haven’t been occupying my spot on the porch in the last 10 years was my first freshman year, when I didn’t have any means of getting back home for the day (instead, to celebrate the day, my mother sent me a Guild cake). So we’ve been at it for a while, and as I said, it’s down to a science, which has allowed me to get the entire yard and porch setup in an afternoon. Which was great, when I was working, I could take a half day, and the last two years in school, my schedule was such that I could leave at noon or Halloween was on a weekend.
The problem this year lies in a lab that I have that goes until 2:20. Which mean I wouldn’t be home until sometime approaching 5, which would only give me an hour to setup, which wouldn’t quite work. My mother also has classes on Monday nights, and Halloween being on a Monday night only further complicates things. So for the first time in 20 years, my mother’s going to take a break from the haunting, and being stuck at school, I’m hanging up my mask for the year as well. It’s going to be odd in the neighborhood this year for it. I know a lot of people look forward to it, but we just don’t have the time this year.
And while I’m reminiscing, the other neat thing that I like about only setting up the porch the night of Halloween is that our house goes from normal in the morning, haunted by evening, and then back to normal by the morning. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that adds to the mystique. Don’t get me wrong, I like houses that put up Halloween decorations for the few weeks before Halloween (best holiday ever, duh), it’s just that’s not something we’ve ever done. The witch comes to Woodbine for one night and one night only.
But on the upside of not being able to go home this year is that I’ve found kindred spirits at school, that is, others who love Halloween. So the three of us carved pumpkins and sorted seeds until after midnight on Friday night (after procuring them from a pumpkin patch hours earlier). Not wanting to limit my pumpkin carving fun, I opted to get two pumpkins, a little one and a big one. The big one got the tradition jack-o-lantern carved in it, but as you can see above, the second smaller one (that I actually did first) was carved as Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas, and it came out quite well, if I do say so myself (and I do). The funniest part was that I had both of my pumpkins finished before either of the girls I was carving with had their one finished. Good times indeed.
Aaaaaand We’re Back
October 16th, 2005Took long enough for me to get off my arse and reinstall MT (and php, perl and mysql) after I upgraded the server that almoststarted sits on from Win2k to Win2k3. MT went and pulled a minor version update in the mean time, which means new default template. I’m going to have to see if I have any notes from the last template I built, as I think that looked pretty nice.
I was hoping that I could simply drop the entire old almoststarted folder back onto a site and have everything work, so I wouldnt have to play with reinstalling everything and refiguring out a template. While the frontend all worked, the back end was completely shot after doing that, even after trying to use some MT tools to “reinitialize” the install. Oh well. We’re finally back.
Stupidest shit ever
August 1st, 2005So my boss got a hold of the new IE 7 Beta, which has tabs, and I love tabs, which is why I use Firefox. So I install the copy, knowing full well that I’m installing a MS beta, but seriously, the major features of the program were buggy. My favorites pane would not expand, instead I had to use the sidebar, there were no configuration options for the tabs, and MS changed the hierarchy of the toolbars, and made them so you couldn’t use them, so the top line was address, and the bottom was file, edit, etc. It’s all just fucking stupid. But the kicker was the pop-up blocking. I have to use IE with the helpdesk software I’m implementing here in the office, so I go to use it, and click on a link that opens a pop up window (to search a solutions database). Only IE 7 blocks it with the yellow bar at the top of the screen. So i click on it, and add the server to the allowed sites. Click the link again, still blocked. Restart the browser, still blocked. Turn off the pop up blocking, still blocked, now right clicking on the blocked message it asks me if i want to turn pop-up blocking on. WHAT THE FUCK. Turn blocking down to low, so that it should allow everything. Still blocked. Ctrl+click, which should open the window no matter what, still blocked. So I go to uninstall IE7, and guess what, you can’t. So I rolled back my system (thank god for that, something MS did right), and it’s gone. Good riddance. It might end up being a good browser after another 5 or 6 betas, but as it stands, RUN AWAY!
Proof that I suck
July 30th, 2005Not that anyone really needs any more proof that I suck at this webbloging thing, but I had to track down an app that would allow me to reset my MT password, because I had no idea what it was (nor was I all that sure on the username).
I also can’t believe that school starts in three weeks. I move back to Valpo on the 19th. The summer just disappeared (as well as most of the money that I’ve made, stupid car). That same weekend is also Treffen, the CVO’s annual car show, and that Monday (the 22nd) is my mother’s birthday. Same thing happened last year (only my family was in Cali at the time, so I moved myself in in two trips).
This year will take even more trips, having an apartment and all. We’re subletting an apartment from the University, so it comes mostly furnished with generic furniture, a bed, dresser, desk, couch in the living room and table in the eating nook. That said we’re renting a garage, putting the school issued couch in it, and I’m bring down my own couch and love seat that are way comfortable, and my roommates are each bringing a recliner. One roommate is also bringing his giant entertainment center, and we’re making the other roommate buy a new receiver so that we can connect every video device known to man to the 32” tv.
Last year, my other two roommates lived in a similar apartment with a third random guy, and by the end of the year, we had every Nintendo game system hooked up to the tv. I’m going to see if I can track down the Bally Astrocade that I’m sure is floating around my attic somewhere, although at this point, I should have already searched for it, because I’m sure the attic is now 120F.
Also, to continue on a point I raised above, at this rate, I’m going to have less money at the end of the summer than I had at the beginning of the summer, and that’s baaaaad. I had this nice budget worked out at the end of last semester as to what I was spending on what, and took most everything into account (food, gas, summer school, insurance, spending money for the year, etc), which resulted in me having like $200 of unallocated spending money for the summer. Unfortunately, I’ve spent $300 on clothes (pants, shoes, shirts), a grand on wheels and tires, and close to another grand on suspension and alignment. So my budget is way hosed. I really need to look into doing some more consulting, and maybe selling some stuff on ebay. We’ll have to see.
Also, one of these days I really need to start using the blog for what I had originally envisioned using it for, and that’s writing down memories from my childhood before I start forgetting them. Things like teachers names, which are already escaping me now.