almoststarted.com

So 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.

I 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.

2006. 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.

Can’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.

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.

Took 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.

So 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!

Not 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.

So I’ve never been one for toolbars in a web browser. Nothing has been compelling enough to make me install it, that and I’ve seen far too many spyware bull@#$$ bars get installed automagically that I’ve had to remove from far to many computers that I’ve had to fix.

That said, I just installed the Google toolbar for Firefox. The spellcheck and the autolink for google maps were compelling. The only drawback so far is the giant google search field. I search google from the address bar in Firefox, always have, probably always will, so for the moment, it’s just taking up space, as there isn’t a way to turn it off, as that’s probably the primary reason for a Google toolbar (even though there’s a search box option for the toolbar in FireFox that defaults to google, which I’ve also got turned off).

And now that I’ve tried it, I must say, the spell check feature is quite snazzy. There’s probably a spell check hidden in movable type somewhere, or offered as a plugin, but I’ve never sought it out, so I’m sure there’s some very questionable spelling going on in my older posts, but hopefully, not anymore.

So the two wheels that had been “left” in Hodgkins magically appeared at my doorstop last night while I was at class, along with the two that ups said were “out for delivery.” They were used, so they had a bit of curb rash going on on the very edge of the lip, and a bit of grime built up in a few spots, so I went to work on them with a rotary tool. Buffed out the brake dust spots, and sanded down the curb rash before hitting it with some 2000 grit sand paper. You can hardly tell there was any curb rash to begin with. Got the tires mounted on the wheels this morning, and the car looks DAMN good, and I do say so myself. All that’s left to do is to procure VW center caps for the wheels (they’re OE Audi TT wheels), and then finally order a suspension kit to lower the car. After that, it should be all little homebrew projects left for the car (like a new pc). And I have no idea if this will work, but it theoretically should:

Click here for a larger image.