Category Archives: Site Crap

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Composing A Symphony

Oh, it is good to be home having returned from a trip away to a foreign country. Man, was that a sketchy ride. And the locals are just plain whacked. I didn’t understand a damn thing they were doing the entire time. Or…wait. That was (is?) home. This is the foreign country. Right?

So, I want to thank all (three) of you that emailed to ask about content. Frankly, I’m appalled. I mean, with all the distraction that the InterWeb offers, you choose to hang out here. Did AOL close? Is YouTube out of content? MySpace not responding?

*…goes into Goldie Hawn mode…*

“You like me! You really like me!”

Seriously, I was taken aback by the queries. I honestly figured that no one checked this psychic vent out (while secretly hoping that The Wife does). Okay, in retrospect, it would be logical that this would be a means of communication to The Folks Back Home to keep in touch, or at least keep up with the goings on here. Sometimes I am not good with the whole Elephant in the Room thing. Just ask The Wife.

So, I am busily scribbling away at this madness, with a number of future posts promising to regale the hushed and awed audience with wild stories of nightlife in Baghdad, going out clubbing, raucous jaunts in the Theater District, and the art scene in the Syrian Desert. Oh, plus the one night where we got all in a tiff over the Syrah wine served us in this one dive, none of which will be true.

Therefore, some of the future postings will not be in chronological order, so it is highly recommended that the careful reader not look too hard trying to figure out what I am doing right this moment. In this case, the smart alecky trivial answer of “duh, sitting in front of your computer typing” is the correct one.  I am putting down my remembrances, just some of the more amusing and telling stories, nothing more. Some are current, some are not, and I won’t tell you which is which. Hopefully, it will be more like Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five, and not just a collection of disjointed ramblings.

Then again, come to think of it, Slaughter House Five was a collection of disjointed ramblings.

Crap.

Okay, hopefully it will be better than Cats or Rent. Or at least Hair. I think I can outdo Hair.

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Upgrades and Improvements

As you may have noticed, there is a new theme about the site. This is because I have upgraded WordPress to 2.0.4 from *cough* 1.2.2, and, yeah. It was needed.

Naturally, this took a lot longer than it should have, so the site was down for most of the day. I followed the simple five steps outlined on the WordPress site and that was fine. The problem was that the files were a pain to get on the server. Granted, we have “high speed” internet here in sunny Iraq (or at least I do), and granted it is prone to finicky behavior. Since it is satellite, it is susceptible to environmental considerations, like sand, wind, and mortars. For whatever reason, I simply could not FTP the files to the server reliably. Dropped connections, socket errors, and all manner of Very Frustrating Things.

In the end, I simply put them up via a web based interface that my servers have. And that took two plus hours with all the files involved. Fortunately, I missed only one that I know of, and that has been corrected. If you notice anything amiss, please leave a comment.

With all the time available to me, I noticed a couple of things. One, recursion is difficult for the human mind to grasp beyond a few levels. I think this has to do with memory, and that called to mind the paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” dealing with the inability of the human mind to grasp large quantities of data for a given channel. So, tracking which files had to go up, which directory was the next one to recurse, and so on, was a bit of a challenge at times.

Two: as I did this, I noticed that I got into a rhythm with keystrokes and the like. Never one to leave well enough alone, I would switch hands with the mouse pad and which hand was doing what keystroke. Without fail, the process would suddenly stall, since now a lot of mental processing was being shifted. While I can and do often mouse left handed, switching in mid-stream would throw a wrench into everything. And I would lose my mental pointers of where I was at and what I was doing. Now, I would recover, and get back into “the zone,” but it was an interesting observation to me of what the costs are of interrupting the flow of things and how long it takes to get back into the groove of things. Nothing like learning things for yourself, which is usually how I learn lessons in life. (Just ask The Wife.)

But things are running now, and all of this was to combat spam. What? Well, the blogging needs of mine were pretty much met with the old version, but I really didn’t have an effective way to trash all the comment spam in a timely manner. I was getting literally thousands of spam comments a week. Too much to do by hand, so I needed some code to limit it, or at least help me throw it out. Nor could I use a handy tool that I wanted to use on the site. It (the version I used) was simply Too Old To Begin The Training. So, I upgraded. And we’ll see if the New Cool Toy I wanted lives up to my expectations.

In the meantime, I’m tinkering with the newer features that I have. I’m undecided about the new theme, though. I kind of liked the older one better, but maybe it was time for a change. There are definitely some parts that I know I want from the other theme, like the calendar display of archives, but with a little toying, I’m sure that can be arranged.

Until then, enjoy!

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First Post!

It’s my birthday and the birthday of this blog.

Since I have done this before in the 2000-2001 timeframe, I will skip the obligitory new blog posting of “I promise to feed it and walk it and change the little box.” Curious parties can Google-stalk me for previous entries.

WordPress? Yeah, I had the choice of roll my own, or go with the existing tools. If I rolled my own, I would take another few years, so in the interest of making useful something I have been sitting on, I decided to go with this.

Now, because I took 30 minutes to screw up a five minute installation, I will cut this one short.