Recently in moronosphere Category

test after update to mt5

I have, I'm not kidding, five entries sitting in draft state that I'm almost done with. But trivial time suck keeps eating my final touch ups.

The latest one; a reminiscence about my fondness for pulp writers, interrupted by the need to go buy pet supplies. My war against the ants, nearly won, has moved into my kids guinea pig's cage. I just had to race to the store and buy some supplies to build a temporary cage, until we can either figur eout how to get all the ants out of coroplast without insecticde, or until we can get more coroplast to build a new cage.

Of course, I can't do that now, because in ten minutes, I'm leaving for a friend's daughter's bat mitzvah in the Napa area (which is an over-night run).

So one more entry almost done, goes into mothballs.

This is getting frustrating. I'd describe all the travails of the last month (surgeries, injured limbs, amputations, illnesses), but i don't have time.

On the other hand, if we're lucky, Ray will post an entry so at least there's SOMETHING to read!

Meanwhile, it's time to kilt up and run. The good thing about Lisa's mitzvahs (bat and bar) is that she knows how to throw a fuckin' party.

Five years.

1,175 entries.

6,000 comments.

Three ISP's, a half dozen servers, several crashes.

It's been a bit of a ride, huh?

Five years ago yesterday I started blogging. You can read about that here or here or here or here.

And each yeah it seems like I have less to say about it.

This last year has been a fucked up ride. If you're reading you know a bit about it. If you haven't been, feel free to. It's been a terrible year for me creatively; I've written fuck-all, and I'm not seeing that get better yet. Blogging has fallen victim to all this, but so has every other form of self-expression I have.

Here's to a change in all that.

To all you bloggers out there, write something. Come up for air now and then. Facebook and twitter and myspace ain't enough.

For me - I have more to say; I don't know why I'm having so much trouble saying it.

Meanwhile, tonight I go look at a sketch for my backpiece, and tomorrow I pick up my thruxton. Speed and pain, baby.

My friends at Pirates n' Plunder sent me this on mySpace. I kind of liked it.

Typically, when I want to be blogging and run out of words, I start fucking around with the technology that drives my blog. Which accounts for the several different templates I had up tonight, in case anyone was watching. And trust me, it looked pretty damn fucked up for a bit there.

One of the things that frustrates me about my completely lack of time lately is that I have no time for this sort of work; and I really enjoy it. This sort of hackery, than is of no benefit other than pleasing myself - is why I started playing with computers when I was a teenager. Just to make things that pleased me.

So it irritates me to have to be half-assed about this shit; that I can't hack together the parts of various styles that I like and make it work all by myself. I'd far rather be doing this than babysitting users who either won't listen or who think they know better.

Still - frustrations aside, I rather like MT Pro. Many of the glaring design problems in Mt4 are vastly improved (though it's still vastly over complicated in some key ways that violate principles of good interface design). I just think I need to make a hackery blog so that I can test this shit someplace that isn't live.

It's looking more and more like my planned holiday break is going to be mostly work time; the good thing about that is that I'll get some of it back in the form of extra days off, and can take a few free days when things slow. The down side is, that's not likely to be until April.

The other good thing is, sometimes when I work on holidays, what I'm really doing is waiting for something that might happen, so I have time to kill in front of my computer. If I'm lucky. that time means I get some writing done (though facebook or myspace do NOT count as writing).

Meanwhile, I'm trying to make forward progress of some kind. This whole death business; I had no idea how many things needed to get done, and how much paperwork was involved. I see now the advantage of living in a bus with no fixed address and no assets you can't carry with you. It means a whole lot less paperwork for anyone still left behind if you decide to drive off a cliff.

Yes, I know this space looks weird and green. At least, it will as soon as your browser refreshes the stylesheet (shift-reload to force that). 

Sometime in the next week or so I'm planning to update this site to the latest version of Movable Type Pro.

As usual, this means I need to blow away all my designs and templates, because the idiots at Six Apart don't grasp backwards compatibility.

However, they have enough great new features that, once again, I'm sticking with MT rather than switching. While WordPress is still getting better, it's still a very good tiny little minitruck compared to a somewhat clunky semi; ie, wordpress does a tiny job well, but is years away from doing a big one at all.

Six Apart keep pissing me off; but the product is still very, very far ahead of anyone else in the market. So I'm riding it a little longer 'til someone comes up with an option that's enough better to make the switch worth it.

I say this only so that when my site suddenly goes to a generic layout, you few readers who're still around know why.

We had a server problem last night and this morning, so moronosphere.com come was down. Let me know if any mail sent to me bounced back to you.

Meanwhile, all looks well now.

If you're reading this it means you've found the new, and not-at-all-improved, version of moronosphere.com.

Lucky you.

If anything seems broken let me know; all we did was swap hardware, so everything should be identical.

I'm working on moving all the domains I host to a new server.

This isn't helped much by the fact that that company that physically maintains our hardware fucked up the machine and had to wipe and re-do it, after I'd moved half my domains.

But in any case, I'm down to the hard ones, the ones that have database-driven blogs and so forth.

Sometime in the next couple of days, this site and others hosted here may go unreachable for a short duration. The move should (knock wood) be largely invisible to the user, but still, fair warning.

I'll post a note here when I'm done.