A tiny bite of good news. Ecto works. Six Apart just got me a bug fix. Yay! I can update some things now…
A tiny bite of good news. Ecto works. Six Apart just got me a bug fix.
Yay! I can update some things now…
Month: August 2005
What can I do to help?
The question is always this when there’s a disaster on the scale of a huricane katrina; what can those of us far away do to help? In many ways, the answre is not fucking much. But there are a couple ways we can help out – money, and time. I’m no expert on this. So […]
The question is always this when there’s a disaster on the scale of a huricane katrina; what can those of us far away do to help?
In many ways, the answre is not fucking much.
But there are a couple ways we can help out – money, and time.
I’m no expert on this. So I’ll point to someone who is – go read Doxy’s entry on helping 101. (EDIT – that’s a new link, she just updated)
These are the people who’re gonna be there, with time and bodies and money, helping those who lost everything, sheltering them, feeding them, getting them clean water to drink and medical attention.
So what do you do, where do you go?
You can start with www.redcross.org, though that server is being hit hard. You can call – 1-800-HELP-NOW.
You can also give time, if you have some. It’s all volunteers, taking calls, processing donations, shipping supplies to the disaster zone, or out there slogging through the mud helping the cleanup.
redcross.org/donate/volunteer/
You can even give blood. As always, blood supplies are short. http://www.redcross.org/donate/give/.
It’s something, for those of us too far to do anything useful to help all these poor bastards.
Now, with Extra Piracy!
It’s a whole new moronosphere here, now with extra Piracy. Let me know if you have any problem with the way this displays. Let me know if you like it. If you hate it, get on your knees and practice your oral skills. I started out just porting my old look to new templates, but […]
It’s a whole new moronosphere here, now with extra Piracy.
Let me know if you have any problem with the way this displays. Let me know if you like it.
If you hate it, get on your knees and practice your oral skills.
I started out just porting my old look to new templates, but then when I found Arvind’s Style Generator I got kind of inspired to go three-way.
And then I did something really smart. I asked for help.
The fabulous Doxy went above and beyond the call and did a stylesheet, and some graphics for me, and sat here with me tweaking and adjusting until we got something I think looks pretty damned good. She gets 100% of the credit for what looks good, and I get 100% of the credit for what doesn’t.
Now maybe I can actually get back to blogging.
If this looks fucked up on your browser, try shift-reload, and if that doesn’t fix it, try blowing away your cache. That should fix it. I’ve checked it on (MacOSX) Safari, Opera, IE, Firefox and Mozilla, and it displays fine on all of them for me.
Got Backups?
Ok, I feel better. I got mySQL database dumps going on our server, as I had before, but I also am automatically copying them to a remote machine nightly. I test this tonight via a cron job but it worked when I launched it manually. So starting tonight I’ll have dailys and we won’t risk […]
Ok, I feel better.
I got mySQL database dumps going on our server, as I had before, but I also am automatically copying them to a remote machine nightly. I test this tonight via a cron job but it worked when I launched it manually. So starting tonight I’ll have dailys and we won’t risk loss of more than a day of work.
Obviously I should have done this a couple weeks ago. And I knew that. But at least I can get back to writing about something other than technogeekery.
Hey, MT32 users? How the hell can I turn on comment notifications? It seems obvious but I can’t seem to locate where the knob is for that feature, and MtNotify, the plugin I used to use for notofications, barfs in 3.2. I don’t want to miss a single word my lovely readers say.
Note – we’re now running on the non-beta version of MT3.2. Weeee!
One Damed Thing After Another
I shook out my cloak and brushed myself off. I traveled for perhaps half an hour then, leaving the place far behind me, before I halted and took my breakfast in a hot, bleak valley smelling faintly of sulfur. As I was finishing, I heard a crashing noise. A horned and tusked purple thing went […]
I shook out my cloak and brushed myself off. I traveled for perhaps half an hour then, leaving the place far behind me, before I halted and took my breakfast in a hot, bleak valley smelling faintly of sulfur.
As I was finishing, I heard a crashing noise. A horned and tusked purple thing went racing along the ridge to my right pursued by a hairless orange-skinned creature with long claws and a forked tail. Both were wailing in different keys.
I nodded. It was just one damned thing after another.
–Roger Zelazny, Trumps of Doom
I’m back here. No more blogosity at http://moronosphere.blogspot.com/. That’s done though it’ll stay around a while with a pointer back here until I can paste it all over and automate backups.
The disk drive we had hoped to recover? Toast. Total loss. So we’re moving forward with what we have now, our july 17 backup and whatever we can salavge from google cache.
I’ve actually got a lotta stuff saved in Ecto, so that would help – only there’s some bug between Ecto and MT Beta5 that no one can seem to reproduce. The error goes like:
Method “metaWeblog.editPost” produced a server error: “No ObjectDriver defined at /export/www/moronosphere.com/movable-type/lib/MT/Object.pm line 144.”
I don’t know if it’s a version problem with Perl, or something else, but Ecto says it’s MT, the MT people say it’s something missing in my install (no – I re-did the install completely). So Ecto is useless to me until that’s corrected. And I don’t know how to blog without it, I’ve become completely dependant.
Is this week over yet? Started with me being sick, went on to include a friend with a severe bladder infection, another whoes dog needs surgery, a friend sitting in the path of a hurricane, a whole new set of work problems, most of which are political, not technical. And another friend, friend-of-a-friend actually, just called from jail. Now I add this, no drive and no ecto. Let’s start over at next monday and sklip this week, ok?
google talk and adiumX
(this entry copied from my blogspot blog) Mac users who want to use the new Google Talk (I’m not sure why you would want to, honestly, we already have more than enough chat clients and chat protocols, but, you know, what the fuck), adiumX supports it, but it’s not exactly obvious how. Take a look […]
(this entry copied from my blogspot blog)
Mac users who want to use the new Google Talk (I’m not sure why you would want to, honestly, we already have more than enough chat clients and chat protocols, but, you know, what the fuck), adiumX supports it, but it’s not exactly obvious how.
Take a look at these directions, but basically you have to add a jabber account with your gmail address, and then add the server and port under options (talk.google.com and port 5222. Check “use tls encryption”, and click ‘ok’.)
You should then be able to chat with google talk users.
Google is starting to seem more and more like microsoft, I tellya. They’re out to rule the world.
My Revolver
Sometimes you just have to reach for your revolver.
Sometimes you just have to reach for your revolver.
Jittering
I’m absolutely jittering today, waiting for word from Seth on the drive recovery. Yeah, I know it’s too soon, we really could not hear before tomorrow at earliest and friday at latest. But something in my head decided it was today and I can’t stop checking email and looking at my IM client (adiumX) to […]
I’m absolutely jittering today, waiting for word from Seth on the drive recovery. Yeah, I know it’s too soon, we really could not hear before tomorrow at earliest and friday at latest. But something in my head decided it was today and I can’t stop checking email and looking at my IM client (adiumX) to see if Seth’s logged on. At which point I’ll have to resist the urge to pester him.
Thanks to glorious chemicals, I managed a decent night’s sleep last night. God I needed it. Also thanks to my friend Mike, a stray brought home by yummy-ex-nanny Andrea (who brought over her photo ipod last night so she could show me pictures of her ass – I love this girl). Mike’s havin’ a bad patch in his relationship, and needed some love; for Mike, this means cooking for someone. He made a fantastic salad of spinach, maytag bleu, chopped almonds, fresh sweet corn, balsamic and a light oil (we were out of EVO, but we all agreed that was ok, the lighter oil let the ingredients shine in this salad). He followed with great grilled rib-eyes and chard sauteed in bacon fat with a little cider vinegar, and mashed potatoes. An excellent dinner, and all I had to do was clean up around Mike while he played my usual role of chef.
This is why, back in days of yore when I had dotcom money, I built a giant kitchen. So people would come to me and cook; an evening in the kitchen is one of my absolute favorite things.
It made for a relaxed evening, rounded out by watching the DVD of Sin City, which I just got. My god, I love this movie. It’s sheer brilliance, and a second viewing just makes it better. I was noticing minor touches I hadn’t seen the first go-round, and the noir crime-novel-b-movie dialog, which sounds stilted at first, becomes poetry. Everything about this movie is beautiful, casting, visuals, pacing, music, lighting, language. If you have not seen it, go buy the DVD. Don’t even bother to rent it, go buy it now.
An evening like that helped, but I’m still vibrating today. I just want word back – did we get any data or not? I wanna move back to the m’sphere and finish cleaning up, but I don’t wanna rebuild everything until we know if we have to.
More coffee. That’ll help. Mmmmm, Peets!
Groan.
My weekend. Went to a surprise 40th birthday party for a friend; a social group I don’t see much anymore, from a school my kids used to go to. The birthday girl was surprised in a bad way, but seemed to make up for this with a lotta margaritas. Her husband is one of those […]
My weekend.
Went to a surprise 40th birthday party for a friend; a social group I don’t see much anymore, from a school my kids used to go to. The birthday girl was surprised in a bad way, but seemed to make up for this with a lotta margaritas. Her husband is one of those guys I really like for no reason I can put a finger on; he’s just a warm-hearted, loving guy. He’s the one I picked up ‘my love‘ from, so if you’ve ever heard me say that, it’s courtesy of Benjamin. And I never use it when I don’t mean it.
I can’t exactly tell why this couple is together; he’s one of us, us dirty-minded womanizing types, where his wife is such a barbie doll that I think she’s all smooth molded plastic between the legs. But they have a great home, a sweet little girl who’s growing up much less shallow than I expected. I like them, even if I don’t really need to seem them more than a couple times a year.
So I wound up at this party, drinking those cheap slurpy-margaritas from a machine, which I began spiking with extra cheap tequila ’til they were pretty much all tequila. I sort of lost count how many I had. I then switched to some cheap merlot in big-ass tumblers. There were some party games, the ones where you pass an object clenched between chin and neck. The kinda games that are purely an excuse for groping. Too bad there’s no hot tub at this house.
The night gets blurry after that, though I seem to have bruises on my knuckles. I’m wondering how that happened.
Sunday dawned with an awesome hangover, which continued to get worse rather than better; eventually it became obvious I had some sort of food poisoning as well as the after-effects of way too much bad booze. Though there was a high point; the series finale of Six Feet Under which, all thinks considered, was a good wrap-up for this show. Like the show itself, it was inspired but uneven, incredibly well acted, and thought-provoking. The closing montage was fabulous.
I need a lot more sleep though. I think I got maybe six hours over the entire weekend. I’m thinking I’ll spend Tuesday completely unconscious.
Not THAT Karl MacRae
Not THAT Karl MacRae
, karl macrae
I’ve recently noticed I’m getting hits on a google for Karl MacRae. But in many cases they may be looking for that other Karl MacRae – seems there’s a prisoner’s rights activist out there with my name.
I’ve tried to convince him that he’s not allowed to use my name and he has to change his, but we didn’t get so far with that. I mean, really.
In any case, if you’re looking for him, you’re in the wrong place – I’m trying to dig up contact info for him, and will update this if I find it.
–edit–
Interestingly I also just found a ‘carl macrae’ (god, can’t he even spell ‘karl’ correctly?), in the uk. I’m not that one either!