greyduck.net

Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Category: Geekery

  • Didja miss me?

    Whew. I ran into a little gotcha right at the end (“hmm, maybe double-checking PHP for MySQL support would’ve been a good idea two days ago…”) but other than that it would seem that my efforts of the past week have paid off.

    Yes, the websites are back. Not that they were ever really gone, thanks to the good efforts of my former corporate overseer, but I feel a whole helluva lot better now that I’m up and running in new digs. There will be bits and pieces of all of our sites that probably won’t be fully functional until I’ve had a chance to tinker with them individually, of course. Please be patient with me, as it’s been quite the couple of weeks.

    I’ll do a nice big “catch up on things” post later. This? I’m mostly just testing to make sure things actually work…

  • Thanks the gods for IM privacy settings.

    This, folks, is why I require authorization to be on my “buddy list.”

    The user 177254271 wants to add you to their buddy list for the following reason:
    Hello, how are you?
    im fine and you?

    Riiiiiight. On a related note, last month’s entry about “missy_kitty” is among the most popular posts I’ve written yet, at least in terms of search engine hits and comments from people I don’t know. It’s so nice to be providing a valuable service, indeed.

  • Make mine pumpkin. With whipped cream.

    Happy Pi Day!

    Actually, this concept will be even funnier in nine years, depending on your preferred date notation.

    Think about it.

  • Thank you, Mother Nature…

    Oh, goody. Because there’s nothing I want more to be doing on my birthday (and the days immediately following) than dealing with possible snow, possible hail, possible lightning & thunder, probable high winds and a definite downpour. If I was (still) the kind of guy who looked for signs in everything, I’d say the universe in general was trying to tell me something.

    Apparently, that something would include the phrase “don’t forget your inversion-resistant umbrella.”

    Geeky side note: I know some “blog” authors like to use the feature of their chosen software that turns the entry title into part of a unique URL instead of just using the index number, but it doesn’t really work out very well in most cases. The “easier to remember” idea is bunk, ’cause the entry address tends to include things like date information, and who’s going to remember that, eh? Another problem is that the URL tends to be insanely long. The most amusing failing of this technique, however, is the way that longer entry titles get truncated arbitrarily. For instance, “Storm on the Horizon” becomes “storm_on_the_ho.html”.

    Methinks it shall storm on the ho and the non-ho alike.

  • Does this qualify as “filk?” I hope not.

    I went to several minutes’ work to create this little monstrosity for a comment on a LiveJournal entry, so by golly I’m going to inflict it on… I mean, share it with my adoring fans. Sharing is caring, after all.

    To the tune of Midnight Oil’s “Blue Sky Mine.”

    So I’m caught at the website still waiting for torrent posts
    Wipe sweat off my brow, keep on clicking search engines
    Hope the crumbs in my keyboard can keep me for another night
    And if the fansub torrent posting scene won’t come to my rescue
    If the anime dubbing industry won’t save me
    Who’s gonna save me?

    But if I click all day at the torrent site
    (There’ll be files on the hard drive tonight)
    Still I scroll up and down on the torrent site
    (There’ll be high bandwidth usage tonight)

    And some have RAWs from a distant shore
    And the fansubbers take what the fanboy hordes want
    And nothing’s as anxious, as a codec not found…

    No, I didn’t “do” the whole song. Would you want me to? I didn’t think so. Hah!

    For those of you desiring context, you may find it at EK’s LJ post which started things off…

  • After a while, you stop counting the hours or risk going mad.

    Here it is, one o’clock in the fine, fine morning. I just got home, and am working on the dinner I bought some seven hours ago. Once I crank out this entry and decompress a bit more from the evening’s fun-and-frolic, I’m going right to bed.

    I, along with the other two-thirds of the “engineering staff,” put in *mumblemumble* hours today, first doing our normal work and then doing a three-sided server swap on the digital audio system. We took Enco-PDX, the former primary server, and made it the secondary server. Enco-FS1 is the new primary, while poor old Beast is finally retired. (Don’t worry, I’ll find something to do with an 800 GB drive array. Bwahahaha.) We faced a myriad of challenges tonight, including “how to recable the entire Enco networking system without taking any stations off the air.”

    We were thorough, we were organized, and we were careful. I know; I’m just as shocked as you are. There’s even a chance I won’t get called on my day off tomorrow… er, today. At least, if I get called it shouldn’t be about anything we worked on tonight. Heh.

    During my lunch break (oh, let’s not think about how many hours ago that was) I installed Spam Karma 2 on both this site and the anime site, ’cause I’m tired of “moderating” annoying spam comments that WordPress 1.5’s built-in system can’t quite prevent me from seeing. Oh, and don’t go trying to sell me on that Akismet thing of theirs… anything that has to “phone home” every time someone posts a comment is something I want to avoid. Hell, I eventually gave up using Blogrolling.com because I don’t like being reliant on anyone else’s servers to keep my content running.

    Anyway. I need to get some sleep tonight. And clean up the place a bit in the morning. And meet my beloved at the train station on time. And… well, you get the picture…

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