It’s been the kind of workday in which it takes me until three hours later than usual to check my security logs. Among the constant attempts to hack into my Linux-based webservers, this line struck me as terribly amusing:
unknown (ip-68-178-170-212.ip.secureserver.net): 1 Time(s)
You know… maybe a business inclined to register the domain “secureserver.net” should also be inclined to keep a closer eye on, you know, the security of their servers. I’m just sayin’.
I quote here an email seen on the Entercom engineering remailer, courtesy of one Chris Tarr, Director of Engineering for our Milwaukee stations:
For those who didn’t hear, Google purchased dMarc, purveyors of Scott Studios and Maestro.
From the home office in Newport Beach, California, here’s the TOP TEN THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE NOW THAT GOOGLE HAS PURCHASED DMARC…
10. The logo on the front of the computer mysteriously changes for every holiday.
9. Jocks who need a quick fill song now have a button on the screen marked “I’m feeling lucky.”
8. When you try to put in a liner, the computer says “Did you mean…” and picks one spelled the right way.
7. Altavista and Zabasearch just bought every “Mister Microphone” in the country.
6. A song search for any song by the “Barenaked Ladies” also brings up six pages of porn sites.
5. “VT-32” now trading as “VT-46.87” after inexplicably exuberant run-up in the minutes after the sale was announced.
4. Hundreds of stations now offer prestigious email addresses to listeners on “dmail” server.
3. Jocks now spend hours mindlessly surfing the music library.
2. Next corporate buyout result: “MTV-bay.”And the number one thing that will change now that Google has purchased dMarc…
1. Revenooooooooogle Suite!!
In the interests of usability, the search form no longer shows gray text in a gray box on a gray background when you type into it.
You’re welcome.
In other news, the RSS/RDF/whatever feed now consists of the entry summaries rather than the full text. This more-or-less emulates what the previous system used to do. If you don’t like it, now would be a good time to say so. (My possible solution to an uprising might involve providing multiple feeds. I’m not sure yet.)
While I’m on that subject, I suppose now is a rather late date to point out that the feed URL has changed, so if you use a feed reader to keep tabs on me, you’ll want to re-add the subscription to this site. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I accomplished my first post-switch goal today. Most of the old content and linkage resides where it should once more, and the theme generally matches what came before. I think it looks cleaner and snazzier now. Of course I would, though, wouldn’t I?
As I indicated yesterday, however, a considerable motivation for making the platform change was the ability to do fun and interesting new things with the website without actually becoming a programmer. To this end I’ve installed a few WordPress plugins which you can see and enjoy on the new Status page. I found the myStatus plugin while looking for examples of how WP’s standalone Pages feature works, and that led me to the incredibly-cool plugin modestly named “The Execution of All Things” as well as to a succession of last.fm plugins, one of which tried to break my site (fortunately EZ-Scrobbler works like a charm).
I need to bring over the old Tenchi Muyo Thumbnail Theater material, the NaNoWriMo ’02 excerpts (in later years I simply posted them in the main journal’s Art category) and decide what to do with my old “bio” page, but otherwise I’m done. Whew. Heck, I even cranked out some new rotator images to liven things up at the top of the page.
So here’s the new site, as finished as it’s likely to get, ready for me to play with, ready for you to enjoy. It looks a lot like the old site, but behind the facade lies code that makes me happy.
I bet you weren’t expecting this, were you?
Let me make one thing perfectly clear from the get-go: I loved Monaural Jerk. It let me do some fun, geeky things. I could, in theory, do almost anything I wanted to with it. Unfortunately, over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly trapped by what I wasn’t able to accomplish without taking the time to fully learn the PHP language. I may be a geeky sort of fellow, but that’s more involved than I really have time for anymore.
After many months of using WordPress for the anime site, as well as sporadic tinkering with the Portlandbloggers page, I decided that this is the platform I want to run with from here on out. (That is, until the next big thing comes along in a few years. I am a geek-dilettante, after all.)
The process of getting from point where-I-was to point where-I-am was, indeed, quite the learning experience. Starting with an import script from Monaural Jerk v0.43 to WordPress 1.5 graciously provided by Michael Alderete (who also helped with a lot of the debugging) and kludging in some dotcomments import code, I set to work finding all of the fiddly little bits that went wrong. This included such fun as misnamed variables, non-escaped apostrophes, mismatched database insertions and just plain pig-headed stupidity on my part. Oddly enough, considering that as of this very morning I’d all but given up on making the conversion work, I was surprised to manage two major breakthroughs in the space of an hour. And here we are!
Of course, now I need to get all of the fun extra bits from the old site back up and running on the new. Don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned the basic “look” of my website. I just need time to construct a working template that more-or-less matches the kludgey old stylesheet rig I was using before. That project is now on the top of the list. Cross your fingers, folks.
Welcome to Version 3 of greyduck.net. I hope you like it here.
Thanks to my dear Twinlet North, I had fifty bucks to blow. (I could make a truly disturbed joke here, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the perverts in the audience.) Unlike last month’s debacle, I figured, this time I’d have no trouble at all spending that gift card money, especially when the venue is upgraded from Fred Meyer to Best Buy. Right?
“Wrong!”
First I looked at headphones. (The better Sony pair? $100. No thanks.) Then I looked (briefly) at computer games and came to the same conclusion I did last month, namely that what I most assuredly don’t need is another massive time-waster when I’m already paying a monthly fee for one (or two, depending on how you count it) major gaming experience(s). I looked at speakers, but I don’t really need a surround-sound set for the A/V computer since it’s not like I really have a room that properly supports the set I already have on the “gaming” rig. I looked into a RAM upgrade. Too damned expensive, that turned out. I thought about a sound card upgrade, but the only device that looked remotely useful still lacked the bells and whistles I’d be giving up by switching to a card that doesn’t support the Live!Drive I/O bay. I considered, repeatedly, and discarded, repeatedly, the idea of buying a faster wireless card for the laptop.
Finally a solution presented itself. What if I took the ATI Radeon 9000-series card out of the living room multimedia PC and swapped it with the All-in-Wonder Radeon 7500 from the A/V computer upstairs, then spent a whopping $20 out-of-pocket for a TV tuner card with which to continue the VHS capture work I (periodically) perform on said A/V computer?
Brilliant!
Let’s just gloss over the issue of how much time this dithering process actually ate up out of the evening. It’s not terribly important, anyway. Ahem. I did manage to finish in time to dissuade my (very patient) shopping partner for the evening from buying purple rhinestones for her iPod. Not only that, but I bumped into something of an old friend, namely Wendi’s best friend Amy’s husband, Michael. Spending a few minutes catching up with news from that quarter improved my evening a bit. Having them come over for Diablo II gaming sessions was among the highlights of the later years at the old house.
If I’ve learned anything from the combination of this experience and the last one like it, and I probably haven’t, it’s that I need to have a much clearer idea of what I want to purchase before I enter any given geek-toy store. We’ll see if I can take this lesson to heart, eh?
