So the next time I get a bright idea in my head to upgrade the webserver, remind me what a disaster this turned out to be. Please?

Let’s see how many things can go wrong in one server upgrade:

• Grub strangeness post-install, requiring use of the “rescue” mode of the install CD.
• An intensely frustrating experience trying to make networking work, solved hours later by the discovery that SMP kernels don’t like APM/ACPI on some motherboards. Oh, isn’t that nice. By the time I got this one figured out it was too late to catch a bus home.
• The VirtualHost directive in Apache 2.x is ever-so-slightly different from what it was in 1.3. Just enough to give me the better part of an hour’s frustration.
• When you’re already tired (and very hungry), trying to make Qmail work isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It doesn’t help when you’re a doofus who forgets to turn off Sendmail before firing up Qmail. Ouch.
• Courier-IMAP gave me similar headaches.
• I couldn’t figure out for the longest time where the ‘maildir’ script came from that I was using in my .qmail files. Oh, turns out it’s actually ‘safecat’. Duh?

And that’s just the stuff that takes me to, oh, right now. That would be 2:30 in the Ayy Emm, thank you very little.

Bah. I couldn’t get home now if I wanted to…

On Friday, the 18th of January, 2002 I made the first post on my new domain, greyduck.net. I’d had a journal elsewhere before, but it was shut down after about a year. (Some of its posts survive here, mostly in the Thoughts category.)

As I posted the meme entry just below, I realized with a bit of shock that it was post #999. Now, the Monaural Jerk system in its earlier incarnations had some strangeness in its numbering scheme (it had to do with how media review entries were filed, I believe) but still… I’m now at the four-digit level. I’ve made just about one thousand actual posts.

By the by: I’d like to thank Matt McGlynn for the MJ system and his patient assistance over the years making this thing work in the bodged-up fashion I have here. Also, as of this post, I’ve changed my webserver configuration so that the clunky “/journal.php/”-based URL scheme is gone, in favor of just “/journal/”. (The old links still work, mind you, thanks to a symlink I made for backward compatibility.) This configuration matches what I set up for Lil’, and what Matt uses on debris.com. It’s a good time to make a clean change, wouldn’t you say?

In a way, I didn’t actually believe I’d get this far when I started. I’m an infamous dilettante, after all. I get started on something, all full of excitement, and then I get bored and move on. But I’m still here. Maybe, just maybe, there’s hope for me yet. Now I just need to learn how to post interesting content, eh?

Here’s to the next thousand. May they not be another three years in the posting!

It was probably inevitable. Blogsnob recently changed hands, revamped and then started selling advertising slots to companies. Oddly enough, I don’t want to provide ad space to “Christian singles” sites and the like, so I’ve taken their ad code off of this site for the last time.

Ah well. It’s not like it generated a whole lot of traffic for me… and that’s what it’s all about, right?

This is the sort of imagery that I can’t get enough of.

You can see what’s left of Ivan, the full-figured Jeanne, the wayward Karl and the still-forming Lisa in this image composited from yesterday’s satellite data.

It figures that my namesake hurricane would be too much of a wuss to strike land… or to ask for directions…

I’ve installed your fine, fine MMORPG called City of Heroes on my computer here at the office. (It’s a long, slow Sunday spent waiting for backups to run. What do you expect me to do for the next seven or eight hours?) Having double-checked the various agreements and your not-too-clunky Knowledgebase, I know that I can install the game on another computer besides my home gaming rig, as long as I only use the actual account from one location or the other at a given time. No worries. I have no intention of abusing terms-of-service or anything like that.

Here at the office I use a handy dandy proxy server for all of my connection needs. This provides me with protection while also granting me much more freedom than the main corporate firewall (the one I can’t configure to my own requirements) provides.

But for some reason, your game is the first piece of software I’ve seen that is apparently incapable of using said proxy server. So I look in the Readme, under “Configuring your Firewall.” I’m referred to the appropriate section of “Connectivity Devices and Issues,” which refers me to… “Configuring your Firewall.” That’s it.

Er, what? Nice bit of work there, guys. Really nice. Time to shoot off an email via your regular support channels…