You know it’s a typically lazy Saturday when your two biggest accomplishments are organizing some of your anime CDs into new binders and finishing a Windows system build-out that you started on Tuesday.
I am, indeed, just that exciting of a human being. Aren’t you just honored as all heck to know me? Yeah, you know you are.
Look! Look! Check out the upgraded gallery!
Thanks to the incredibly-well-designed import method, all old links to gallery content will still work, by the way. Oh, and those of you for whom I’ve set up Gallery installs should poke around this new system and decide if you want me to do the upgrade or not. Just let me know, eh?
Not bad for an hour and a half of work, is it?
I’m probably going to tinker with the generally-unused anime site over the next few days. Why? Because I’ve got an itch to tinker, and I want to see if I can actually put the site to good use, that’s why. (I did fix a couple of annoying stylesheet issues this afternoon, mind you.)
In the process, I’ll be upgrading the gallery to, er, Gallery2. Actually, that’ll be Step Number One. Maybe that’ll get done some time tomorrow if I wake up early enough to tinker with it before helping friends move.
The next step will be to implement this nifty little WordPress plugin.
All of you who can see where this is going, please move to the head of the class…
I made it work, alright. I cheated a bit here and there, but what I ended up with was an end-user experience that is wholly identical to that which our airstaff have been used to for years now in addition to reintroducing a feature that some of our airstaff have been lamenting the loss of for months now.
Because I’m just that good, I tell you.
I’m glad tomorrow’s the end of my work week, however. It’s been a long week for such a short week…
You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: “Lack of preparedness on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”
Whoops, I’m terribly sorry. It turns out that lack of preparedness on someone else’s part does, in fact, constitute an emergency on my part. This afternoon I enjoyed the dubious pleasure of running around dealing with the fact that Metro Networks changed the entire website delivery system for up-to-the-minute traffic info… and didn’t tell anyone beforehand. Just one short email with the new URL, instructions and (it turns out) new passwords would have saved me all sorts of stress.
Oh, yeah. They insisted at first that the “current” passwords would work fine. Bzzzzt.
Then I find out that their new website looks like crap in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. In one, the text is too big and the text window too small, so one has to scroll sideways to read an entire line of text. In the other, the text window is black text on a black background. That’s rather useless, wouldn’t you agree? The solution in both browsers is to click on a tiny, unlabeled icon that launches the text document itself in a dedicated window, nicely unformatted for ease of use.
The entire new system is so counterintuitive as to be nigh-useless, and I fully expect phone calls tomorrow morning from show producers and air talents who’re confused and upset. I won’t be able to blame them one bit, either.
So in among all of the other fun stuff going on right now (do the names Sarbanes and Oxley ring any bells?) I get to find a geek-fu solution to this little nightmare. Wonderful.
It was amusing enough when I saw that someone tried to log onto this webserver as a user named “fluffy.” Imagine the laugh I got out of seeing one industrious little hacker try the following names (among a few hundred others) to get onto Washuu, however:
darkman (man, just don’t watch the sequel. what a stinker.)
romeo (tragic shakespearean characters are gother than thou.)
quake (with fear?)
ping (naughty, naughty PS2 accessory!)
pong (yes, go ahead and hack into my uber-l33t networked table-tennis game.)
taz (taking time out from trying to eat bugs bunny, apparently.)
kimi (that’s a very pretty name.)
reebok (running shoes…)
nike (…are sensible…)
adidas (…username selections? in what alternate universe?)
die (another day.)
jem (do kimber and stormer know what you’re really doing on the internet?)
jaime (the co-worker I’d least suspect.)
callhome (why? did I leave the oven on again?)
notorious (underrated duran duran album, can’t find it anywhere, dammit.)
toto (never liked that “africa” song very much, but the “dune” soundtrack is pretty cool.)
alexandru (my daughter will find this amusing. or disturbing. something like that.)
banana (come mr. hackerman, hack on my banana…)
bootcamp (yeah, that’s where you camp the boot sector and frag the operating system as it loads.)
coupon (a word I now cannot help but pronounce as “koo-pun.” damn you, comedy central.)
phoebe (the sitcom character I’d least suspect.)
dummy (no comment.)
stud (again.)
hacker (finally, truth in advertising.)
sexy (something that the person trying to hack my servers most assuredly is not.)
Okay, that’s about enough of that. I think I’ve fixed Washuu’s “swatch” setup so from now on I won’t get a massive list of illegal usernames on Monday morning…
