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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Month: August 2006

  • Only three mistakes? Not too shabby.

    I’m getting better at this webserver migration stuff. (Note to Universe At Large: This is not a hint that I want more practice!) I only forgot three things, and they were all easily corrected:

    1. Feed on Feeds: Lil’s & Kyla’s website feed readers didn’t make the transition very gracefully at first. It turns out that a MySQL export dump from version 3.x may not import very well into a 4.1 system. (Of course, the WordPress exports & imports worked just fine. Make of this what you will.) Luckily I was able to simply copy the directories from /var/lib/mysql on the old server to the appropriate directory on the new server. In related news, the guy who wrote “FoF” has made noises about a new release.
    2. My files: There’s an entire subdirectory called “files” on this site which contains various and sundry images, videos, sounds and other miscellany. These files tend to be large enough to make the weekly site archive a bit cumbersome, so I deliberately exclude that subdirectory. Imagine my horror when I realized that I’d failed to migrate that subdirectory, and I’d asked Infinity Internet to dial down the old box hours beforehand! Luckily they hadn’t gotten to it yet, and I retrieved all of the files. Whew!
    3. My son’s email: His account gets a fair bit of spam for some reason, so I set him up with the same mail filtering rig that I use on mine. This was all well and good until, as I set things up on the new server, I simply copied my mail filter configuration file into his home directory… without editing it appropriately. Yes, the mail server has been trying to filter his email into my mailbox for the last few days. (Due to file permissions, this is generally impossible.) This is now resolved, and mail is being delivered as I write this. Sorry, Spud!

    It could’ve been a lot worse. Now I just need to finish adding things to the backups (like email, which I wasn’t doing before for some reason, but is now part of the nightly process) and automating the off-site backup process. Then, maybe, I can relax a bit.

    I hope.

  • Lack of license doesn’t stop ninja.

    Well, if Kyla did it and Lil did it (even though I doubt she’s ever played the game) then by golly I have to do it!


    Choose a Ninja Burger Career at the
    Ninja Burger website.

    Mind you… I don’t drive, so this doesn’t make a lot of sense. Oh, wait. The game doesn’t make a lot of sense either. It is a lot of fun, though.

    (They did get the “excellent music collection” part right.)

  • Server Migration Happy Fun Fun Time

    If you can read this (which, when you get right down to it, may be one of the most pointless turns of phrase ever created) then you’re accessing this site via the new server. I spent last night and this morning getting websites, databases, email and other configurations moved over. One hopes that our experience on this new machine will be more enjoyable than on the last, which was woefully underpowered for the work we were asking it to perform.

    Of course, something is bound to be broken. I just haven’t found exactly what that thing is… yet. If you spot errors, please let me know in some fashion. The faster they’re squashed the happier I’ll be.

    And, thank you all for your patience.

  • Hello, journal. It’s me, Karel.

    I seem to remember telling myself that I’d get back to writing here more often. What happened to that? Maybe when I’m a bit less frenzied in my day-to-day life, I suppose.

    My life at the moment, in a short paragraph: Work is going well, in some ways better than I had any reasonable expectation of it going. The kids are awesome, which is nothing new but is always worth mentioning. I don’t get to spend as much time with friends and loved ones as I’d like. I need to focus on getting my finances back in order and re-learning good habits. I think I’ve made progress on my eating habits… small progress, but I’m not knocking it baby.

    Oh, and: This Fox 12 WeatherBlog posting made me think: How neat would it be to spend a night or two in a fire lookout? Then again, I imagine those things are raised high above the ground, so that probably wouldn’t work for me. (I couldn’t manage the Astoria Column, and that staircase was entirely walled in!)

    Anyway, good night, all, and may the gods watch over you. I’ll try not to be such a stranger.

  • Of Feeds And Chats And Sealing Wax

    Maybe I’m just getting lazy. Maybe a change is as good as a rest. Maybe, indeed, I’m hoping to attract people to my syndication feed with actual content. The reason may in fact be irrelevant, but the results aren’t: I’ve switched from a summary to a full-text syndication feed setting. This will make certain people happy, and will probably bewilder a few others.

    It saves me the trouble of trying to come up with a clever and witty summary description for each post, though, and anything that makes writing in my journal easier is to be embraced without delay. This poor site has been neglected long enough as it is, wouldn’t you agree?

    In other news, I’ve added links to my LiveJournal and my Vox page down there in the “My…” section on the left. Feel free to peruse them and amuse yourself with what I get up to when I’m not writing here for a change. If you’re on LJ at all, and are interested in instant messaging, you should definitely read this entry at the very least.

    I think I’m starting to crawl, slowly, out of the emotional hole I’ve lived in for the last few months. Maybe this means I’ll start writing more, as this week’s output might suggest. One can hope, yes?

  • What do you mean, he’s fourteen now?

    There are two amusing things about Alex’s birthday today.

    The first is that everyone I work with insists that I’m too young to have teenaged children. Well, obviously that isn’t true, now is it? So we started early. So what? It just means we’ll have lots of time and energy to enjoy life after the kids are adults. (Let’s not think about “the g word,” though. Nuh-uh.)

    The second is Alex himself. He’s a funny kid, and I don’t mean that in the snarky way. The boy has a genuinely keen sense of humor, so I decided to further his comedic education this year: I bought him the boxed set of Marx Brothers movies, featuring all five films that included all four brothers. This evening we watched Duck Soup (his choice), and I think Alex liked it. I picked Cocoanuts as the follow-up. Apparently restoration can only accomplish so much with such an old gem; the audio was as washed-out as I remember it. Such is life, I suppose.

    Now I just need to figure out what I’m getting my daughter for her impending official entry into teenagerhood…

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