Over the course of the last eight years, I’ve had a very simple email address based on my domain name, and the spammers figured it out pretty early on. The amount of junk I got has been steadily increasing to the point where lately it would take my custom filters and Mail.app’s junk filter about five minutes to sort my incoming mail in the morning. It wasn’t unusual to see 600+ junk mails by the end of a business day, which didn’t seem out of the ordinary for me.
Yesterday I started getting a ton of “Mail Not Delivered” messages coming back to me from various places, and did a little header snooping: the messages weren’t addressed to my account at all, but an foreign account from an old server I used to host on. I contacted my old host and he apologized for the crossed wires; within five minutes the onslaught had dried up and I went from 5 junk mails a minute down to 5 an hour. I hadn’t realized how much of that crap wasn’t even coming to me directly.
The Houseblog is finally fixed. I’m not sure if I’m going to keep it or migrate the posts over to the main weblog (probably the latter), but it’s not giving “This directive could not be processed” errors or whatever it was saying. Carry on.
The Search functionality on this site is now back to normal. Strangely, while it was an easy process to combine a search request across two separate weblogs in MT 3.16, it seems to be set up differently in this newer version. So, for now, the search only searches the main weblog. I’ll get the Linkblog straightened out soon, I promise.
I’m digging the new features of this version, though. It’s a nice upgrade from the older model—leather bucket seats, heated mirrors, cruise control, etc. Now, if I could just find something interesting to write about…!
The site isn’t quite finished yet, but I’m writing here anyway. MT 3.3 is pretty slick. I’m now only two years behind the technology curve instead of four, which will provide things like better spam filtering, a refined editing space, and better plugins. After this exercise is finished, I’m going to take a long hard look at upgrading to 4.1 now that my puzzle-solving synapses have warmed up.
Other than that, things around Idiot Central are pretty quiet. On Saturday I stopped over to the Beerfather’s house to bottle the result of our efforts: two and a half cases of wheat beer, sitting neatly in the basement fermenting on the shelf where I stored the bin full of Scout parts. He and I are hatching plans to go wrenching on the truck this coming weekend, something that leaves me with a bittersweet taste in my mouth: I’m excited for him. His enthusiasm reminds me of myself ten years ago when I had a lot more money and big plans for my new truck, but it will admittedly be hard not to feel like I failed in my efforts to keep it in shape. So I’ll be bringing a box of tissues along with my socket sets on Sunday, and try to keep the blubbering to a minimum.
I’m also signed up for some photography this weekend—the paying kind, and it will have me dusting off the panoramic rig for the tripod I was testing out last spring. I have to buy some cheap spotlights this week, and I’ll have to spring for a copy of Stitcher to process the photos, but I’m excited to finally start working on this for real, and this time it’s all paid for.
My Mom’s new MacBook showed up last Friday, and I’ve played with it only enough to update the software. It’s a really nice little machine—it feels solid, it’s quick, and she’s going to get a kick out of the built-in camera as well as a fresh battery. I got her old Pismo in the mail yesterday, so I’m going to transfer her data over and set her up with a chat account so I can use screen sharing to troubleshoot any problems with her machine. Meanwhile, I’m helping Jen’s father work through problems with his wireless printer. Troubleshooting Vista over the phone has been like doing this year’s taxes while guiding a non-english speaker through a root canal on a CB radio. He will explain what he sees on his screen, and I will frantically Google whatever he can describe to figure out what to do (I don’t own a copy, and am trying to avoid buying one). Adding to the pain is the fact that his patch cords have all vanished, leaving him with no way to directly connect to his printer. Argh!
Guitar lessons have gone reasonably well; I missed last week’s lesson but got back in the groove this Tuesday. It’s to the point now where I miss playing it if I go too long without it, which I’m taking as a good sign. I also broke down and bought an electric tuner after consistently coming in for lessons out of tune.
Add to all of this the fact that it’s half past February and I’ve only done one illustration this year. I need to clone myself.
This is coming from a new install of MT 3.3. Let’s see if it works.
Update 4:12 EST: I done busted the template files, and the new way they (were) doing the comment form is really messy. More work to do…
Update 5:52 EST: Individual entry archives are looking good again. Everything else is still pretty awful, but I’m going to take a break and eat something first.
Update 8:58 EST: Category archives and the main index page are now cleaned up. MT 3.3 was using a tag called MT_TRANS, which was meant to do some kind of translation to other languages, but it was bollixing up the whole thing. So it’s getting cleaned out of the templates, one at a time.
Update 12:26 EST: The linkblog is back up! It looks like I was doing a few things wrong on my end (not configuring the archives to publish correctly, for one) and the site root wasn’t working correctly, but it’s back up and running now. That doesn’t excuse the lousy documentation, though. I’ve made a lot of minor tweaks to the site overall, getting the meat and potatoes working right. The search function, however, is completely fucked up. The Archives page is reorganized, although the thing I want it to do automatically seems to be impossible in MT 3.X. The Linkblog archives are currently hosed. And don’t even look at the houseblog…
Hi folks– if you see strange things around these parts, it’s because I’m doing a long-avoided upgrade to the CMS engine that powers this site. Comments are coming in, but they’re not being posted to the live site yet, and there are several pages that look like poo. Plus, the sideblog is totally busted because the author of the plugin offers the lousiest documentation possible. Stay tuned here while I sort some stuff out.
It’s been almost four years to the day that I started writing on this website, and in that time I’ve switched jobs, been engaged, gotten married (which almost didn’t happen, I love you baby!) and bought a new house. We’ve come a long way since 2001, and I’ve tried to write and photograph about as much of it as I could. For both our birthdays, I decided to finally invest in a commercial weblog application and move into the future. This journal will stay online at this location and be put into archive mode, and I’ll update the links to point to the new domain easily.
For the final name choice, I decided to boost a song title from Soul Coughing and bought www.idiotking.org for my new site. Come on over and join me!
The domain name search has been an exercise in frustration. I used to think that I’d be able to come up with something in five minutes, but when I actually put my mind to it, it stumped me. A word or a phrase or a nickname that isn’t too embarrassing, perhaps. (I didn’t really have anything other than my last name, which worked fine usually, but isn’t what I want for this site.) Hopefully nobody else has taken it yet. Do a domain name search for it…. Chances are, it’s already gone. Adding a level of complexity, tailoring the name around what the site is about- art, poetry, quantum physics… chances are somebody’s got it. Or worse, somebody’s squatting on it and willing to sell it for an inflated price. This stuff gets harder and harder.
Now, I’m also a snob because I don’t want a .biz or .us or .info extension, so I realize I’m being picky. I tried phrases that reflected the house, and things inside it, e.g. the toilet in the basement, which always makes me laugh, has a yellow seatcover with a smiley face painted on the top: Pottyface.org. I tried silly words I use all the time: all permeutations of craptacular and craptastic are taken. (Most of the other phrases I use are PG-13 and R-rated, unfortunately.)
Then I started thinking of common phrases and dissecting them: one came to mind immediately, which was [open mouth] insertfoot.org. Another was [this house/truck/tool is] donebusted.org. Song titles that might lend a name were consulted: idiotking.org is available. I haven’t decided on anything yet, but I’m going to make a decision in the next 24 hours so I can get this thing off the ground.
Bling. This past weekend, I noticed a new realty sign on the corner down the street on my way to work. Always curious, Jen and I did a search and found that the four-square around the corner (same floorplan, same square footage) is on the market for the astronomical sum of $550K. Good LORD. We’d better spiff up our house before the neighborhood upscales us out of existence.
Foresight, foursite and foursight are unavailable in the usual extensions. Foursquared.org is available; fourscore is out. Jen and I have been thinking of names for the whole morning and we can’t come up with anything really catchy. We’re trying to play off the ‘fourth’ in my full name (I’m the fourth Bill Dugan, yes) but that gets pretty limiting. I’m trying to keep it relatively neutral but still connected in some way to who I am. As much as I like Blogdahlia (thanks XLC) I’m trying to keep ‘blog’ out of it—I dislike the word—and I’m trying to make it as concise as possible. (www.thelongesturlnamevercreatedbyman.com is kind of a drag to type in.) Austinscarlett.com is already taken. whatsthefrequency.org is available.
Love Is. When your wife bakes you a fresh turkey pot pie and a chocolate cake in the same evening. I was so stuffed I couldn’t move last night.
This morning I awoke to the sound of the doorbell click-clacking and a knock on the door. I was laying in bed ignoring the snooze alarm and trying to decide if the beep-beep-beep sound outside was a road crew hot-patching the hole across the road (it wasn’t) and later, if the hollow tapping sound was our door, when I suddenly realized we had an appointment with a cabinet installer, who was supposed to take measurements of our kitchen so that we can find out just how much blood we have to sell to finance a remodel. He seemed ok when I greeted him in my pajamas and bedhead, and clucked when he saw the room. The good news is that we’ll probably be able to fit a dishwasher in there, and running a gas line for a range should be easy. The bad news is that it’s still small, the stove stays where it is, and there’s not a whole lot we can do with the fridge.
In the meantime, I’ve been lax about writing here so that I can put the finishing touches on the local version of a new weblog. I have a sideblog installed (a sort of secondary blog of interesting links, in this case) and the templates completed; I’m still working out the archive sections and the search result page. Unfortunately, I’ve been neglecting to settle on a name for the damned thing, which is kind of important in buying a domain. Suggestions? Really, I’m kind of stumped here.
foursquare and brokedown are all unavailable with the extensions I want (.com, .net or .org). Fivecentsplease has been ruled out. Waitingroom is unavailable. (I’m thinking of a doctor/house theme here, have you noticed?) PerpetualRenovations is available but a little long—maybe there’s a shorter cousin…? ThisOldGrouse is available.
It Is Decided. Our firstborn son will be named Octavio.
Corrollary: It took us about an hour to remember the third Bee Gee’s name (Jen finally got it). Can you get all three? No cheating…