Camping Out.

Back at the Panera again today, because the stupid transformer behind our house blew out this morning for no particular reason, again. Of all the days to do so, this was a bad one; I've got sketches due this afternoon and a conference call. There's nothing like shouting over the din of a coffeehouse during a conference call.

In happier news, a Flip Mino appeared on our doorstep this morning, mostly because the Kodak was sold out at Amazon and I'd still need to buy a memory card to use the damn thing. I opened it up before I left (clearly, they looked closely at the iPhone packaging; theirs was done very well) and within 15 seconds was shooting video. I then plugged it into the USB port of my MacBook, and within 20 minutes the battery was fully charged. Later this evening I'm going to do a side-by-side comparison of the video from my Canon G3 with the Flip video to see what the differences are. Overall, I like it very much so far.

Update: I totally get this thing now. And it's really a work of genius; all of the best design cues (minus the case, which honestly feels a little cheap) are taken from generations of the iPod and put to good use here. What I've read elsewhere is completely true: It is absolutely perfect for capturing something quickly with a minimum of fuss and bother, at the expense of high quality output. But the portable form factor, ease of use, and utility outweigh my desire for uber-quality HD video—I'll get something that shoots high-quality video a little later. Right now, this is all we need.

The spam issue has been solved, I believe. Yesterday evening the site got the shit kicked out of it by spambots, at the rate of one a minute, for about three hours. I shut commenting down completely, and then by accident stumbled on CommentRegistration, a plugin that lets me authenticate commenters locally. So if you've commented here before, please take a moment to register (it's fast, free, and you'll get a new toaster with deposits over $1,000!) so you can continue to comment all you like. I've fixed the problem with registrations not working correctly. I'll verify you, and then you don't need to wait a day to see your comment come through!

Really, give it a try so I can test out the system. Please!

In other news, the rain barrels are empty and the air conditioners are out of the windows. It's officially autumn around here, which means I need to insulate the gutted exam room this weekend to keep some of our heat inside, as well as mix up some hydraulic cement and seal up the holes in the ice room downstairs. And, remember that cabinet I started refinishing last year? I have a few more screws to drill to finish it off so that we might actually use it! Oh, and there's the lawn, which has two weeks' growth and half the neighborhood's leaves... I'm very optimistic, I know.

Update 10.23: I've disabled that plugin and removed it, because I was getting unreliable and unexplained results. The documentation is pretty sparse, and there isn't any customization available unless I start hacking Perl, which I'm too tired to do right now. I'd like to just enable TypeKey on this site (a hosted authentication system) and be done with it, but the documentation for that is about as sparse as it is for this plugin. I found this writeup of someone else's experience, and with a little tweaking, I've got 90% of the service hooked up. Please do me a favor and try this system out. I know it's another web service to sign up for, but they can handle stuff like lost passwords and info updates where that plugin I tried could not. I'd really like to hear from you all; I just can't deal with all of the spam right now. And please let me know how it works for you.

Matt Haughey, the creator of MetaFilter, just switched his personal weblog over to TypePad, and wrote a post about why he did so. If someone as technically proficient as he decides to make his life easier, I'm listening. There's real food for thought in there, and I have to say, after four+ years of banging my head against MovableType, using a hosted CMS package is looking pretty good right now. One of the reasons this weblog hasn't changed its look in two years is because it's such a goddamned hassle to do so. For the short term, I'll stick with what I've got, and look into a more modular template system for 3.3. Down the road? Who knows.

Posted on October 22, 2008 4:21 PM | link to this entry | comments (3)

On Hold.

Comments are currently turned off due to some serious spam issues. I'm working on some fixes for the problem.

Update: They're back on, but you're going to need to register to leave a comment. It should only be a one-time thing, and very easy to do. Meanwhile, all of the images are now too big. I'm working on a fix for that tomorrow.

Posted on October 22, 2008 12:45 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Quickly...

Sage is back from a hellish hospital visit. His belly got shaved again, and he spent the majority of last evening dragging himself around the atrium in an opiate-induced haze. The doctor still can't give us a clear determination between cancer or a very bad infection, but in the meantime he gets to eat whatever the hell he wants in the hopes it'll put some meat back on his bones.

There is drywall on the porch as of last night. The guy I'm using flaked on us twice but finally showed up on Monday to start the job; I'm not altogether pleased with the initial results but I'm hoping his skill with a drywall float will cover up the major blemishes.

We're getting ready for a trip north to see my folks and present The Belly to the extended family this weekend. Showers will be attended, parties will be held, pictures will be taken, and laughter will be heard. In the meantime, I'm doing everything I can to get a bunch of work out the door before we leave.

We have made it through ¾ of a dish of cherry clafoutis and ½ of a blueberry pie since Monday; there is still about 4 lbs. of blueberries and cherries left over, waiting to be canned. Blueberry pie is delicious for breakfast, by the way.

Also: I'm fooling with TypeKey authentication for comments on this site, seeing as I'm getting slammed with dumb spam for russian pr0n and offshore gambling sites. If you have any problems with signing up, let me know via email and I'll either fix it or disable the whole thing. (If you've got a TypePad account, I'm pretty sure you have a TypeKey account too).

Update: Nevermind. The TypeKey documentation was too hard to find in under 5 minutes, and I don't have 5 minutes right now. Back to moderated comments.

Posted on July 16, 2008 10:37 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Junk Drawer.

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.

Posted on April 24, 2008 9:53 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

House Renovations.

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.

Posted on March 20, 2008 6:10 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Search Party.

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...!

Posted on February 22, 2008 12:53 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Upgraded Seats.

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.

Posted on February 21, 2008 9:45 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Testing Yet Another New Entry.

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...

Posted on February 20, 2008 3:27 PM | link to this entry | comments (0)

Site Maintenance.

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.

Posted on February 15, 2008 1:54 AM | link to this entry | comments (0)