Holy hailstorm, Batman!

We got slammed by some nasty storms yesterday.

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This weekend we were coming back from a wedding in Southwest Michigan.  Our travels led us to I-94, by way of US-131, coming from the South.  This is the path I would normally take:

However, Michigan (Kalamazoo?) has decided to screw the pooch and completely hose things up.  This is the new path, to get from Northbound 131 to Eastbound 94:

What.  The.  F-.  Not only was the ramp to East 94 from 131 CLOSED FOR CONSTRUCTION TWO YEARS AGO, but we had to completely make a large loop just to go the right direction.  Bah!

So I’ve decided that traveling for work…in a word sucks.  I’m tired of eating out for every meal.  The flight out here (the long one, from Chicago to LA) was awful (thank you, airline industry for sucking even worse than you used to)…I think we need a corporate jet.  And my body is out of whack, too.  I’ve actively been up since 5:45am, and can’t go back to sleep.  Of course, I went to bed at 8pm local time, too.  :-/  The first night, there was no free wireless Internet in the hotel.  Ten bucks for a day’s worth of connection time, when all I need is less than an hour?  At least now at the next hotel it’s free, but it’s 1) a very weak signal, and 2) the slow 11mps wireless Internet.  Who the heck doesn’t have wireless-g anymore?

And don’t even get me started on the reasons I’m out here…I’m not even sure where to begin with that.  I might address some of those concerns in a later posting, but I guess we’ll see.  I’ll just say that it looks like I’m on the brink of a possible IT nightmare, one of those stories you read about in tech journals and say “whew, glad that wasn’t me!”.  Yay?

Well, that’s it.  For the second time in a few months (all revolving around changes with my web host, but that’s another story), my Wordpress install was hosed.  Something with the caching mechanism it uses gets screwed up, and I get ugly errors and junk when the pages load.  Last time I lost some comments and a draft post…luckily this time I don’t think I lost anything, but it’s still annoying to have to do cleanup.

I’ve been keeping my eye on another blogging platform, MovableType, and think I’ll try moving to that.  I was hoping to wait until they released an upcoming open source version; currently it only offers a “free for personal use” version.  At this point I think I’ll take the plunge anyhow and maybe move to the open source version once it comes out.

I’ve read some comparisons of the two, and I think I should be able to do what I do in Wordpress in MT4, and supposedly some of the things are even easier.  The big difference I can see is that where WP sort of hacks together caching so it loads faster and doesn’t hit the database so often, MT builds posts into static pages.  So, here’s to looking forward to some changes in the coming weeks - with at least a new theme, and better stability!

2 hour software upgrade to make your expensive new phone system actually sound normal: two people, 8 hours on Saturday, 5 hours on Sunday

Elapsed time before end users tell you they are randomly unable to make outbound phone calls, or repeatedly get busy signals, or keypresses don’t register on voicemail: 2 days

4+ hours on the phone with tech support, both foreign and domestic, finding a “solution”, and still not sure if it’s actually fixed: Priceless

Let’s just say this comic sums up the past couple weeks quite well. Sigh…..

The bee’s knees.  The cat’s meow.  Last night I was going over some stuff on how to download Gmail messages via POP to a desktop email client like Outlook or Thunderbird, and saw that they had added IMAP access now!  I personally don’t think I’ll go back a desktop email client anymore, but I know that’s a feature that’s been wanted for awhile.  Plus, now that should be a way to load messages into Gmail from another account - dragging and dropping via IMAP.

Speaking of, I think the migration of the FT domain’s email to the hosted Google Apps went well.  I used the 30-day trial of the premium service to import emails, and went this morning to cancel the trial now that I didn’t need it.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that Google Apps now offers 4GB of space for messages!  Holy crap!  Sweeeeeet….

How many comics can incorporate SQL Injection* into the punchline? See XKCD:

*The down and dirty of it is that SQL is the language to manipulate databases, and unless you check for certain characters when entering data, somebody could run code that isn’t meant to be run. That’s “SQL Injection”. By having “DROP TABLE Students” embedded in the student’s “name”, when the person entered the name into the school’s database, it inadvertently deleted the database table that stored all of the students at the school. They should have checked for that.
As the Fall season roars into town this week (highs in the mid-50s today, woohoo!), to those readers out there that remember…well, actually probably just one of you out there: I can hear the CHS marching band out practicing on my way out the door, and this morning brought back memories of being out there at 7am practicing. It was 44 deg out at that time this morning. Ahhhh, good times!

do people send image files (say, a logo in this instance) as a PDF or embedded in a Word document?  Send the f-ing thing as the original JPG or BMP or GIF image.  You have to copy and paste the damn thing into Word or print as a PDF in the first place - just send the damn image.  Gahhh!

Just a few minor annoyances to end an otherwise pretty good week:

One of the houses that we were going to look at this weekend, has been taken off the market. What sucks is that this one (at least from the outside) had the potential to be a front-runner for us, and the outside of the houses was one of the major things we had problems with in the first round of househunting. I don’t think the owners sold the house; it was a situation where some personal things wouldn’t allow them to keep it. Is it bad to hope that maybe whatever happened falls through again and we’ll get a chance to check it out?

I have a UPS package waiting at the apartment office. They are only open during the convenient hours of 8-6 M-F, which keeps either of us from really having a chance to stop in there. Luckily, I was able to work from home this afternoon, so I thought I’d stop by when I got home. Surprise! They closed at noon today. Nice. Dammit they suck. Or maybe I should just keep sending things to my work address. :-/

I’ve come to find out that I can’t search for files on my computer (Start Menu –>Search doesn’t work…nothing comes up) and IE7 won’t load any webpages. I normally use Firefox anyway, but it’s going to drive me nuts that somehow my own PC is busted. I want to blame the god-awful Comcast software they forced me to install to connect online, even though I uninstalled it. I have a sneaking suspicion that it was incompatible with IE7 and borked it. I have no idea when it would have stopped working, though. Same goes for the Windows Search function. I don’t use it that often, so I have no idea when that happened. Bah.

What prompted all of this is that I was going through our wedding CD that our photographers sent us (which is a completely different story to be told sometime later), and all the pictures are in separate folders. There’s no pattern for which pictures are in which folders, and the folders are just named with numbers. I wanted to copy them to have them all in one folder, and I planned on searching on the CD for images, selecting them from the results, and copying to the destination folder. Buuuuut, now I can’t be lazy and have to do it manually.

Screw it. This computer has been feeling slower lately anyhow. A new Ubuntu is coming out soon - maybe I’ll copy my important stuff, wipe it clean, and dive head first into Linux.  I can’t do any real gaming or VS programming on this anymore anyway.

Otherwise, happy weekend to everyone!

Anyone have any good ideas for a Seinfeld themed costume that would work for me?

There does seem to be a lot going on lately, but really that’s no excuse to let things go stale on here. My apologies….

Won’t Someone Think of the Children??
Courtesy of Ars, it is being reported that Anheuser-Busch is coming under fire from 21 stage Attorney Generals over it’s Bud.tv video streaming site. The Generals are saying “that it asks A-B to use a better age-checking tool; the worry is that underage youngsters might somehow see the streaming goodness of Bud.tv and be tempted by the demon alcohol.”

Bud.tv, launched at the Super Bowl, is A-B’s attempt to stake out a media presence on the Internet, and the site offers video clips and original programming to those discerning drinkers who enjoy a cold Bud.

It’s not as though Bud.tv is simply letting people waltz on in after they supply fake birth years, though. The site’s sign-up process is deeply annoying, requiring the creation of an account and the surrender of name, e-mail, ZIP code, and date of birth, which is apparently checked against public records to verify the information. The state AGs want more; anyone could, they say, get access to an adult’s information and easily sign up for the site.

It’s always good to see state resources tackling those bad alchohol companies and their websites that kids could possible go to, enter in fake information, and see advertising for adult beverages. The States are saying Bud.tv isn’t doing enough, even though it sounds like it’s age-checking scheme is even more robust that a lot of…ahem….other sites out there. And where does the fact that you see beer commercials on TV all the time fit in? Quick, avert their eyes so they can’t watch!

Another 7th Guest?
I’ve been meaning to post this up for awhile, but I found a site where a group of people are creating a 3rd 7th Guest computer game. For those that don’t know, The 7th Guest was a computer puzzle game from way back in the day, one of the first “multimedia” games I ever played, and was a blast. You wander around a haunted mansion, solving puzzles to see more and more of a grisly story. Yeah, I’m a dork, but back then, with the lights off and the sound turned up, it was a lot of fun.

Blog Changes
In case you didn’t notice (and I’m doubting any really did), the address for this blog is now http://blogs.fiestyturtles.com/pete. My problem is I’m never content to sit still with technology or software. Wordpress recently released a new version of their awesome software, 2.1. My own, and I think all of the other FT blogs were on 2.0.x or something, but this new one has some great changes: a better admin interface, better post writing interface, automatic saving of posts (screw you crashing browsers!) and an improved file uploading/management system that I notice right off the bat.

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