Posts from — September 2002

The hotel here in Zurich has a web kiosk, so we just HAD to try this out. Don`t worry, it was all my idea.

After discovering a coherent discussion about the nature of blogging, I perused a bit more of the author’s site this evening.

First off, this guy is a co-founder of Panic Software, so he’s gotta be alright. I am loving Transmit, their ftp client in development. I hope the subdirectory bug gets squashed soon. I’ll buy it then.

Anyhoo, Steve has another site called Disturbing Auctions that is absolutely hysterical. It’s a collection of, well, rather disturbing items for sale on eBay. Go there now. It’s great.

Oddly enough, the “God Bless our Truckers” velvet masterpiece received no bids. I would have thrown ten bucks at that, for the humor value alone. However, this one deserved to die a silent death.

I’ve been wanting to rebuild my site with Movable Type for a while now. My wife does not understand this. My friends are amused. Family members are concerned.

Why in the hell would anyone want to read my opinions on anything? I don’t know. I suppose it’s more for me to barf them out there, opinions, links, pictures, you name it. Someday it may form a decent database of my life.

I suppose the line of privacy is not clearly defined with this weblogging business, and that’s a little scary. I guess I’ll feel this out in the coming months. I’m glad I’m not the only one giving thought to this today.

Just watched a commercial for “The Banger Sisters”. I mean I watched the entire thing. Good Lord-a-Mighty, what in the hell happened to Goldie Hawn? Clearly, she was experimenting with the joys of silicone years ago (see “First Wive’s Club), but she seems to have reached a new level of tolerance for the magical levitating expanding goo. It’s in her lips, her tits, and Kurt knows where else.

My god, how do these ex-stars look themselves in the mirror? What exactly do they see? Goldie’s still charming, but the shell around her is getting thicker and thicker and her acting skills were already being taxed to the limit in “Wildcats”. Speaking of that flick, one only has to refer to the bath scene where her estranged husband walks in on her while she’s in a tub with not enough Mr. Bubbles working their magic to fully appreciate what is going on here…

I went to a Pie-Off tonight. Never been to one of those before. Apparently, it’s Canadian. Good excuse to have friends over, have a party, and then judge some pies. Brenda was a judge. I will have to locate the original application letter; she cited her status as a Libra (the scales of justice and all that) and the fact that she hails from Minnesota as bullet points in her list of reasons why she should be a judge.

Pix to follow; I forgot my camera and so must wait until David gets his developed and scanned.

Amy won (again), some graham cracker crust deal. The three people who read this site know that I don’t eat pies. So I observed the entire shebang with a beer in hand, and still found the entire thing amusing. But there was some serious pie judging going on. There were rules governing the presentation of the entries and there were even glasses of water for the judges, to cleanse palletes. Very fun.

And Mike & David have an un-freaking-believable home. Beautiful. Huge. Old. Pretty. I was floored. Congratulations, guys.

Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman had a fiasco installing OSX 10.2 this weekend. Glad I read the article. Apparently if you don’t have OS9.2 installed, when classic runs everything goes to hell, possibly leaving you with a trashed OSX partition as well. Not good.

I don’t remember the last time I loaded Classic, but I need to remember that this is a problem until I get the chance to sort this out. Not exactly sure how the hell I’m going to get me a 9.2 install disk either.

Zeldman complained about the Jaguar installer; he has a legitimate beef. When I installed the Jaguar upgrade, I has a less devestating snafu, but there was a snafu. I had Yellow Dog Linux installed on my G4, along with OS9 and OSX. YDL comes with a bootloader that allows easy triple-booting of all three OSs. The Jaguar installer failed to notice this, because it never asked me about it and blindly attempted to update the OS, and failed. It simply said the disk could not be updated. When I rebooted, I got the grey OSX.2 startup screen (uh oh), but then the install worked a treat. So, apparently OSX.2 is very closed-minded about things, assuming that there couldn’t possibly be any other OS or boot loaders on your computer. I wasn’t using YDL anymore, so it was a minor snafu for me. But if I was, that would have really, really sucked.

So, I have a happy installation of Jaguar, but a hidden partition that I’d like to get back someday, but I’m not messing with anything until after the Radiance Workshop this weekend.

Jeff Zeldman had a link to this site. It’s unbelievable. Steven Champeon has created a bunch of renderings of photographs, via CSS.

Have a look.

Today, I was to install a new router at my boss’ house. This router would enable him to telecomute to the office, via VPN. He has a DSL connection with Verizon, and since we have a SonicWall firewall at the office, it was suggested (by SonicWall “tech support”, of course) that installing a SonicWall at the remote site would be a snap.

Many of you are already screaming, as you have seen the names of the players involved. I hear you. Perhaps you heard my screams earlier today?

Verizon, already well-known for having some of the worst “customer service” around, and SonicWall? Joined together in one multi-headed medusa of lying and deceit? Yes. All allied in the cause of making my afternoon an unpleasant one. Score one for Red & Blue.

Of course it wasn’t a snap. Of course it wasn’t. But then you saw that coming. For some reason, Verizon’s DSL modem does not want to play nice with the SonicWall, despite the fact that all pertinent technologies are supported. Of course Verizon says it’s the SonicWall. Of course SonicWall says it’s Verizon.

The end of the day, and all I have to show for my efforts is a new private network address, and my boss’ daughter’s computer is connected to the internet, as I had a chance to replace her faulty NIC. At least she’s happy. And I can roll back a Netgear router very very quickly.

Why am I telling you this? Because this, my friends, is how I keep my blood pressure down. I vent. And through this blog, I can vent to more people. My favorite exchange of the entire afternoon was with one dim bulb at Verizon. After explaining that, yes, the private IP addresses are correct, and yes I have the PPPoE login and password correct, she says “Well, sir, I don’t have any other information for you”.

“Surely there’s something we missed here, maybe you need the MAC address of the new router? Flush an arp cache someplace?”

“No, sir, the only other people who might have more information on settings is sales”.

HUH? The sales department is gonna shed some light on this hardware problem? Do people actually accept this level of “support” on a regular basis? I’d LOVE to hear what sales would have had to say. Good lord. Tomorrow’s another day.

Welcome to my MT-managed blog. I have tried doing this weblog stuff in the past, and always lost interest, either because the maintenance was too much of a pain in the ass, or the software designed to maintain the site was too much of a pain in the ass.

I came across Movable Type a while ago, and finally got a decent enought chunk of time to set aside to install it. It’s really a great piece of software, with an unbelievable base of user support. I hope to tweak my installation over the coming months and make this another useful node on the rich labrynth of weblogs out there.

• Update (March, 2004): I have since changed weblogging software to Textpattern, which is even better than Movable Type for my needs.
• Update (March, 2005): I have since changed weblogging software to WordPress v1.5. I’m fickle.
• Update (March, 2006): Now using WP v2.
• Update (March, 2007): Now using WP v2.1; what’s with March and upgrades for me?
• Update (January, 2008): Now using WP 2.3.