Blog-related
Apparently someone that received one of the aforementioned handouts decided it would be a great idea to add insult to injury. The guilty party scanned the handout containing all of my contact information and posted it to the armpit of the Internet, 4chan's /b/ board.
It's amazing how long you can spend safeguarding your privacy, yet how quickly those barriers that you've erected can be broken down with one fell swoop.
Some wonderful people decided to hand out roughly 150 flyers containing my name, phone number, e-mail and IM addresses, and Skype name to various people on campus. Now that I'm receiving a deluge of phone calls and e-mails IMs and Skype requests, I figured I'd let everybody know that I may end up changing my phone number and e-mail address if things keep up like this.
Thanks a lot, world.
I've already had a few requests for a copy of the crowbar image I was using while my blog was down, so here it is:
It feels nice to have some time to spare and catch up on things. I've been quite busy recently, with family, life, work, and school, and the sheer volume of what's been going on had put me off from taking the time to write a blog entry about anything. For those that have kept up with me via e-mail, AIM/iChat, Skype, and the like, bear with me for just a moment.
Things start in mid-April, where I had been working on a series of videos for the senior comedy event at school. This was, more or less, the only time when...
For those experiencing difficulties with the blog these past few weeks, I offer the following explanation which I am fairly sure is not RFC 2616-friendly:
'Twas the Night Before Christmas, at my Family's House.
There were no sounds of stirring, save the click of a mouse.
For 'twas just like a childhood Christmas except
I'd forgotten the hours that normal folks slept
Merry Christmas, everybody.
I woke up this morning at 7:30 to my alarm clock, which I had no memory of setting. To the right of the time display was a Post-It note that read, "Take batteries off charger in basement."
I've concluded that I have a very strange way of giving myself reminders.
Upgrading to Subtext 2.1 on this server was a rather painful process. Database operations take forever to complete due to the 233MHz CPU, causing the web-based installer to time out... So I ended up pulling the SQL scripts from Subtext's SVN repository and installing them manually, which took somewhere around five or six minutes.
After installing the scripts in the wrong order twice, I got it right and found out that Subtext 2.1 is miserably slow. It takes just over a minute and a half for the site to compile down to HTML now. Be glad for caching and NGEN, or...
Yesterday, Antony showed me a Mii version of me, created using the Mii Channel on his Nintendo Wii.
I can't say I've ever seen myself in Mii form, so I'd say this is pretty cool. Thanks!
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Fifteen witty and inappropriate excuses I've given recently to people telling me to get a MySpace/Facebook:
"Alternatively I could flush my college application down the toilet."
"Get a job."
"I don't even know Tom."
"I can name fifty more productive things to do."
"I'm not a conformist."
"I value my privacy too much to do that."
"Your concept of fun differs radically from mine."
"I have a blog; that's enough for me."
"I'm...
I seem to have gone through my main mobile phone battery and my two spares without charging any of them. Each battery lasts about nine days, which means I haven't bothered to throw my phone on the charger in nearly a month.
I still haven't managed to find any new job offerings, though I managed to make up for a week's pay (based on my pre-August paycheck) by selling my old TV tuner and two PCs on Craigslist, though that possibility clearly won't last long.
Well, I got laid off today, along with everybody else at the place I (used to) work.
Anybody looking for a part-time desktop support technician or Web designer?
I just noticed that this blog's RSS feed was pointing to my server's internal IP address, "hh2k.homelinux.org". Apparently it's a bug of some sort in subText's URL processor, so I replaced the dynamic link to the feed with a static one pointing to my DynDNS name. The feed should be working outside of my LAN now.
Has anybody been using the W3C Markup Validator recently? I ran my blog through it and received 24 errors in the output. Upon correcting one of the errors, the error count decreased to thirteen, and the correction of a second error brought the count down...
BlogML is a lifesaver. Using Google's cached copies of my blog entries, I constructed a BlogML dump of the pre-crash site and imported it here without many problems. Google unfortunately didn't archive a total of four comments, and the comments I did manage to import are having problems with linebreaks, but the content here should now be the same as what it looked like prior to having the Gericom Hummer's hard drive die.
To prevent this from happening again, I'm going to have to learn to back up my database more often...
Despite the fact that my three previous phone calls to Hewlett-Packard ended in receiving a new case number and subsequently being sent to the back of the line, I went against my better judgment and gave their number another try. After spending the better part of my afternoon (5PM to 7PM) on hold, I finally received my first piece of information (other than, "We can't use your old case number."): I have a FedEx tracking number.
You may expect that, after an entire month, I'd at least be happy to know that the thing's coming back. Unfortunately, that's not the case:...
As I've mentioned to a number of people, my nx6325 randomly quit working a few days ago. I'm not entirely sure what happened: the machine unexpectedly powered off while I was editing a photo in Photoshop. Two days of attempts to boot the machine gave the same result: the power light would come on and then fans would spin, but the unit wouldn't produce any video, wouldn't POST, wouldn't beep if I overloaded the key buffer, and for that matter wouldn't even heat up after half an hour. It came with a standard three-year warranty, so after a bit of...
I was recently inspired to give blogging another try. If you've known me long enough, you're probably perfectly aware of my two previous two-year-long attempts that eventually ended up going nowhere for one reason or another. I hope to remedy that this time around. After all, third time's the charm, eh?
I have a few major reasons for taking up blogging again:
Another one of my online acquaintances recently put up a blog.
Some real-life friends have been pestering me to get a Facebook. My aversion to social networking in general ultimately told me not...