All posts by jason

That Was Unexpected

Well, maybe I shouldn’t even admit this, but I got into work this morning, and all of a sudden, soloshootsfirst.com was pointing at my new WordPress site. Wasn’t doing that night when I went to bed. Is now. *shrug*

So, err, welcome to the new version of the site. Yep.

……

Update your feeds.

**UPDATE**   Talked to Joe and learned something new about Apache and needing to restart it– which I had to do this morning for a completely different reason.  But at least I feel better about not being a total schmoe.  Carry on!

The Clock Is Running…

Very close to debuting the new site to the general public.  I started messing around w/ the Apache .conf file to update the locations of my virtual servers, but the behavior wasn’t exactly what I was expecting.  I’m still thinking it through, and I’m sure it’ll be figured out (with some help from Mundschau, no doubt).

I actually really messed it up when I thought I had the simple file updating done– fortunately, I wasn’t the first to so dick-up my wordpress site, and a much smarter person created a convenient solution.

Good, Bad, or Indifferent?

I don’t get a lot of visitors to my site.  That doesn’t really bother me at all.  I’m just trying to entertain, enlighten, or inform those precious few, and also myself.

That being said, while this WordPress site is “in development,” I have a feature turned on that keeps Google’s prying eyes away from this webspace, and the site stays “off the grid” to a certain extent.  I’m considering whether or not I should keep that feature enabled once I formally go live with it.  I don’t have much of a rationale for this consideration.  What could I possibly say or do here that would suddenly overrun my server with traffic?  At the same time, who needs to find me via a Google search?  If you’re reading this blog, odds are over 99.9% that we have met and maintain contact face-to-face.

Any thoughts on this topic?

Self-Taught Lessons

I’ve discovered something this evening while I work on building some photo galleries for the new site: my pictures are organized like shit.

On the old site, I had a LOT of pictures in a number of galleries, and something I’m changing here is the volume of pictures that are out here. I figure no one on the webs needs to see that many. Who looks at all those pictures, anyway?

You’d think that would make it easier to do, but really it’s not at all. I’m only going to upload some of my digital pictures, and I have approximately 7000 images to page through and consider including. I can see the vacation collections being toughest to slog through. What I’ll probably do is take my external hard drive (where I have backups of everything) to work, and I can work on this a bit at lunch time. One of the other benefits there is USB 2.0. That’s right– desktop machine at home is still on 1.1. Yeesh.

In somewhat-related news, when are you available for a Brewers tailgate outing this summer? June 14 or 21?

Hardy Upgrade II

The initial upgrade to 8.04 broke my sound and my network card.  And I couldn’t use the mouse.  But I don’t know if that maybe just had something to do with the network hanging, trying like hell to get an IP.  The upgrade process itself went really smoothly, though.  Also, seemed as though the video driver wrinkles from 7.10 have been smoothed out.  So that’s nice.

What I may try to do, again, since I have the /home in its own space anyway, is do a clean install again of the rest of the system.  The biggest drawback is having to reinstall all your optional packages.  With APTtoCD, though, it’s (fairly) painless.

I’m not that interested in spending a whole mess of time on it, though.  It’s only a beta, after all, and the first one at that.  To be continued.

Hardy Upgrade

I decided that I would use this blog as a repository for my adventures in Ubunt-ing as well as all the normal day-to-day shit that makes up my existence.  That said, unless you give a shit about computers and geek-related stuff like that– nothin’ for you to see here…

I got an email last week that said Ubuntu 8.04 was now officially in beta, with a release due the latter half of next month.  I’m not really very good at being a tester or submitting info about bugs, but… ah, well.  After reading over the release notes for the beta,  there’s a lot of stuff worth getting a look at.

I couldn’t remember if I still had that second hard drive installed in my desktop machine or not.  Fortunately, I did create a separate partition for /home the last time I installed, so everything else is only running at about 4 gigs.  I was ready to do a backup to DVD, but it turned out that second drive IS in there.  Just made a copy of the partition in GParted, and then started up the graphical upgrade tool in Gutsy.  Still downloading all the new packages right now, but I’ll have more to say about the switchover soon…

An Open Letter to My Candidate of Choice, Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

During your candidacy, one goal I recall that you mentioned is getting high-speed Internet access to as much of the nation as possible.

Pleasepleasepleaseplease–for the love of all that is right and holy on this Earth–I really need you to get my folks the high-speed Interwebs.  After all these years, they are still on dial-up, and I could write all the stories on cnn.com myself in the time it takes that mother to load.

I mean, shit.

Thanks.

Continuing Evolution

I tried to import all my previous blog entries via RSS the other day.  That didn’t work at all.

It brought in the titles of all the posts and the timestamps, but none of the content itself.  I’m not quite sure why, when you run that importer, the WordPress looks for a local file, rather than a feed address.  I suppose one could, in theory, import ANYONE’S blog as their own (???).  Anyway, I figure I’ll give it another go at a later time.

I’m having some trouble getting logged in to my server from work the last few days, too.  But only when I use WinSCP, not PuTTY.  Eh, weird.