I’m sending this quick post from the road in Incline Village (near Tahoe), NV. I’ve just spent the past 3 days skiing until I nearly dropped. Given the ambient temperature (20 F) and the conditions (blinding snow storms and fog) I’ve gotten in some good runs. Pictures to follow later.
In the meantime, enjoy a happy new year. I’ll be crumpled up in a corner somewhere with some Advil 🙂
I tried to do something helpful earlier and it backfired on me. In an attempt to cut down on the error messages from the various search engine robots hitting this site I decided to redirect an old directory to this new blog on the home page. Problem is, that breaks other scripts running on the same directory. So now I choose: do I help the robots or help the people?
For now, I choose people, although the logs say that robots outnumber people 8 to 1 on this site. Perhaps someday that trend will reverse and my errors will subside. Until then, no such luck.
Sometimes getting new computer things is cool. Often its just a big pain, since you have to re-install and re-setup everything from scratch. Today I am living that nightmare over and over again. The worst part about it all is its a disaster of my own making. It could all be prevented by getting off the upgrade treadmill.
I’m a big fan of progress, really. Just not when it requires me to work. 🙂
I believe I’ve cracked the code as to the source of my Christmas and Thanksgiving flights to OK disasters: DFW airport. Again today I get to Dallas and I meet up with non helpful gate agents threatening to leave me at the terminal rather than let me board the plane. All because I brough 3 carry ons instead of 2. Happy holidays to you too, wicked witch of the central US!
File this one in the “I though Toyota’s were supposed to be reliable” folder.
Last night the “check engine” light came on in the 4Runner. Since I’ve never seen it before I was concerned. I checked all around the engine compartment, looking at hoses, wires, fans, and the like. I looked under the truck for leaks. It all seemed fine.
I took it in to Toyota to have them give it the once over this morning. I get a call barely an hour after I get to work. “Well, there are some problems,” they begin. No, really?
Long story short, at this point in time I’m out at least $1200. Most of that is labor considering they have to crawl around inside the engine area. What happened to the always reliable, never breaks down Toyota mantra? Bah!
I spent the last few days assisting some friends of mine work on their house, and I decided to note a few things that are interesting (to me at least):
1. I can still remember how to paint walls w/o wearing as much as I roll on
2. Filling holes and sanding is still not any fun
3. Watch out for bookshelves: some items may shift, could fall, and cause damage to your head
4. Construction dust can and will go everywhere it can, even if you have covers
5. There are never enough hours in the day to get stuff done, nor are there any “on time” schedules or “on budget” projects.
Armed with this information I am now convinced that I should never buy a house, or at least not one that requires so much work. When would I ever have time to sleep?
Some days it just doesn’t pay to get up in the morning. Today I spent all day working on various odd tasks to make up for a day long trip I have tomorrow. As fate would have it, I spent two hours at the end of the work day building a new PC image only to have it completely fail when I bring it home. The kicker? I need it to work for my trip tomorrow. And my flight leaves at 7am. And its coming up on 11pm now.
Can you say no sleep? Sure you can.
I’ve now gone through the whole site and made the main pages consistent and readable. For the most part, broken links and bad formatting have been banished. A host of upgrades to the scripts driving the site are now in place. Only error messaging and subdirs remain a problem.
Ah the joys of web site renewal. I think I’m ready to call it good enough and move on to something productive… like writing!
If you know nothing about PHP, Apache, or server side scripting this next statement won’t mean much to you: paths suck! As I continue to rebuild the guts of this site to be “easier” to manage, I’ve discovered the joy of absolute vs. relative paths. Seems like you need a little of both, but where and when to use each is a mystery to me.
I guess I need “wasting time scripting for dummies.” I wonder if it comes in an audio book format?
It looks like most of the guts of the CSS page script is now in place. The site is starting to look a bit better. Sometimes I wonder why I do all this. Oh well, off to bed.