Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).
I’m working on figuring out the pros and cons to various ways of approaching the fact that I’ve now got a secondary weblog that I need to keep active as well as having this weblog that’s been active for a good few years now at its current address.
Any bright ideas?
Okay, so I’ve got this new toy to play with, and I do need to make sure to play with it. I just need to figure out how to play with it.
Possible options:
There’s pros and cons to each of the options, of course. Hmmmm…
Yeah, it’s cheesy. More to come, I promise.
I got a surprisingly cool e-mail when I got home today — I’m a TypePad beta tester!
I can’t really say much more than that, as is to be expected with something such as this, but one thing I can do is point you to my TypePad weblog: Eclecticism! There’s not a whole lot there yet, I’m still more or less randomly poking around and getting the hang of the new digs, but more will appear before too terribly long.
Now I just need to figure out how I’m going to manage keeping two weblogs current and up to date, without letting either one languish too much. Should be interesting. We’ll see how I do. ;)
Help raise money for Amnesty International and sponsor me for Blogathon 2003! Looks like TMBM is going to be keeping an eye out on all the various Blogathon participants, compiling a live-as-we-go “best of” list. Should be interesting to see what pops up as things progress!
They’ve already found a few ‘concept’ projects: one site will be focusing on Harry Potter, and another will be posting in haiku. I’m thinking about focusing on some of the music I listen to that isn’t overly well known, especially now that I can let people listen in, but I’m not entirely sure yet. Still have a couple weeks to plan!
I just got an e-mail from Blogshares telling me that I’d been given 50 shares of The Book of FSCK as Jonas empties his portfolio. This gives me a cash balance of \$1,106.43, and my portfolio totals \$152,415.64 with shares in four blogs (two of which are mine). The funny thing is, I really haven’t got the faintest clue what all that means.
I signed up for BlogShares a few months ago, when it first appeared on the weblog scene. At the time, I didn’t bother making any sort of announcement about it — I just added the BlogShares button to my site, figuring that I’d come back to it later and figure it all out. The thing is, since then, I’ve more or less just ignored it — I’ve stopped in a time or two and poked around at my statistics, but little to none of them ever made much sense to me. So, I just kept ignoring it.
End result? Not the foggiest! My share price seems to have been fairly stable, though my valuation has been bouncing up and down drastically. Why? Beats me. It’s all voodoo, as far as I can tell. Kirsten and D have both given me a bit of advice from time to time, but none of it ever really sunk into my head. Guess it’s a good thing I don’t try to play the real stock market, huh? ;)
Jonas seems to be pulling out due to the introduction of artefacts. What they are or what they do to the game, though, I can’t tell you, the explanation made just as much sense to me as the rest of this whole thing.
I guess for now, I’ll just keep ignoring it. It doesn’t seem to be helping or hurting me — it’s all funny money, anyway — and it gives me something to poke at when I’m bored.
Hm.
\<poke>
\<poke>
Nope. Still clueless.
After being prompted by D, I’ve signed up for Blogathon 2003. 24 hours of weblogging, raising money for charity (in my case, Amnesty International)! Of course, I won’t raise any money if I’m not sponsored…so won’t you be so kind as to sponsor me?
So what exactly is a “blogathon”?
First some terminology: “blog” is a shortened version of “weblog” which is a frequently updated personal website. Most blogs have date stamps on the entries, and consist of links and commentary.
Now, remember when you were in school and you would bowl for charity? And for every pin you knocked down you got, say, ten cents? Or run for a dollar a mile? During the Blogathon, people update their websites every 30 minutes for 24 hours straight. For this, they collect sponsorships. Pledges can be a flat donation, or a certain amount for every hour the blogger manages to stay awake.
So how exactly does this work?
Easy: you sign up to sponsor a blogger. On July 26th, watch your blogger go for 24 hours straight. When the event is over, you’ll receive an email asking you to donate directly to the charity for which your participant was blogging.
Now, to see if I can pull an all-nighter — I haven’t done that in years…
Just a quick note that I’ve updated my ‘About DJ Wüdi’ page to replace the download links for my mixes with streaming audio links instead. Everything’s still there, just less chance of running afoul of rabid copyright lawyers (on the exceedingly rare chance that they should decide to pay any attention to my little corner of the ‘net).
There was some unintended downtime here last night through mid-day today — unfortunately, I don’t really know much more than that. In the midst of browsing around last night, I lost my connection, and nothing I could do had much of an effect. My DSL modem appeared to be working, but my machine insisted that there was no Internet to be found.
I called Speakeasy and opened a service ticket with them. They couldn’t figure out what the situation was, so they passed it on to Covad (the next company upstream).
Here’s the gory details from the service ticket:
Customer is sync no surf, no E2E ping. Checked TCP/IP settings on multiple computers. Isolated 1 PC, powercycled, checked cables to no avail. CFI, DSL light show sync but cannot E2E ping. Some traffic incrementing on line. Please reset DSLAM card, thanks!
Upstream Cells Received from CPE: 764 ( 130271135 )
Downstream Cells Transmitted to CPE: 140 ( 97056973 )
ATM HEC Errors: 0 ( 53 )
Upstream Line Errors: 5 ( 2063 )
Downstream Line Errors: 0 ( 624 )
Training Starts: 1 ( 10 )
Time Since Snapshot Counters Reset: 8 Min. 57 Sec.
What all that means, I’m not entirely sure of, but at some point during the day, things kicked in again. I’m not sure when, as I wasn’t checking in on a regular basis, but I did get a response from my webserver at about 7pm. From the response on the service ticket, though, Covad looks a bit confused themselves as to what the issue was…
Status changed from NEW to OPEN-Pending Partner Testing
DSLAM Trunk Status: OK
Technology: DMT8-2
Card Status: OK
Port Status: Up
Actual Port Rates: 1536 kbps Downstream / 768 kbps Upstream
Margin: 20.0 dB Downstream / 9.5 dB Upstream
the dslam shows the loop up with no errorsATM pinging the backhaul was successfull
ATM pinging the cpe and it failed
I reprovisioned and that didn’t help
The dslam, transport and backhaul switch show increments of 1 to 2 cells at a time
I put the z-link in a loop back and the atm ping passed
At this point this looks like a cpe issue
Please have the end user power cycle and try again if still unable to surf then we need to RMA the end user anew KIT. Thank you
Ah, well. All’s well that ends well, and everything appears to be back up and running.
Phil was kind enough to include me as part of his beta testing team for UserSpace, his followup blog client to EspressoBlog, so I’ve been posting most of my posts tonight from UserSpace.
First impressions: quite good! For one reason or another, all of the prior standalone applications I’ve used to post to my weblog have had just enough quirks or annoyances to keep me using the standard MT interface most of the time. Phil actually came closest to what I was looking for with EspressoBlog, and it was the prior reigning champion…but UserSpace has it beat hands down.
UserSpace is fast, organizes the various elements and options available for weblog posts well, and handles all the various little goodies that I like to have available (multiple weblog support, primary and extended entry, excerpt, and even keyword fields, multiple category selection, menus for text formatting and comments — any goodie that you have available within the standard MT interface is in UserSpace). I can even set upload directories individually for any uploaded files. Nicely done!
That said, of course, I’ve stumbled across a couple small bugs (though that’s why they call these ‘betas’, right?). None of them deal-breakers, but worth mentioning.
There’s no indication that UserSpace is doing anything when posting an entry or uploading a file. Some small progress bar or spinning flower (or whatever the OS X dingbat for “I’m thinking, leave me alone” is) would be handy, just so we know that something is going on.
For some reason, I can’t upload files (though this may well be something odd on my end, and not within UserSpace). When I try, I get the following error:
XML-RPC Fault
Fault code: 0
Fault message: Application failed during request deserialization: Can’t locate MIME/Base64.pm in [\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} ([\@INC]{.citation cites=”INC”} contains: /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/lib /System/Library/Perl/darwin /System/Library/Perl /Library/Perl/darwin /Library/Perl /Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl/darwin /Network/Library/Perl /Network/Library/Perl .) at /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables/mt/extlib/XMLRPC/Lite.pm line 278.
I ran into some wierdness with categories that seemed to fix itself. I had a couple posts that originally showed up on my main page without categories assigned, but when I put the next post up, the categories mysteriously appeared.
The last thing I ran into actually amused me. After posting the ‘Dean calls for Bush accountability‘ post, I realized that I’d mucked up the link. Easy to fix, as UserSpace has the ability to edit past posts. I jumped in, fixed the goof, and saved the edited post.
Imagine my surprise when after saving the post, it showed up with the ‘Hunting Wabbits’ text formatting option — suddenly Elmer Fudd had posessed my weblog! ;) Apparently, if you don’t specifically choose a text formatting plugin, UserSpace defaults to the standard ‘Convert Line Breaks’ plugin when first submitting a post. Upon editing a post, however, as there is no text formatting option specifically chosen, it defaults to the first item in the menu — which in my case, let Elmer Fudd run rampant. Again, it was an easy fix (just choose the correct text formatting option, and re-save), but it gave me a good laugh when I saw what had happened.
All in all, though, I’m quite happy with where UserSpace is, even in its ‘early beta’ stage.