Rebuilding from scratch

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Okay…so here’s the scoop.

In brief — everything died.

Last Thursday, I grabbed a moment during work to check my site, and found out that it was down. This wasn’t immediately a concern — computers do occasionally freeze (though it’s wonderfully rare with OS X), my router has a tendency to lock up on occasion, and I’ve got the occasional tendency to forget about some of the more important of my bills — so I just didn’t worry about it right off.

Unfortunately, when I got home, it quickly became obvious that this was no minor problem. The iMac that I’ve been using for my webserver, was dead — “D – E – D, ded”. No response to any keypresses…no response to the ‘panic button’ reset switch…not even any response after I unplugged it, let it sit for a minute, and plugged it back in. Not a good situation.

Especially when I noticed the faint smell of something burnt lingering in the air.

So, my webserver is no more, and I’m in the process of rebuilding things from scratch. My first priority was to get my blog back up — but to do that, I’m starting with just the default Movable Type template. The rest will fall into place…though it’s likely to be a long, slow process.

On the bright side, I’d done a backup of my website just three weeks ago, towards the beginning of August, so I’ve only really lost about three weeks of posts. On the down side — just copying that backup into the webserver directory of the machine I’m using now, didn’t work, so I still have to rebuild everything. Still, it’ll go a lot faster than if I’d entirely lost all that information, so that’s a good thing.

In the meantime…well, things are likely to be a bit odd around here for a while as I get things going again. Caveat emptor.

Music, music, music

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I found a fun little toy to play with today — a little program called Kung-Tunes that ties into iTunes (my .mp3 player), grabs whatever song I’m listening to at the moment, and writes a small text file to my website. That file is then integrated into the page whenever someone hits my site, giving them an instant readout of whatever I’m listening to if I happen to have any music playing when they visit.

Useful? Not in the least. Just cool.

Redesign in progress

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Well, I did a bunch of coding tonight, and have v1 of my site redesign up and ready to beta-test.

More details on the redesign are in the rest of this post. Unfortunately, as all I’ve re-coded so far is the main Long Letter page, they’ll revert to the current design. Still, at least I’m started, right?

Read more

Geek mode on!

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I didn’t want to say anything about this too soon — I tend to get a little too excited about things before they’re actually happening — but now that i’ve been at it for almost a full week, I figured I’d actually say something about it.

Life at work has taken a definite turn for the better!

Last week I was about ready to turn in my resignation and ask my temp agency to find me another posting. While the work hasn’t been bad, there have been two main annoyances that have been getting to me. First off, the pay is a lot lower than I’d like it to be, and secondly, since I’ve just been your basic bindery monkey (binding books, cutting paper, laminating, drilling holes, etc.), not only was I not learning anything new, but I wasn’t even using the knowledge I had. Not something that’s likely to keep me interested for very long, and I’d pretty much reached the end of my rope. So on Wednesday, I was on my way to the boss’s office to talk to him about this and see if there was anything that could be done about either (or preferably both) of these situations.

On my way there, I got pulled aside, and asked if I knew anything about HTML. Since I’ve been playing with this website since about 1995 I was pretty cofindent in telling them that I had some idea of how it worked…and suddenly, I was a lot less interested in whining to my boss.

Since this last Monday, I’ve been neck-deep in HTML, CSS, and XML, working on helping to code the pages for a web-based job submission tool being built by Xerox for use within Microsoft for sending jobs to the Xerox print shops. They’ve given me a week or two to ‘prove myself’ so that they could be sure that I actually was able to contribute to the project and wasn’t just talking out of my rear when I said that I was good with HTML, and then we get to start negotiating a raise. This doesn’t look like it’ll be too hard to do, as I’ve made a lot of progress over the past four days with the two pages that I was given to start with.

One fun side effect of diving into the world of code has been that it’s kicked me back into full-on geek mode. I’ve had a few things bouncing around that I’ve wated to work on here on my site, but I just hadn’t gotten around to getting started. Now that geek mode is back in gear, I’ll be diving back into those projects. Should be interesting to see how this goes….

Strait or Gay?

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This is an e-mail that Karl just sent me…

For me, voting in the Republican primary election for my district (Turnagin District 26 in Anchorage), l have to choose between Strait and Gay.

This is ABSOLUTELY TRUE…no kidding!

This is from the State of Alaska, Division of Elections candidate page.

Look at the bottom two entries of the candidate listing where it says:

STATE REPRESENTATIVE DISTRICT 26

GORDON W. HARTLIEB (Libertarian)
3419 Grissom Circle
Anchorage, AK 99517
Phone: (907) 243-8198
e-mail: gordon@systems33.com
Candidate’s web site: http://www.ak.lp.org/hartlieb

ETHAN A. BERKOWITZ (Democrat – Incumbent)
1219 Inlet Place
Anchorage, AK 99501
Phone: (907) 279-5659
e-mail: ethanb@alaska.net
Candidate’s web site: http://www.ethanberkowitz.com

STEVE STRAIT (Republican)
2500 Douglas Drive
Anchorage, AK 99517
Phone: (907) 248-1028
e-mail: steve@stevestrait.com
Candidate’s web site: http://www.stevestrait.com

BECKY GAY (Republican)
PO Box 190428
Anchorage, AK 99519
Phone: (907) 248-5909
e-mail: beckygay@alaska.com
Candidate’s web site: http://www.beckygay.com

These Republicans are running against each other in the primary!

I’m switching to Libertarian GODDAMNIT!

Sounds like a good idea to me…

Parable of the Talents

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I’m not sure where or when I picked Parable of the Talents up, but I found it while digging through my book box at one point, and finally got around to reading it. Neat stuff — though apparently it’s the second book in a series (the first being Parable of the Sower), so now I’ll need to go search that book out to get more details on the first part of the story.

PotT is the story of Lauren Olamina, a woman with a mission to spread the word of Earthseed, a religion with the destiny of bringing mankind to the stars in a post-apocalyptic (though not nuclear) near-future America. America has fallen from its status of world protector into nearly third-world status, torn apart by wars with Canada and the newly-seceeded nation of Alaska, and run by a ultra-conservative religous fanatic as President.

Told as a memoir of Olamina’s life though the difficult years of the growth and destruction of her first Earthseed community as written after her death by her estranged daughter, a fascinating portrait of a woman driven to a purpose, no matter what the costs, is painted. Using excerpts from Olamina’s journals to present her side of her cause, and ruminations by her daughter to give an alternate view gives a wonderful portrait of a very intense and controversial woman at a very trying time.

Hopefully there’s more coming…and I’ll definitely need to flesh out the story with the first part sometime soon.