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Another giant step
Tonight, Evan is sleeping in the big boy bed for the first time.
He seems to be doing OK – falling asleep with a full belly and a book for company is very, very daddy. … Read more
Month: June 2009
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You’ll be malfunctioning within a day or two. And so will your dog.
A bit of background here: several years ago, my dog attracted several potential suitors despite the fact that we’d been told she was already spayed (hint: she wasn’t). It was kind of like the dog version of The Bachelorette, in that you didn’t so much have lots of moon-eyed soft-focus close-ups in fabulously romantic mansions and vacation spots, as you walked out the door to see dogs gettin’ it on in the front yard. (Thankfully, this was years before Evan was born – how in the world would we explain such a sight now? “Well, son, they’re hiking the Appalachian Trail…” But I digress.)
Both of the dogs pictured in that earlier blog entry still live near here, and they still drop by, often bearing gifts – as if to say “Pleeeeeeeeease, can we do that thing again? ohpleaseohpleaseohplease!” These days, post-spay, Xena’s more like “Howdy, want to follow me down to the pond on the adjacent property and go swimming? Maybe gang up and kill one of the pond geese or something?” It’s altogether unlikely that she’s physically capable of caring any less. (I really need to learn her secret someday, my life would be much happier. Or maybe I need to go kill a goose to release the tension? Anyway…) The male dogs bring her dead deer (or pieces thereof) and other strong candidates for road kill – it gets disgusting, especially once it’s built up that beautiful aroma that only comes from not-so-freshly-dead animal carcass that’s been baking in the noonday sun. Guess who gets to dispose of these “gifts” from Xena’s boyfriends? Who else?
So imagine my unfettered delight when my wife informs me that the backbone and ribcage of some unfortunate creature has been left at the top of our driveway by some ex-boyfriend of Xena’s. Nothing says romance around this house like dead things. When I walked out to look at this latest gift from the gods, er, sorry, dogs, I was completely perplexed. At least the usual dead things have some meat on them – there’s some practical value to a dog. This poor thing, whatever it had been, had no such value.
But once I laid eyes on it, I realized that, as the head of the household, I had a responsibility to do the only thing that would resolve the situation to anyone’s benefit and with any kind of dignity whatsoever. … Read more
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Holly Hop
As if fighting to keep a web site on the air over something like six or seven weeks wasn’t enough, I can also announced that I have slain another technical dragon: I finally declared victory on getting the wife’s living room media center PC working, and only a few weeks after Mother’s Day too. It plays Master Of Orion II, it plays movies, it plays music, it plays Monopoly. In theory it can browse the web and do e-mail too, but let’s not get too carried away – it’s using a fairly old TV as its monitor and I’m having a hard time imagining trying to do a lot of reading off of it.
Thank God the machine’s previous owner set up a restore partition on the hard drive; I must have reinstalled the OS something like 20 times. The thing is, while the machine runs on XP Media Center edition, I was never actually able to get the Media Center crap to work. The Media Center functionality is really cool, at least in the brochure – you have a remote control that lets you navigate your media files in a very-easy-to-read-on-a-TV environment and play any of them at the touch of a button. Neato, eh? But the problem, I suspect, is the fact that I put a new video card in it that would do S-video out. Somewhere, having that new card in the machine gummed up the works with some arcane hardware conflict, and so I finally said “@#$% it, I’ll install Nero.” Except that didn’t work too gracefully either. Reinstall again.
I had previously planned on naming this system “Gambit” for network purposes, but after all the reinstalls, I started to think that Holly – from Red Dwarf – would be considerably more appropriate.
Another few reinstalls later, I was scratching my head as I installed Winamp (for music purposes). Now, I’ve been using Winamp since it came out. You know what? Nobody ever told me that it’s suddenly become a damn good video player as well as a damn good music player. I had no idea. Solved all my problems right there. Didn’t bother with Nero. Didn’t need to. With the possible exception of the Media Center-specific DVR functions, that pretty much got me on track. I’m still not sure what to do there – I suspect, however, that I’ll continue to use binaries newsgroups as my DVR for recently-aired stuff that’ll be wiped again as soon as it’s watched. (I know, I know – tut tut tut, shame, iTunes is out there and it’s legal! But how much do you pay for every show that you record and then wipe off of your DVR/Tivo? Heh. Thought so.)
My wife’s favorite part about the new machine: the wireless keyboard. This and the new video card were virtually the only pieces of the machine bought brand new. Total expenditure on the whole project barely crossed the $250 line – hooray for tax refunds!
To sidetrack for a moment: I was gazing at Winamp doing a damn good job of playing some video when I noticed that the playlist window was still up. And that I could add stuff to it. And that’s when it dawned on me: around 1995 or so, when I was working at the (original) Fort Smith Fox station, the station purchased a computer-based commercial playback system which, when hooked up to a cable spot insertion timer (normally used to drop local spots into place unattended at a cable TV head end), could practically run prime time by itself. There are no words to describe what hot shit that was in 1995.
And here we are, barely 15 years later, with a system, in my living room, that could basically run a whole station. If one carved up a show into segments, and then had commercials on the hard drive to run between those segments…
…one would really be onto something if there was still room in the world for standard definition. It’s a neat idea, but I don’t think it’s one I’m going to put into practice anytime soon, not even for fun. Because unlike the guy I worked for back in the day, not every single little idea that occurs to me needs to become a company memo and a “hey, let’s try this!” But it sure would’ve been neat in 1995, aside from the whole thing about not needing many human operators anymore that almost certainly would’ve followed.
In the meantime…happy Mother’s Day. Only about a month or so late.
P.S. I’ve kicked off a summer special for some of our DVDs, to celebrate the site’s seismic shift to a vastly superior hosting service; you can order a bundle consisting of the 4-DVD Classic Gaming Expo set plus either Phosphor Dot Fossils Level 2 or the Phosphor Dot Fossils Brown Box (Level 2 + the first Phosphor Dot Fossils DVD). If your DVD shelf has a gaping, “stuff-produced-by-Earl”-shaped hole in it, and you dig video game history, you can find the limited time special prices here. I had tried to start this deal earlier in the month, but then we got bitten by vampire Globats. The prices on these are good both inside and outside the U.S., so get ’em while you can! End of plug.… Read more
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It’s that time again…
…time for yet another Evan & daddy picture, taken the day after Fathers’ Day.
Not seen here, but mere moments away from sticking his head into the shot when I wasn’t ready to snap another picture, is Oberon. Too bad – that would’ve been a one-of-a-kind shot of the entire male membership of this household! At least until Nimitz comes home…… Read more
Happy Fathers’ Day
[nocrosspost]This is a song that always kinda got me “right there,” and unusually, it gets me “right there” more and more as time passes.
[/nocrosspost]… Read more
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Best line I’ve heard on TV tonight
From the second episode of this season of Law & Order UK, in a scene in which two police officers (a middle-aged officer and a younger one played by Jamie Bamber) are questioning two just-into-their-teens kids while moving a trampoline across one of the kids’ yard:
Older Cop (looking over his shoulder as he’s backing up): Is there anything behind me?
Kid: Yeah, your youth.
😆… Read more
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Farewell, Globat, and none too soon
Warning: this is a pretty lengthy post, and pretty technical too. If you don’t give a flip about websites, internet security and the like, this would be an excellent one to skip. … Read more
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This is only a test.
If this works, then I think ye olde blawg may be back on the air. Hooray! More baby and cat pictures!… Read more
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The hostest without the mostest
As I write this, my FTP client is firing an enormous amount of stuff at a server which will hopefully, in very short order, become the new home of my website.
It’s ironic that, in a year in which I’ve made such a big honkin’ deal about some of the site’s core content being 20 years old, and having been on the web for over 10 years (and at the same domain name for exactly 10 as of Memorial Day weekend), my site, which I’ll admit may well be celebrated this much only by its owner, has spent so much time being DOWN.
After spending a good deal of May fending off repeated hacking attempts, I held my breath as my hosting service sent out an e-mail to announce that they have new owners and management. I was hoping for some improvement – Globat.com (my web host since late 2003) had been steadily going downhill, with the most frustrating incidation of that in recent years being the tendency for their database server to collapse under even fairly mild loads of activity. As theLogBook.com has increasingly become a database-driven site (for the better, in my opinion), this was more than a little bit unacceptable.
I turns out that the new management and technical teams are, in fact, a step down from where Globat already was. I think these people were unfrozen from 2002 or something: their .htaccess defaults (which govern how your site can be accessed and by whom) was hardwired to favor Microsoft Frontpage, a web authoring platform that even Microsoft has stopped supporting. Additionally, their CHMOD settings – basically, the security level of your files and directories, governing who can write/change stuff – is hardwired to a setting of 777: in effect, anyone can change just about anything on your site. When you’ve been fighting off as many hacks as I have for the past month, this is so far beyond unacceptable that the light from unacceptable will take four billion years to shine on me.
The final straw? In an attempt to fix my blog, Globat apparently toasted the database. It’s gone. The post I wrote from the hospital on the night my son was born, and the accompanying congratulations from my friends? Gone. There is a backup, but it’s fairly old – thankfully, my blog posts have been automatically mirrored in two places (Facebook and Livejournal), so I can cut-and-paste missing entries back in once I get things set up at the new hosting service.
I’m incredibly impressed with the new place; not only was the price right, but the options and amenities are mind-blowing, and they go out of their way to show you how to do stuff, including migrating your site and databases from another site. It sure beats the hell out of unreadable-going-on-cryptic “support tickets” written in some sub-dialect of Engrish.
My site is not only one of my proudest (and certainly longest-lived) achievements, but it’s also a vital cog in my attempts to support my family and myself. With the site down and even my e-mail inaccessible, not only is no money being made, but I can’t even solicit future business or sell stuff I’ve already made. It’s having a tangible impact, not having the site working.
So it’s without much of a heavy heart that I plan to bid farewell to Globat very soon. If nothing else, I think the upgrade will be a fitting 20th birthday present for the old thing.
I’ll have more updates soon; for the moment, there’s a massive amount of files to move in order to make the whole thing work. Do not adjust your set.… Read more
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Technical difficulties
Warning: geekspeak contained within
Not too long ago, I surprised my friends by suddenly switching to Firefox, something I hadn’t been too keen on before. Now, I may surprise them again – after an extended and extensively frustrating battle, I’m still trying to decide if I’m going to turn the media center PC I got for my wife for Mothers’ Day into a Linux box, or into an oversized and expensive doorstop. … Read more
