Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Today’s Random IM Conversation

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 31, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Humor and Random
. 4 Comments

Today’s Random IM Conversation from Someone You’ve Never Heard of Before about Nothing Relating to You brought to you by the letter M and the word “Crazy”…

him: Whats up Alabama?
me: alabama?
him: aren’t you from Alabama?
me: uhh
me: not quite
him: ummm…you’re not the one that got censored?
me: censored for what?
him: MIS? Independent contractor?
him: any of this making sense?
me: not to my knowledge, no. and i should think i’d be familiar with such a thing, had it in fact happened to me…
him: I must have the wrong person…I apologize
me: after consulting the available evidence, i do believe you are correct. no apology necessary, however. these things do happen. i’ve got one of those “familiar faces”, right?
him: lol…consulting the evidence? are you a lawyer?
me: no, it just makes me feel important when i use big words and complex phrases.
him: if not from Alabama, where are you from?
me: south carolina
him: thats not THAT far off
me: as i said “not quite”
him: you made it sound like you were from Maine or something
me: no, but i wish. i hear they have lobsters… and snow… and lobsters.
him: not sure…never been…I was in South Carolina for 13 weeks once…interesting memories
me: yes, the hicks are rather enjoyable to watch while drunk on a saturday night, are they not?
him: not sure…I was at boot camp
me: it’s like an episode of 90210… who’s sleeping with who’s… sister
me: boot camp as in military boot camp, or some weenie IT “boot camp”?
him: as in Parris Island
me: ah
me: well we do have much more to offer than burly sweaty guys running drills
me: but still no lobster…
him: all I remember is heat and sand
him: and my Drill Instructor who would eat his cigars
me: hey, everybody needs a hobby…
him: amen sister
him: or brother
me: yes, that would be brother
him: ok then…brother it is
me: well, this has certainly been an interesting start to my evening, but i’m afraid i must go off in search of food
him: good luck
me: you’ll have to randomly IM me again sometime and tell me about this person i’m apparently not…

Can anyone tell me what exactly we talked about there…? I feel like George Dubya being left out of a conversation…

Today’s Bright Idea Nixed Just In Time

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 31, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Humor, Techno-Babble and Work
. 6 Comments

Update: I realized I forgot to sub in some &lt and &gt values for < and >, so just ignore this update if you’ve already read it.

The conversation went something like this:

Female Employee: You said I could log in here with my username, but I can’t.
Me: Ahh, it’s because <so-and-so> left it logged in and locked.
I promptly enter my username and password to force a logout and allow her to login.
Female Employee: Well how did you do that?
Me: I entered my username and password, because I’m the administrator out of that “Only <so-and-so> or an administrator can unlock this computer” part.
Female Employee: Well well well!
My Boss: [after witnessing this] Yeah, why don’t we make it so anyone can do that?
Me: Would you want <so-and-so-other-peon> coming into your office and logging you out forcibly while the tax records for the company were open and unsaved on your computer?
My Boss: Well, no, but sometimes… [noticing the look of disgust on my face] Why is that such a problem?
Me: Because it would require making everyone domain administrators.
My Boss: So why don’t we?
Me: Absolutely not. Don’t even finish that thought, because it’s not going to happen.

At which point he noticed my look of near rage and realized that it was, indeed, not going to happen.

Sometimes you just have to say ‘no’…

Networking, Geek Style!

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 26, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Incoherent Code, Random and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

Since I’ve been getting more and more in to Wordpress lately (hacking, plugging in, etc.), I decided I would pop by the #wordpress chatroom (on irc.freenode.net) and see what went on in there.

Well, not only did I meet a bunch of crazy nerds just like me (who love Wordpress), but it turns out to have been even more beneficial. Not only do I have the off chance to help people who have problems with their Wordpress installs, but just last night I got involved in what turned out to be a very beneficial conversation:

Someone created a #wordpress group on Flickr, to more easily allow us to share pictures that related to the channel and its members. This, of course, spurred a lot of people to trash on Flickr and rave about better alternatives (at least in their opinions).

Gallery 2 was one of the alternatives a lot of people liked (which isn’t really surprising). I’ve had some less than pleasurable experiences with Gallery in the past, and in general try to stay away from it whenever possible… and so I said so.

A couple of people asked me why I didn’t like Gallery, and I told them that in the past I’d had several little gripes about the user experience and some things that weren’t at all intuitively obvious or just plain clumsy.

As it turns out, one of the members of the channel was actually on the development team for the Gallery package and asked for more details and any specific complaints I had, so they could actualy be addressed and possibly improved upon.

Wow, kick ass. I’m networking, geek style! Screw expensive conventions, crowded meeting halls and lengthy plane rides, I’ll network with fellow nerds from the comfort of my wunderbar computer chair!

And now back to our regularly scheduled server migration. I promise this’ll be over soon and I can get back to my normal life…

Picture of the Day

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 22, 2006
in Commentary, Daily Grind, Links and Random
. 3 Comments

I found this thanks to Slashdot over on the Wikimedia Commons project as the picture of the day:

SFO at Night

The author has a lot of great pictures over on his Flickr account. Great find, if I do say so myself…

Server Migration Complete

Published
by
Chris Meller
on January 20, 2006
in Announcements, Follow Up and Techno-Babble
. 0 Comments

The server migration (at least for this blog) is now complete. Everything appears to be functioning normally in my testing, but please let me know if you find anything out of whack.

The only possible problems I can think of would revolve around permissions on the directories, preventing the web server from being able to write data where it needs to. Anything out of the ordinary, drop me a comment or an email!

UPDATE: The SCP command I used to migrate the site didn’t include the .htaccess file, which makes all the URLs actually work, so things were broken. This should now be fixed.