ever so gently rambling, rambling at my chamber door
manscaping:
to groom a man. Shaving, waxing, cleaning up the superfluous fur.
Courtest of the Urban Dictionary. A collaborative (think wikipedia) dictionary for modern slang. Found out about this earlier this week on the Rep yahoo group. Since a lot of slang is a bit crude in nature, I don’t have to warn you that this site may offend some of the prudish folk out there. You’ve been warned… I could probably spend all day looking through that site.
Katie: Happy Valentine’s Day! Oh, and would you adopt this cute kitty I found?
Anyway, he’s a sweet Siamese mix and is probably somewhere around 3 years old. We’ve decided to call him Sam, which is Amanda’s interpretation of the Thai word săam which means 3 (our third cat). Got him into the vet on Monday and it looks like he was well taken care of until he was dumped… he’s even neutered! So far he’s been much better behaved at night than our other kitties (at least in part because he’s older), curling up down at the foot of the bed and sleeping most of the night. He doesn’t walk around on us or yowl at us or bite our toes or anything. Well, he did kind of bat at my feet a couple of nights ago when my feet were only under a sheet (as opposed to a heavier blanket), but he left them alone as soon as I got them under a blanket.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve got some pics up over at my flickr.
Part way through switching over to K2. Looks like I need to fine tune the custom page themes I’ve previously created (for movies and header_graphics). They work at present, but the two column setup isn’t really formatted right under the new theme.
I also want to set up a new header graphic, probably tweak the color scheme, and maybe look into some other cool options/extensions (such as embedding a flickr feed in the sidebar).
I’ve gotten a bit farther in my updates for Malkier. I’ve fixed how I’d set up the databases. Basically I realized webmin had greater flexibility for creating databases than phpMyAdmin is currently set up to support. Things are nicely organized now in that respect. I’ve also upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, so I’ve gotten all those goodies and bugfixes now.
The main task left is to do some customization and update the style for my site. My old theme customizations and plugins appear to have transferred over alright to the upgraded install, but there are some issues I’ve always had with how I’d set some stuff up. Michael Heilemann and Chris J Davis have been hard at work on the successor to Kubrick (theme my site’s currently based on)… K2. Looks to be good stuff, so hopefully I’ll shift over to that just as soon as I can integrate my changes into it.
Well, I’ve gotten the critical stuff transferred over. Stuff that’s up and running:
TODO:
Looks like I’m finally going to get around to moving Malkier over to a new server.
iPowerWeb has been decent as far as hosting providers go, but they’re clearly targetting a different market than whatever category I fall into. They provide (read: push) a bunch of web business stuff, but don’t seem to be quite as concerned with cool webtech or security. The server I’m on has been hit by security flaws on a few occasions, resulting in either server downtime or mass defacement of the php source throughout my site… inserted spam code in every php file on my site… Funny because it pointed to a non-existent web address and was written in such a way that every page it was on was broken and wouldn’t even render in a browser. So I’m not really sure what they were trying to accomplish. I tried discussing site security with their support staff (ie any chance it was a php bug in code I’d written or code from packages I’d installed), but couldn’t get much out of them. My guess is it was just some unpatched security flaw in their php install, but who knows for sure.
Anyway, a while back I ran across TextDrive, a hosting provider run by people who love webtech. They provide all sorts of stuff that I haven’t seen elsewhere… especially not all in one package: Apache2+lighttpd side-by-side, PHP5/PHP4, RubyOnRails, Python CGI, mod_spelling, mod_deflate, WebDAV, WebDAV iCal sharing, Subversion (with SWIG, Python, http/https access), automatic subdomains (foo.tld.com -> tld.com/foo), support for a broad range of CMS apps (Wordpress, Textpattern, Instiki, Drupal, Basecamp uploads, Blogger, Trac, Smarty, Movable Type), other version control systems (SVK, Darcs, Monotone, Arch), shell access via SSH (with VIM, Mutt, etc), lots of good email stuff (Spamassassin, content/attachment filtering, Mailman lists), and a range of database servers (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, Berkeley DB). I got in on one of their “venture capital” fundraisers (ie instead of actually going out to venture capitalists for funding, they sell a number of lifetime accounts to raise cash). So I’m set with a pretty slick “lifetime” hosting account that’ll let me host 3 top-level domains (eg abc.com, xyz.com, malkier.com) and all the usual extras (tons of email addresses, 1G disk storage, more bandwidth than I’ll even need, etc). If they only stick around a couple of years, I break even so I felt pretty confident supporting them. They even donate a chunk of their fees to an opensource project of your choice. Looks like they have an even better deal going on right now that gives 2G storage, 15 top-level domains, as well as adding 9G of Strongspace storage and a 5 user license for Joyent (a web-based groupware app). I can’t really justify signing up for a second one of these, but it looks like a pretty sweet deal.
Anyway, I’m hoping to get all the old Malkier stuff switched over this weekend (including transitioning all email over to their server via IMAP). To ease in the transition, I’ve disabled comments on the blog for the moment (I hope). May take me a little while to get up and running over there, since I’m hoping to upgrade Wordpress while I’m at it…
Caught Andrew Bird last night with Lee at the Canopy Club. Impressive live show. I was really amazed how much can come out of so few people. If you’ve never heard Andrew Bird, his music has lots going on. Very melodic. The show (and presumably his album too) was performed by two people using slick audio equipment. They’d play several measures on one instrument, loop it, then play along to it with other stuff. Bird plays the violin, an electric guitar, sings all the vocals, whistles (reminiscent of the little bird Woodstock accompanying the girl in the ice skating competition in one of those old Peanuts tv specials if you know what I’m talking about…), and occasionally kicks out a few accent notes on a small xylophone.
He was accompanied by Martin Dosh who played keyboards and drums in a similar manner. Dosh played a couple of “instrumental” tracks as one of the opening acts immediately preceding Bird’s performance. Could swear I’ve heard his tune “Sam the Cat” somewhere previously…
Haley Bonar got things started with some acoustic guitar/keyboard tracks sometimes backed up by a guy on an electric bass. Beautiful voice. Reminded me a bit of early Jewel (the more thoughtful/sorrowful tracks as opposed to the peppier ones… before she went and tried to go all trashy mainstream pop).
Unfortunately, the crowd was largely composed of rude undergrads (the Canopy’s real close to the Quad) who couldn’t stop chatting during the first couple of performances (especially bad during the first act). Felt kinda bad for her having to perform in front of a reasonably large crowd, at least 2/3rds of which couldn’t care less that she was up there. No accounting for the bad taste of rude people I guess.
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