THOMnottom

Actually, not much was wrong with the morning (other than being tired and beat up from last night’s adventures – more on that later) until halfway to work this morning. Just before Route 3 merges with 46W, there was a sudden slow down in the left lane. People swerved away from the shoulder, and as I reached that spot I saw the trouble – a deer lying on the side of the road. Worse yet, he was still alive. I nearly cried when I saw him struggle to get to his feet. I drove like a maniac to get to work so I could search for a number for Animal Control. I finally found a website with all of the relevant NJ wildlife contacts, but the phone has been busy for some time. I can only hope that someone else called them about it. Still, it will be stuck with me for a while – more so if I find tomorrow nothing was done.

4 days left in August. I was on a record pace in the middle of the month, but now I must blog on at least 2 out of these final days just to match the 13 posts/month I had going this summer during those glory days of June and July. I feel silly, but I have in fact grown attached to my site and actually want to add more and more and make it flourish. I don’t really care if anyone outside of my apartment really hits this (although I like the idea), but there’s a sense of pride in actually creating something on my little server – something that I would actually show to an outsider. There’s now a push to be somewhat consistent and to eventually have more days in the month with posts than without. It’s not important, but nothing really is.

I noticed some broken features in WordPress yesterday after proclaiming the mightiness of my recovery. Before I could even begin singing the songs of my own praise and recording the historical records for future generations little errors began creeping into my view. Today I hoisted back onto my trusty steed and ventured into the very belly of the database to determine what went wrong. Funny thing, that backup also included drop statements. For those who are unclear as to what I speak (myself included), the backup of my SQL database first deleted then re-added the tables, and then inserted all the data. That meant I was still using the old db structure, thus breaking the beauty that was 0.72 beta 1.

Anywho, I wrestled for a while recreating and deleting my site, until I finally noted all of the problems that my backup from the previous version was causing. After correcting all of those differences the import was a cinch, and neverhood.net was back online. The gallery was even easier. I simply installed the latest RC from Gallery, and then copied my old album directories into it. I almost wanted to cry seeing how easily it accepted and upgrade all 37 galleries and 891 pictures I have up so far. So many people have started checking it out that the timing couldn’t have been worse. I want to get more pictures of my family up since I’ll actually be home this weekend. Oh yeah, the GeoInfo stuff should work now, so I simply have to figure out how to use it on the page… maybe I should be doing some real work though… nah!

Thursday, server died. A/C, too. Home drive all up shit’s creek (I’m not sure if that’s possessive or plural). Things went all wacky. Spent lots of time trying to recover data. Gallery is still AWOL.

In case you couldn’t guess, things became somewhat disastrous and I’ve been slowly rebuilding thebox. Amazingly I’ve almost got the 0.72 beta of WordPress working on this site after importing a modified backup of my old site. I’m even trying this whole Geo Info feature to track my Latitude and Longitude. So much for anonymity. I’ll post more later, for now I’m just happy to be here.

P.S.(The Geo crap didn’t work – I think I partially screwed up the database. I’ll fix that later)

I really need to comment on last night. Tuesdy, my friend Ron IM’ed me late and asked if I was free on Wednesday. I wasn’t sure until he mentioned he had an extra ticket to see Mike Doughty at Maxwell’s. Doughty, in case you don’t know, was the lead singer of the ground-breaking alt-rock-jazz-fusion band Soul Coughing. We met up (unfortunately it sold out, so Lisa decided to head home), and got our first beers just in time to watch him fight his way onto stage. The show was amazing, the crowd was fun, and Mike is just a really cool guy.

His solo music is far less genre-bending than his work with SC because it’s just him and a guitar. But that doesn’t detract from it, as he performs with a quirky and sly sense of humor wrapped around a sincerely intimate conveyence. Doughty sounds like a cross between Dave Matthews (not really the band, more like his work with Tim Reynolds) and the Presidents of the United States of America. He talks with the audience and shares in-jokes with complete strangers. Everybody cheers for the song “Firetruck” written by a 4-year-old. It was sweet and fun and we all got along. After the show Ron and I bugged him for pictures. I took a shot of them together, and when he tried to take my picture he had a few problems. I ended up sitting there with my arm around Doughty for like 5 minutes while Ron tried to figure out what went wrong – and he was totally cool about it. Thankfully Ron finally got it working, and I should get copies of the pics from him soon.

I bought both solo CDs from Doughty last night and had a good time listening to them on my fretful ride home today (more on that later). So all of my faithful readers should go check him out, it’s well worth it.

Another intriguing link courtesy of Markus – this one comparing the California recall to how Herr Bush should be dealt with.

Nicest feature/biggest problem with Quizilla is that you can make your own quizzes. That seems to have led to numerous bizarre themes that I will be forced to tackle. I’m not sure why I too this last quiz, but I did:

You are “Welcome to the Caribbean, love.”
You’re more than a little world-weary, but also
intelligent and you keep your head when things
get dodgy. You’re everybody’s favorite
drinking buddy, but your stubbornness does get
in the way sometimes.

Which one of Captain Jack Sparrow’s bizarre sayings from Pirates of the Caribbean are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Some moron decided to post a comment about my review of House of 1000 Corpses. His comments speak to the intelligence of someone who actually thought that movie was anything but pure and utter mindless trash. Of course he’s too much of a pathetic simp to even have an e-mail (at least that’s his claim), so I can’t respond directly to him. Instead I’ll re-quote the entire comment here on the front page for all to read:

I just wanted to say that baby didn?t drag the razor accross the face, she was dancin when it happend, it was otis. And dr. satan didn?t shoot nobody, you sure as hell wasn?t payin attention cause that was otis too, maybe if you?re gonna be criticizin bout somethin, you should take a good look at what you?re gonna be rantin and ravin about later, Jesus Christ shit for brains.

Continue reading “There should be an test to get online…”

Obviously I’ve been dealing with a lot of power issues since yesterday afternoon. Thankfully half of my apartment still has power and that half includes the A/C. Unfortunately we had tied the server’s power into the bedroom circuit way back when, so it took a 6 foot extension cord to get neverhood.net back online. But to be honest, more than half of Hoboken is without power right now, so that fact that I have an Internet connection and my server is running is rather ridiculous.
The power outage managed to blow out the supply of one PC here at work. To get it back online until Micron comes out to fix it I had to use the PS from my desktop system. That means my only usable system right now is the Dimension XPS P133s that acts as our firewall. Since the machine only has 32MB of RAM and a 1.4GB HD, I could not load X Windows. That means that this is my first post ever using the good ol’ text browser Lynx! I’m happy to report that the site actually looks decent in text, and everything appears to work. Yay me!
Last night a bunch of us headed up to Pier A Park and took some pictures of the darkness. I think I got some really cool shots so I look forward to posting them. Lisa and I even headed up to Yvonne’s apartment on the 15th floor and got to see Hoboken from a different vantage point. We could count the number of blocks with power on one hand even as they announced on the news that power had been restored to Hoboken. Needless to say, it wasn’t all back when I woke up and I can only hope for a safe return tonight. I’ll post more details when I get home.

I have to retake lots of tests so I can redo my About Me page. I know that sounds…retarded? Ok, I guess I don’t know how that sounds. Rumaging around various links I came across Quizzila. My first test had me as Mike from SLC Punk! (surprise – the quiz was which character from SLC Punk are you most like! :razz:). I can live with that because Mike was a cool character (although I’ll prolly retake it and be more accurate – I think I could have answered some questions… more accurately (yeah, I’ve got a real way woth words today)). So I check out the popular tests and they have one about which movie you should be in. It even has lots of possible answers – boy am I excited! Then I hit that submit button and out comes:

Thank God I didn’t come out as Fight Club, The Matrix, or even LOTR. I have a funny feeling that all of my quiz results will disappoint. Time to head over to TheSpark so I can figure out my gender again.