I loaded the site today and my banner image had disappeared. No idea why. The file can’t be found on the server. It’s very strange. I haven’t logged in or edited the site in a few days. Not sure what happened.
I’ve replaced the collage with a backup header image. This is very strange. I wonder what might have caused this… If the current file disappears, then I’ll put in a trouble ticket with my hosting company.
Best thing about WordPress is that site layout can be changed easily. Worst thing about WordPress is that site layout can be changed easily. You can lose hours getting sucked into looking at themes, tweaking newly installed themes, and then making new graphics for header images.
I just switched to a theme called Suffusion. Lots of options without having to edit the CSS files (which I don’t mind doing, but it’s nice to not have to use FTP to transfer files as they are updated).
The new banner image features (from left to right): Kasane, Prize, and Isis. I almost used an image of Logan kicking at Isis, except the color balance was off and didn’t want to be corrected.
I’m having to use the Winddow XP virtual machine on the Mac to do character updates for gaming tonight. Stupid fucking Windows keeps asking if I want to reboot. It’s downloading updates in the background even though that was turned off. I get so aggravated with Windows.
It’s amazing how having to use an application that relies on Windows’s .NET will drive you up the wall. Even though my netbook has XP installed, the .NET installation was customized for the application I documented for a customer. The character builder from DnD won’t run on it. Times out with no error messages. The fix for this? Wipe Windows and reinstall. I have to use my virtual machine on the iMac to run character builder. (My stress levels are way lower when I don’t have to use Windows.)
I’m not even going to get started on Internet Explorer’s “implementation” of web standards. (At least, IE will finally have an implementation of SVG in version 9. Finally. They are years behind Firefox, Opera, and WebKit browsers like Safari and OmniWeb.) Too many days spent fighting CSS in IE when the site worked well in every other browser.
There are reasons why I have a Mac and like unix terminal command line (instead of installing something like Cygwin on top of everything else in Windows). Enough of a rant. I’m going out to the barn to spend time with the girls while the computer updates. Stupid thing.
The Nokia N900 has Skype integrated into the UI. Once a VOIP account is configured, contacts show up in the phone’s address book with Skype call/IM options.
Since I’ve had the phone, I’ve never been able to answer a Skype call and hear a person for more than a few seconds. Reading on the Maemo forums helped uncover two facts:
In order to test what is effecting my N900, I’ll have to try a VoIP call using Skype to a friend first on a 3G network connection and then over Wifi. If I have the problem with both places, then chances are it’s the Maemo5 bug. If I only have the problem over 3G, then maybe it’s T-Mobile filtering traffic.
Once the Nokia N900 was shown to be able to control a miniature helicopter, it was only a matter of time before one success to was extrapolated to a larger scale.
The video, originally released by Tweakker and featured on Nokia’s blog today, is a hoax.
Wouldn’t you love to have the option to purchase a full size helicopter as an “accessory”?
Seems like any time something major happens, I have to choose a new theme for this site. This theme is called “Vina.” Unfortunately, the theme displays all of the categories in the menu bar. I’m going to turn that off, but not tonight. I have stayed up a little too late fiddling with the site.
For many years, I’ve used a picture of Isis running as my header image. This time I decided to do something different. Something to celebrate the youngster who is just starting the riding process. The header image is a crop of Kasane trying to sniff the camera. It was her second time lunged in my good dressage saddle. She was fabulous. So those are her curious eyes. She’s a brave one. So much fun to play with her.
Remember the game Mousetrap where you put together a trap that was triggered by a ball and wound through counter weights?
Here is that same idea on a huge scale — it seem to take up a warehouse. Really cool. Coordinating this must have been a nightmare.
I enjoy playing games: pen-and-paper RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons (yes people still play it), computer RPGs, MMOs, and all that fun stuff. Bioware, a game company, has a good track record producing RPGs (role-playing games). Bioware produced the Baldur’s Gate series a few years back, a well loved RPG.
Bioware recently released a game called Dragon Age: Origins for PC, PS3, and X-Box. I don’t have any of those machines, although I was considering getting a copy of the PC version to use with Cross Over Games (an application that lets you (kinda) run Windows games on OS X). I found a copy of Dragon Age for the Mac (surprise!) this week and it was 20% off. I couldn’t resist. Such a bargain!
The 9 GB download took 1.5 days to complete. Started on Monday and finished Tuesday afternoon. Tuesday afternoon I played for the first time just to get an idea of how it is.
Awesome doesn’t begin to cut it. Great storyline, good character development. Very well done. How else can you spend six hours enthralled in a game and think only two hours have passed?
New interesting feature in this game is the integration of story progress with a social network. As your character proceeds through the storyline, screen shots and quest updates are posted to the character’s profile social.bioware.com.
My poor little Mac died a painful death. What had apparently started weeks ago with random DVD drive openings, ended today with the machine going into an endless boot cycle.
Today was not a good day for this to happen. I was already annoyed from idiots on the drive home and from running errands. I was hungry and had had low grade-cramps all day.
When I first opened the case I smelled burning soldering wire. It’s a metallic, tangy smell. Not like burning, melting plastic, which is what happened when my old Windows PC’s motherboard short circuited and fried the hardware.
A friend came over and we disassembled the system: physically took everything out except the hard drives (which were disconnected). The machine still wouldn’t come up even to see the bios on a screen. Nothing appeared on the monitor because it never even got a signal.
This Mac (really a hackintosh) ran OS X 10.5.8 on a Shuttle SG35 barebones system with 4 GB Corsair RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 gHz processor, DVD-RW, dual 500 GB 8 MB cache drives, a JMicron IDE controller (which can be a world of hurt for a hackintosh), and a 384 MB nVidia 8800 GTS graphics card. Once the kinks were worked out of the system, it ran very well. (I always bought full copies of any software I installed on the Shuttle, including copies of OS X 10.5 and 10.6.)
From November to yesterday, it was almost perfect in fact. (With one blip back in December when it wouldn’t boot.) Aside from the internal and external DVD drives opening and closing some times, everything seemed to be fine. Until this morning when I came in and the machine was offline. It booted once when I got home tonight and that was it. After that, it was an endless boot cycle: power on, CPU fan and power fan came on, and then it would power down and start up again.
My friend and I concluded that the motherboard or one of the chips on it was dead/fried. On top of everything else that I’d gone through today and the hours of frustration spent on the Shuttle, I had had it. I had spent probably close to 100+ hours over the space of 18 months getting the system tweaked so the OS ran smoothly, digital sound out worked, Quartz Extreme graphics engine was enabled, and game window resizing didn’t freeze the system. Oh, and OS X never recognized the virtualization capabilities of the Intel Core 2 Duo, even though the chip supported virtualization. I never could run virtual machines with Parallels 5 (which checks the CPU for virtualization technology). (I might post the list of drivers I used, if anyone is interested.)
I learned a lot about Macs by creating a hackintosh. I feel confident that I could resolve most system problems on a real Mac because of my experience digging into different kernels, plists, drivers, and other internals. Good learning experience for being a tech writer in an IT department.
What I really learned was that I didn’t want to waste my time (and therefore my billable hours) customizing yet another hackintosh system. I wanted something that would work and be reliable. Or “stable” as it were…
So… I’m looking at a shiny new low-range iMac. The main terabyte drive has been reformatted and partitioned. The application/system partition is called “Stable,” the larger working file partition is called “Pasture.” I’m transferring my files right now (300+ GB from my old secondary partition, mostly mail, photos, videos, and writing). While that material slowly copies over via USB2 and 32,000 files download for Guild Wars, I’m going to head off to bed. (I miss the eSATA connection!)
Rest in pieces, poor little Shuttle.
Over the weekend I tried a new theme that had a section that looked like torn paper with pictures behind it. Unfortunately, the theme didn’t work in Internet Explorer. The pictures appeared on top of the torn paper images instead of behind. (Maybe it’s a layering issue in the CSS.)
Any way, I loaded this theme and we’ll see how it works. I would like to customize a theme with horse pictures. Most of the themes with horses I don’t like.
I’ve also started having a Twitter feed automatically post daily digests. If this is too much traffic from the blog, I’ll turn the auto update off.
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