We took a trip to my parents’ house yesterday, to spend the afternoon and evening and have dinner. Since I brought the little camera, I took some photos on the way up and while there – nothing too fancy, but I did snag some shots of a couple raccoons that came by, best of all being the ones when one sucker climbed the tree to “run away” from me.
I did not, unfortunately, have the camera in hand when Marshmallow came by later that evening. She’s just too cute.
My friend Keith has this bad habit. He finds these interesting “browser distractions” (or maybe he doesn’t find them himself, but gets them sent to him too). Then the bad part – he shares them with me. I have no idea how many hours of lost productivity I can blame on these things, but I do know it’s greater than zero. So now it’s my turn.
If you remember the game Lemmings, you’ll like this one I’m sure. DHTML Lemmings plays right in your browser. If you don’t remember the original, there’s some documentation on the page too, which should get you started.
As I played this game last night, I remembered thinking, “This is kinda like that one hidden level in Warcraft III.” In the level, there’s a large “maze” leading up to your position, and some tower defense structures built along the path. You have to build more towers, and upgrade them, to keep the bad guys who are coming out of a portal from making it all the way to the bottom of the level. It doesn’t really count for anything, and has nothing to do with the storyline, but it’s a lot of fun to play. That’s one of the levels I’d reload and play quite often. Now, I can have similar fun right in Firefox with Desktop Tower Defense (which interestingly, the author mentions the level in Warcraft III which inspired him). Place your tower defenses to kill the bad guys before they make it to the other side of the maze (which you get to create). Soaked up an hour or so last night when I was thinking I’d be going to bed.
Now that I’ve tested WordPress 2.1 and found that the themes and plugins I use work fine (there was a slight problem with PHPEnkoder, but it turns out that problem existed before and I just hadn’t noticed it; the author has since squashed the bug), I upgraded all the sites to run the new version.
Of course, they also released another new version in the last couple days, which Dreamhost will soon have available for updating. Oh well, at least that one will be slightly less worrysome since it’s a minor upgrade.
Still need to do the wanted update to Fedora 6, but Joshua is once again living with mostly new hardware (carried over one of the NICs, the SCSI card and the hard drive as a primary slave now). As soon as I can upgrade the OS, I’ll copy off the files from the old drive and probably trash it – it’s been making unhealthy noises for years now. Then again, I’ll have to weigh the unhealthy noises against the pain in the neck (literally) of reaching into that cabinet to pull out and reattach all the cables…
After I can’t remember how many years of service, my desktop computer – which originally was purchased in the early 1990s and was upgraded in some way a few times over the last decade – has quit altogether. It might just be a power supply, but since the machine is so old I’m not sure I want to try to find a replacement power supply or just take this opportunity to replace the machine.
In the mean time, there’s limited Internet access at home, since Joshua was not only my desktop computer but acted as the gateway and router for the house as well.
Well, Dreamhost is upgrading PHP on all their machines over the next few days/weeks, and one of the issues with the upgrade is that versions of WordPress less than 2.1 will be broken. So, they suggest two possible fixes; either upgrade your WordPress installation to 2.1 or higher, or downgrade from PHP5 to PHP4. Turns out that all the sites I have WordPress running on are using PHP4 already, so I didn’t have to do anything. But looking through, there’s some new features and functions of WordPress 2.1 that would (or could) be nice. Only problem is, there’s a lack of information about what plugins or themes will be broken after the upgrade. So instead of upgrading a site to find out things don’t work, I’m going to setup a test site running WordPress 2.1, and install all the plugins and themes that I use elsewhere to see that it’s running properly. Since Dreamhost makes it simple to setup subdomains, and it doesn’t cost anything, this seems like a simpler solution than upgrading one of the sites I maintain and finding out things are broken – and I might be able to find fixes for the problems and get things running anyway, and either submit patches upstream or at least know what needs to be changed on the sites so that they’ll work after the upgrade.
Of course, the data center that houses a good chunk of their servers is going down this evening for about 5 hours, so who knows how much of this work I’ll get done before the connection to the machine goes bye bye. 😛
Spent a good chunk of today going through iPhoto and editing/captioning photos, and when I was finished I uploaded the vast majority of them to the gallery. So if you’re interested in photos that Stephanie and I took, have a look at http://gallery.srhuston.net. There’s now plenty to see there :>
Saw this cute fuzz ball on the tree outside the house in the back yard, and had to snap a couple photos.
Reached another milestone this weekend. Earlier in the week, I’d mounted the NEMA enclosure inside the shack which would serve as the coax passthrough (a way to get the coax connections into the house, without running them through the window as I had done since the antenna was first setup). This Saturday afternoon, David (N0YMV) and I decided – almost spur-of-the-moment – that now was a good time to mount the dualbander on the house as I’d wanted to do since quite awhile ago. I had stopped short of doing it before because I wanted the coax passthrough done first (so I could close and lock the shack window again). But now that the box was mounted and working out, there was no excuse. Not even the slight cold and mild wind 😛
Photos available in the gallery as usual. Next project, mounting the 5/8 groundplane antenna for APRS on the garage peak. Stay tuned…
