Damn, I've been so busy being sick and trying to make a living on eBay I've had writer's block. I had over 100 auctions close Sunday night and my hands are torn up from packing things to mail, but I am caught up which is amazing. Now I get to start all over again. I have a really long rambling entry about the dangers of Prozac that I began and haven't completed yet, I wanted to put it up first, but for the last three plus hours I've been a hostage to my new Maxtor One Touch II external hard drive (don't hit that button unless you've got a lot of free time!!) and I've run out of non-computer things to do so I'm blogging. I'm afraid to do anything that involves my main hard drive because the 38 gig thing is being backed up by the Maxtor...
I've been working my butt off on eBay the last few weeks, and my reward to myself was some new much needed toys. I got a Belkin battery backup, which I plugged everything into tonight despite the warning to charge it eight hours first (oops). That was one of those things I never really thought I needed, but after an electrician looked at our house wiring I decided it might be a good idea. So I spent an hour or two under my nasty, dusty desk following cables and trying to make everything a bit neater. And my old 80 gig Maxtor external hard drive has been making some strange noises on and off the last few months, and Apple's Tiger just came out, so I broke down and bought a new 300 gig Maxtor hard drive, so I can back everything up before I upgrade, and protect everything on my other drive. My intention is to replace the other drive completely, because of several things - first, the weird noise, and secondly... you can't turn the damn thing off! It hums 24 hours a day. And, I only have two Firewire outlets and now have three Firewire devices, I wonder if they make Firewire hubs? So my CD burner is currently disconnected, oh well.
I'm watching the pretty little blue light flicker on the new hard drive, it's kind of hypnotic. It does seem to be much quieter, that's good. I did freak out at first because the CD ROM with all of the installation software would not show up on my desktop, if something's got a defective part, I'm bound to pick it, that's just me. I actually shot off a desperate letter to Maxtor when I registered it tonight, asking for a replacement disk, but then I restarted my Mac and it popped up finally. So I jumped on it and installed everything, and pushed the little blue button... It says it's finished copying, but now it's "comparing", I should have known it would take forever, but I was so excited that the CD was actually working I got carried away.
And I bought Tiger, though I'm going to wait a bit before I try and wrestle with upgrading, especially since I just read that Retrospect, the program that's backing up my hard drive right now, is not compatible with system 10.4. That figures. And I'm really bad about being impatient and wanting to upgrade things ASAP, when I upgraded to system 10 I had to reformat my hard drive and start from scratch. So I'm trying to be a little bit more patient...
Oh yes, and I think I've finally found a mousepad that will work with my semi-new optical mouse and not make me nauseous from the fumes, which seem to never fade away. Am I the only one who is knocked out by that smell? I have a wonderful Ouija board mousepad (recycled material, it NEVER smelled bad), but my optical mouse tends to get confused with all of the patterns on it and fly off into the corners on a regular basis. So I've been on the lookout for a different type pad, I even thought about a leather one, but 99.9 percent of the things have that horrid smell. So when I was shipping in Comp USA this week, I wandered into their mouse section and found a MicroTracker Mouse Pad made of an ultrasuede type microfiber material, and it did not reek of chemicals, yea! It's a pretty grey color, and so far I have not had any control problems with my mouse. The mat does feel slower at first (not for gamers and such), but for anyone who needs precision and control it's very nice. And for those of us who don't always have a super steady hand, it's great.
I've had SO many stupid technical problems lately, Opera keeps crashing (a new version is out but it's still Beta) so I've been having to use Safari, my spam program was all screwed up and super slow (a new version did just come out, thank goodness). I still have a wireless router under my desk that I haven't tried messing with in the last few months, it kept screwing up my cable modem's IP address. And just a a little irritant, I found out one of the mic cables I bought for my Yamaha keyboard back at Christmas time was wrong (it's the one the salesperson picked out to go with a mic), and so I finally went back to Guitar Center to exchange it, which took literally an hour, then when I got home I realized it was now wrong in a different way, so I figured out which kind I really needed and bought the correct one on eBay. I'm sorry, my time and patience is worth more than $9 and hour. Buying the keyboard originally took almost three hours. I'm just not cool enough to hang around a music store for that long, I'm sorry. When I saw it was wrong again, I actually considered going to Radio Shack to see if they had a convertor plug, that's how much I DON'T want to go back to Guitar Center ever again...
OMG, I've been typing now for well over an hour and the hard drive is STILL "comparing" with only 21 gig left!! It would be nice to go to bed before dawn tonight for a change (sigh). And I have some images on my hard drive that I need to run through Photoshop, but I don't want to screw up this backup. Maybe I'll go take a shower and then come back and see if it's finished, I dunno...
Just checking in to let everyone know I haven't slit my wrists... During the weekend I went and got Mac Panther and found out when I was upgrading I had an "overlapped extent allocation" on my main hard drive, which resulted in me trying to upgrade for about 48 hours, then finally installing it on my backup drive just so I could get to my hard drive to backup files, then I had to do a CLEAN INSTALL (gulp!). I've never done one of those before, ever, and I'm still reinstalling everything. I had to dump half of my backup drive to get everything on there because I could not get my Toast to work (sigh), so I couldn't even dump anything onto a CD.
I haven't even tried to reinstall Suitcase yet, I tried the little Font Book think that came with the system, don't think it's going to make a dent in my fonts... Meanwhile I have stacks of eBay stuff piling up to list. But at least my newly reformatted Mac seems to be running much quicker now. Sparky also bought me a new LCD monitor, which came today and my eyes are still getting used to it but it's gorgeous! I read CNET's reviews for a week solid before picking this one out and I'm so glad I did. Now all of the photos I did on my old CRT monitor look really washed out, even my weblog looks much lighter.
So now I have a lot more desk space, a giant malfunctioning 19" CRT monitor sitting in the middle of the floor along with my fax machine, which is working fine, we just decided to drop the phone line it was on because all we were getting was paper-wasting junk mail. And supposedely I can now fax with Panther. We're going to keep the fax machine around, just in case, it's not really worth enough to sell and anything is better than having to go to Kinko's to fax.
I even had to get a new USB hub, I have no idea why, but my old one just sort of stopped working. And continuing on our buying spree for this week, I bought a halogen desk lamp which I'd always said I'd never buy, but I saw it on the way out of Microcenter and it was reasonable, and I'm SO sick of having bad lighting in my office so I caved. And so far, I have to admit I really like it. I'm trying to convince the cat that it's not a good thing to play around, I think she believes it's the sun, but she's been getting too close for my comfort. I had a friend with one at my old office and he used to burn things on it (banana peels being one of his more fragrant ideas).
Back to work, I'm drowning in eBay stuff because I took a hiatus last week (which turned out to be a good thing because apparently eBay's systems were screwed up all week). But now I'm behind because I couldn't use my computer for several days and I need to make at least a little bit of money this week to buy groceries, etc.
Crap, I just went to Apple to get the link for Panther and in 24 hours they have an even newer update than the one I spent the weekend installing (aaaaggh!)... not tonight...
OK, I'm not dead, I've just been overworking. WAY too much eBay stuff lately. Out of town guests, who were lovely BTW. I've been getting hit really hard with both comment and email spam lately, I had to compact my Entourage database last night because I started getting phantom invisible emails in my Delete box. Macs rarely get viruses but I've had other email programs get corrupt databases before (Netscape scrambled all of my mesages together like three times, that was fun, let me tell you) so I freaked out when the invisible message count went from 1 to 10 within 24 hours. I had never compacted my 250 mb of emails before, but it worked and the phantoms went away.
And having other weird computer problems... Why do things have to start acting up when I want to buy something else, dammit? My printer I use for my massive amounts of eBay paperwork (which I thought I was replacing when I bought my HP Photosmart, but it's too slow!) has been shorting out regularly enough that it was at the top of my "to replace" list, then my external hard drive started freezing and causing finder problems, so I started looking at hard drives. Sparky even agreed to buy me a new one.
BUT the last week or so my monitor has been flickering so the price of poker just went way up. When my last monitor died it just went black one day and that was it. My lovely 19" NEC monitor has been jittering and flickering so I'm guessing it's on it's way out. I can't remember when I bought it but it wasn't too terribly long ago. So of course, I want a nice flat screen LCD monitor to replace it. And the ones I'm looking at start at like $600. I really don't want to go down in size, bigger would be easier on my screwed up vision, and the LCD monitors are supposed to be much sharper (as well as giving me half my desk back).
Then I made the mistake of looking at the new Apple Cinema Display monitors (which start at $1300, gasp!). I remember when the wide screen Apple monitors first came out and I thought they were just odd looking and overpriced, sigh. But then I still had most of my vision back then and could read without glasses, and didn't have double vision. My poor husband, he's going to kill me when this thing goes out. I actually hope it does just die peacefully instead of blinking on and off for months, it's giving me headaches already. I've mentioned the flickering to him several times, I need to get him to sit down and look through eBay for an hour or so to actually see how bad it's getting.
What else... (outside news in the next entry), kitty Phoebe has finally discovered how comfy the bed I bought her a year ago can be. She never got in it, I guessed it was because she didn't like the fake fur stuff, and had put a pillowcase over it, towels in it, but no go. I was going to use the old torn fitted sheet from our bed and sew a little cover or something for it, but I just folded the sheet and laid it in the bed and she jumped right in. OK, whatever works for the kitty works for me.
I've also been trying to find a replacement for my discontinued eBay management program (AID), which is nearly impossible for us Mac people. I downloaded a trial of Auction Genie, which is the closest I've found to what I've been looking for, which is basically a desktop database program, and have been playing with it, but the detail page is tiny and hard to read and I haven't been able to get it to do everything I want. The online instruction manual is 90 pages long! It's not terribly difficult, but it doesn't feel at all intuitive. I'd really like to simplify my job, not make it even more complicated. I know I'm just too picky, but it would be nice to have more than one program to choose from. And eBay's own programs they are pushing don't support Macs at all.
And with all the problems going on, and a bad case of PMS (my pharmacy substituted my generic BC pills for a different brand so I've had a really uncomfortable month), I decided to upgrade to the brand new version of Movable Type tonight. I know I shouldn't do anything that requires real thought when I'm PMSy but I like nice repetitive tasks, they calm me down. And all went well so nothing to freak out about.
I think I'm going to get hooked on plugins, I added Mt Entry If Comments tonight, which basically only displays a number count for comments if you have more than zero. Very nifty and makes me feel less unloved because I'm using my blog as my startup page on Opera.
Although the spammers seem to love me, MT Blacklist is working it's little heart out, bless you Jay Allen!
Whee! Not sure whether to feel like a genius or an idiot ;-) Instead of doing my real work tonight I decided to figure out the whole weblog syndication thing. I honestly think the whole thing used to work but I hadn't checked it in ages and I've done a lot of updates and found out that I had old, invalid syndication feeds. So I went back to the MT forums, because it's not really clear through the MT users manual, and found out here is how it all works...
The syndication feed is just a link to a template in your blog. The older one is the RSS 1.0 index and the newer XML feed is the RSS 0.91 index (which should now be renamed 2.0). Mine were out of date, apparently they don't update themselves when you upload a new version.
To check yours go to the Feed Validator and enter your link (should be your weblog/index.rdf or index.xml). This will pretty much tell you what to do. I got this page telling me how to update my Movable Type templates, which I did and the XML one works but the older one is buggy so I didn't add it to my syndicate link.
And MT 3.+ is supposed to support Atom feeds... hmmm, looked through my templates, nothing for Atom. Nothing in the user manual, but there is an Atom template on the default templates page (and the newest RSS 2.0 one). So I added a template and named it atom.xml and the validator says both now work!
So I think I may finally be a real blogger now :-) So that's my aha moment for today, my sincere apologies to anyone I frustrated with my blogging ignorance... Next lesson - how the hell does trackback work...
As you can see I've been playing with my CSS for this page, it still doesn't look as I imagine it, but I like it a bit better. I'm a big fan of grey anyway, so that much will probably stay, I'm not sure about the banner, but I know if I redo it I'll keep it the same size... I didn't realize it was specified in so many different places, geez...
I seem to have gotten the HTML working on the bottom of the sidebar again, I have got to learn how to get everything working better, now I've got Atom feeds, XML, trackback, pings... I know one day it will all click and I'll have my aha moment, but for now my head hurts... Gonna go take a shower and got to bed. I'm all PMSy too, which makes it hard to concentrate (envisioning Jon Stewart yelling "Damn you estrogen!")
Yippee, everything seems to be working! Just slow browser cache problems, apparently. So far version 3.1.1 is beautiful, and the entry boxes seem bigger which is nice (I always thought the boxes in version 2.6+ were too small)
I got my key to be added to the MT "recently updated list", I've bugged tech support twice and gotten prompt responses. I installed the new version of MT Blacklist, I think I did it correctly. I'm already thinking up subcategories to add, exciting stuff for an obsessive compulsive...
Lots to learn, but time to sleep. My brain is overloaded enough for one night.
Well, I uploaded, set permissions, ran cgi thingies, and I think I've got it all installed. My sign-in says 3.11 though my weblog is still saying 2.64. Also, my login entire menu is justifying on the left, which better not be correct because it's really annoying...
Going to bed now, wish me luck.
Not that I mind typing in the nice little boxes on my Movable Type menu, but I thought it would be nice to be able to make notes and type really long entries offline in Appleworks. Then I pasted it, previewed, all good... went back to save and ackk!! All my quotes and apostrophe's had turned into this:
& # 8 2 1 7 ; (without the spaces, of course)
It displayed correctly, apparently being HTML, but it looked awful on my end. And who knows if it looks OK on PCs, etc., I can't test for all platforms, I'm on a Mac.
So I tried saving it as plain text, RTF, in Word, in TextEdit... they all copied and pasted just the same. I could save it as HTML and it seemed to work, but only the stuff newly typed, and I got to look at the formatting which is distracting.
Finally found in the prefs "use smart quotes" and it seems to have solved the problem. It didn't convert my existing document, but it let me go in and retype the apostrophe's on Appleworks then pasted them correctly into MT.
Just a ramble, I'm tired tonight. Here's hoping that when I close and reopen the document, and restart the program that it stays nice for me.
Addendum - Out of curiousity, I was flipping through some of my archive pages (I'm trying to figure out how to make some of them just quotes instead of the full entry), and found where I had some open italics, and lots of little diamonds with question marks in them where I had a space after a URL. Couldn't see those with IE, but Opera shows everything a little differently. Started correcting them but then my eyes gave out, more things for my to do list...
Someone please tell me why anyone would spend like two hours leaving 144 spam comments on a weblog and not even put the correct URL for their website? Good grief, like I'm not going to notice that many new comments...
We went out to eat with my parents tonight, it's nice being able to chauffeur them in my own car. Especially right now, my mom is recovering from a pelvic fracture from fainting from too much blood pressure medicine and my dad's back is just giving him hell. He's going to go to a pain management guy starting this week, he's had several back surgeries and a hip replacement in recent years and is not getting any help from his orthopedic doc, he also got overmedicated and was having dizzy spells. This new guy is an anaesthesiologist who can try some different things. I printed a bunch of literature for him on neurostimulation, which we're all hoping will work.
PLEASE let us get a President who is "interested in science" in office, and who is not a lackey to the drug companies. I'm trying to figure out this week how I'm going to pay for my four prescriptions, which even at Sam's Club's discount pharmacy prices are still going to be about $150. Sparky is telling me to just "do without" some of my medicines, especially my Ambien (which is $80 a month), but I'm not sleeping hardly at all with it so without it really scares me. I've tried several times to go without it for a week or so and I basically didn't sleep at all. I've never been a good sleeper, I think it's mostly the MS causing the problems, but any help at all is a blessing. My parents are paying a fortune for their medicines even with Medicare, and a gap policy. I think between the two of them they are also going to see a doctor about 2-3 times a week which ain't cheap either.
The last time one of my prescriptions expired the doctor tried to get me to come in for an $85 visit (even though I just had my physical a few months ago), and it took three phone calls to get her to renew the damn thing over the phone. I have about 8 prescriptions that I've been taking for years now, it's not like I'm asking for anything new and exciting. And I think I've just realized when I switched pharmacies last time that the new pharmacy is not giving me Fiorinal with codeine, just Fiorinal, which might explain why it hasn't really been working as well. Of course, that's the one I had to fight for over the phone, my doctor has a bad habit of not writing things exactly correct. I also need to see if I can get my Prozac split into two 20 mg pills a day instead of one 40 mg, I think the giant dose is making me sleepy.
However, I did find one way to save on two of my really mega-expensive medicines. Merck, who makes my migraine medicine (Maxalt) and the only allergy medicine I can take that doesn't contain an antihistamine (Singulair) has a patient assistance program that actually works. Because we are both self-employed and don't have insurance or Medicare, I am actually eligible for free medicine from them! And I really, honestly got it, three months worth of each. Maxalt is about $100 for 6 tablets (which is considered one months worth) and the Singulair is over $100 for a months worth. I wish the Ambien people has a program ;-) The most expensive medicine I ever got was some weekly self-administered (shudder) shots for my MS, which were about $2000 a month (I had real insurance at the time). Lucky for my finances, they didn't help me and actually made me feel worse.
My dental bills (and Sparky's soon-to-come ones, he's not in pain so he's spacing his visits further apart) are going to be the price of a semi-decent used car I'm afraid. Or a really killer Mac setup with all the bells and whistles. I'm thinking now the dentist must have hit a nerve or something with the injection on my last visit because the area he worked on is STILL numb and tender. I need to call his office again and see if there's anything they can do about this. And the mystery tooth is still worrying me.
My 30 day Carmax warranty is about to expire and I need to call them like today to get a few little things checked. Supposedly I still have part of the original manufacturer's warranty left also, it was 3 years and the car is a 2002, but the salesman wasn't sure how many months were actually left on it. One of my windshield washers isn't squirting, the light in my glove box is not working, and I think my headlights might be a bit out of alignment. It has Xenon headlights, even brighter than halogen, so I don't want to blind people. They're very nice with my night vision problems, though (which are mostly RK related), driving at night isn't as much of a nightmare anymore. I need to post my review of the car, just to get it out of my head. And speaking of cars, my first pricey insurance payment is due on Monday (gulp), I was paying just liability on the antique car but upped it to collision on this one. At least I have a good driving record, knock on wood.
I've almost gone through my first tank of gas, I think the tripometer is at 200+ miles or so, so even with the bigger V6 I seem to be getting much better gas mileage than my old 4 cylinder car did, which is nice. I haven't even tried the remote gas lid release yet, I guess I should do that before I take it in for service.
Excitement for today - I leaned on the panic button on my remote accidentally tonight while the car was in the garage still, scared the living crap out of both of us.
For ages I've been having what appear to be problems with some corrupt fonts, namely Arial which is really bad, and have been getting those friendly little pop-up messages from Suitcase telling me I have font conflicts. When I had the scary finder crash a few weeks ago and had to basically reinstall all of my Prefs, Suitcase was one of the programs that just didn't want to cooperate, but I eventually got it semi-working again. But then, I started having conflicts between what was displaying in Word and what was actually appearing on my page, uh oh. So the other day, I just decided I would completely reinstall and upgrade Suitcase and all of my fonts.
Now, I don't know about PCs, but when you do this on a Mac you can't really stop until you've finished because things won't display correctly across the board until you do. So I spent two solid bleary eyed days digging through thousands of fonts, eliminating duplicates and old corrupt fonts I'd had for ages (some of which dated back to 1992, gulp!), classifying as many as I could by keywords that made sense to me, and trying to just activate the ones that really were useful and original. After about four hours of staring at variations of Serif, Sans Serif, Book, Titling, Bold, Demi they all really do start to look alike. Over the years I've tried priniting font examples, organizing them by type, name, foundry, it's just overwhelming though. I love fonts, and can't stop collecting them, but it's frustrating to know you have a really cool font and not be able to find the damn thing.
I think I've fixed the Arial problem at least. Everything from my weblog to my email looks cleaner and sharper. Safari is no longer giving me the Beatnik looking font in lieu of Arial. So maybe this cleanup will stop some of my system crashes. Last time everything crashed I had to go in and yank all of my OS9 System fonts out of their folder, which I think helped me regain control of OSX again. I know complaining about fonts seems silly, unless you're having problems with them. One corrupt font can crash your printer, and your entire computer.
Now, my next step seems to be having to upgrade to Panther. I'm using 10.2.8 currently, and I know they are just about to come out with 10.4 (Tiger!), but I'm very leary of jumping across an entire system update. I'd like to still be able to use all of my programs, and things like my printers and scanner... The reason I now need tup upgrade, though, isn't because of Suitcase, it's because I'd like to be able to use the new version of the equivalent of the old Menu Fonts utility. I was typing stuff up last night and my word processing programs are now making me scroll through all the Helveticas, all the A Garamond's, etc. So I looked around and found You Control:Fonts. But it's OS X10.3 and up only. Oh well, I guess it's time to upgrade again. I just hope I don't screw anything major up, once I get everything working I always sort of hate to mess with it, but that's the Mac way ;-)
Wow, whirlwind week. Besides having to basically rebuild most of my system prefs, etc. in my Mac after a bizarre finder crash, plus having to have a new cable modem installed (and even the outside pole worked on), which all threw me terribly behind on my work, Sparky announced last week that (drumroll please...) I could FINALLY get another car!
Now, this may not sound like a big deal to some folks, but around this house it's earth shattering. Sparky is very slow to make decisions (it took us seven years to legally get married), and I have been bitching about my car almost since I got it, which was 1991. It was a present from my parents (no, I'm not ungrateful, really I'm not), but they picked it out and bought it without even asking my opinion. Granted, the car I had at the time was a supreme piece of crap (a 78 280Z with horrendous mechanical problems), I used to trade cars out on a regular basis, but never had the funds to get a new car so often my trade-ins brought more problems than the previous model. And I was a sports car freak, so I had a big disadvantage to begin with (my dad's favorite proverbs are "don't buy anyone else's problems" and don't ever buy a used sports car").
The only two brand new cars I ever had were bought for me by my parents, a 1979 light blue metallic Camaro, which I did at least get a voice in, and my current car, a black 1991 Olds Cutlass. With a four cylinder engine. Which was my first mental problem with it. The second (other than the fact that I had no say in it) was it was not a sports car, it was a mid-size almost family-type car. It's main redeeming graces were it was a 2 door and it was black. It had a "Quad 442" fuel-injected engine, which is a bit peppier and has more torque than most four cylinders, but unfortunately it was also a huge lemon. I began having engine problems when it was about 6 months old and they just continued non-stop, along with transmission problems and assorted other things you wouldn't expect from a brand new car.
We have spent enough to buy at least one more new car (or several nice used cars) in repairs over the last 13 years. It's been towed more than all the other cars I've owned combined, and I've owned a lot of old sports cars, dating back to a 1973 Corvette. The ironic thing is my parents bought it for me because they were worried about the reliability of the car I had. I honestly don't know how it has survived as long as it has except perhaps for the fact it's still under 100k. I used to drive downtown every day, but we rarely took driving trips (and I'm "the driver"), but in the last few years I've been working from home so it's been spared too much abuse.
But it hasn't been to the mechanic in probably 6-8 months, which is a long time for it, and the "to do" list has been mounting. Oil change, new tires, alignment, replace brake pads, replace windshield wipers, tune up, coolant system checkup, intermittantly working brake lights... and the final straw was - the AC & defroster stopped working. So Sparky's been having to drive lately. He hates to drive and I don't like to drive his big lumbering full-size car. But you can't drive in Houston in the summer with no AC, even at night. When I was young and foolish I went a year without working AC or heat in Austin and almost died, actually the cold got me even worse than the heat but both were unbearable. Plus the plates on my car expire at the end of the month just to add to the expense list.
So when he saw the list his brain just clicked a switch and said "no more". So he said "We need to get you another car. Not a new car, but something newer that works". See, Sparky doesn't believe in new cars, and my parents don't believe in used cars. My dad always changed my mom's car out when it would get more than about 4 or 5 years old or showed any signs of major problems. He's big on the reliability thing, bless his heart. It's funny, too, because she would maybe put a few thousand miles tops on any car she's had, even when she had to drive us kids around.
So we've spent the week going back and forth bartering on car prices while I've researched. He originally thought we could get a nice used car for around $10 or $11,000, but all I kept finding were $18 and $19,000 ones, so then he went up a bit to $15k, and now I think he's just tired of it, trusts my judgment a bit more and feels sorry for me and is telling me to just pick one out and he'll buy it. So we're probably going to end up in the price range I originally started in. I think as long as I keep it under $20 grand I'll be all right.
About a year ago, I was going nuts and did a lot of semi-serious research on cars and I'm very glad I did because it gave me a huge jumpstart this time. A car is a big thing for me, it's always been much too large a part of my personality and self-esteem and I really do love to drive. I've only had two four cylinder engines out of all the cars I've owned, the other was a Mustang, which I had to trade for and ended up being probably the second worst car I ever owned. The rest were hge V-8's, 2 Camaros, a Firebird, a Corvette, the 280Z (hmmm.. not sure what that engine was really), and I even owned a motorcycle. My ex-husband had the cheapest of taste in cars, and I remember just being moritified to have to drive some of his vehicles, I wanted to wear a mask I was so embarrassed. I mean, I used to go to Houston Speed & Sport and buy chrome air cleaner covers for my Camaro, I dueled out the exhaust, put bigger Radial TA tires on it... Sparky doesn't care about any of that, he's not even picky about color (though his favorite is red which I do NOT want), he just wants the AC to work, be roomy enough for comfort and for it to get him around on his little daily errands.
Me? The first thing I look at is performance and handling, then a stylish design, then if I could reach the pedals without having the dash & windshield right in my face (I'm short), then the color (black - grey preferred, though some of the dark blues & greens are very pretty, no beige or white please), then the interior amenities... When I started this quest my main requirements were power windows and locks, at least a V6 engine, automatic transmission, and a rear defroster. Now that I've been looking around, though, the power seats have moved up in importance, and the leather interiors aren't too bad either. Hate the sunroofs and the airbags, didn't want the anti-lock brakes, didn't like the 4 door sedans, wanted a 2 door coupe.
But now I'm reconsidering the 4 door thing, I don't have kids but I do occasionally have to haul more than one person around, and I'm not sure I want to continue torturing my friends and family by stuffing them into the back sead of a coupe. My current car has a decent back seat, but I've noticed the new coupes are really tight, even on the mid-size cars. And I'm a bit worried about visibility in the 2 doors since I'm so damned short.
My original pick was a 2002-2003 Toyota 2 door Solara, then I leaned toward a 2 door 2002 Honda Accord, now I'm debating a 4 door Accord. I was a pretty die-hard GM person till this last experience, but now I'm going for reliable. After reading tons of car reviews, and test driving two of the Accord coupes, I think the next step is to test drive a 4 door. And the good thing is they are a tiny bit cheaper, more plentiful (especially with the V6) so I have a better chance of getting the color I want. The new cars are so light, the modern four cylinders really aren't that bad, but I test drove one of each and the V6 won hands down. I really wanted to open it up, but I was afraid the salesman would have a coronary ;-)
So I've been scouring the internet and the newspaper trying to find, to quote Joh Kerry, real deals. If it's too good to be true forget it. And after spending an afternoon with a wishy-washy car salesman out in the blaring sun I'm more determined than ever to pick something and not window shop. And Sparky refuses to come with me until I actually pick something for certain (he hates shopping for anything but DVDs). Hopefully Monday I can go look at a four door I've singled out (it's WAY across town). I've looked at and printed out so many listings I can barely keep them straight in my head... And being obsessive compulsive I feel like I have to look at and read everything out there to educate myself. And I know whatever I pick will probably be in my garage for the next ten years minimum, so it's a big decision.
OK, after much downloading, testing, crashing and swearing my new browser of choice is Opera 7. Mozilla and Netscape kept fighting with each other's preferences and Firefox would not even install, it just completely freaked out on me. Awhile back when I tried to play with Opera (version 6 I believe) I could never get it to run right, but version 7+ seems to be doing beautifully. It took some work to figure out how to remove and add some toolbar buttons, and even to navigate correctly but in just a few days I've got it pretty well customized to my liking. They have a free version but I went ahead and registered it to get rid of the ads, which aren't that bad, but the targeted ones are sort of unnerving. And I'm super easily distracted these days, I hate seeing things flashing even in my peripheral vision.
I had read in several forums that Opera was even faster than Mozilla and how antiquated IE for Mac had become, I thought it was just me having problems, doh! Apple's Safari browser is not acting right and I'm having what I've finally determined is a font conflict with the Arial family which makes a lot of pages (including parts of my own) display very weirdly. But after playing with Opera this week it really is noticeably faster, especially on eBay, which is worth the price for me alone.
Then this evening everything starts dragging again, then my mail times out (sigh). It's not me, though, it's Time Warner (again) so I sit on hold on the phone for half an hour watching my cable modem lights blink, go dead, then come back on. I finally get an customer service agent and we test it and it really is working slow (at the time they are checking it, what are the chances?). It's running at like half of the minimum speed and I have a "25% packet loss". So service tech coming out midweek, I told her to make sure he brings a replacement modem, this one is 5 years old, the new ones have GOT to be at least a little better. But after the last 3 1/2 day crash, I'd rather not take any chances.
She said I could get a business account and they would come out 24/7 but it would "cost extra". Maybe when I win the lottery, I can barely afford the residential account at like $50+ a month now. It irks me to see the commercials they are running for Roadrunner now, "get 6 months at only $29.95 a month". But anyone using a cable modem for six months is not going back to dial-up, so they've got them hooked.
Another good investment that I actually paid for is Spamfire, I've been averaging about 200 messages daily and about 80% of those seem to be garbage and it catches most of them. I need to play with the email program for Opera, I'm using Entourage now, which has lots of great features, but has been acting unstable lately (again, I thought I'd debugged it).
I got my first randy comment the other day, actually I just found it, it's been hiding for a couple of weeks. At least I know how the IP block thing works now, I need to install MT Blacklist, it's supposed to be very good at blocking spammer comments.
I just found out that Movable Type has revised their pricing and licensing for the new version, perhaps I'll be upgrading after all. Glad I didn't jump on it too fast, though right now I don't have an extra $70 bucks. I haven't even upgraded to the free version of 3.x yet, though, I like to let other people find the bugs first. Ironically several days before they switched to the new program I actually tried to buy a license but they had stopped selling 2.6x licenses because of the impending release of the new version.
I was playing with browsers earlier... I've been trying to determine which problems are Mac related and which are browser shortcomings. Been having a lot of IE problems lately, they haven't updated the Mac version in ages, I have a bad feeling about this... I've been playing with Mozilla, but can't seem to keep the damn bookmarks in place for some reason. But for example, I hit on two websites today that would not work correctly with IE, so I checked them out under Mozilla and Netscape.
B4RB.com has a cute logo and design, but under IE the flashing title at top kept manically refreshing my browser to the point nothing else would work correctly. OK under Mozilla and Netscape, though I couldn't get the webcams to load. (Missing plug-in).
Then I landed on Kadyellebee's wonderful site, and all of her type was shoved to the right column and the main column wasn't spacing correctly, lots of type overlap. Also most of her image links at the top were not even showing up under IE. Still some type overlap in the right column under Netscape, but at least I can read the main column and see the navigation. Oops, now I've gone to the main page and reloaded and things have stopped overlapping. Very strange... Just checked it in Mozilla and it's loading correctly in it (it was doing the same thing as Netscape). Why are Mozilla & Netscape sharing the same user profile? I hardly ever use either of them, but they seem to really be fighting with each other since I installed Mozilla.
I stopped using Netscape because so many pages wouldn't load correctly and now IE is giving me problems, I'm very confused. And no, I don't want to try Opera, besides having to pay for the damn thing I don't like the way it looks and it's buggy on my Mac. I'm going to bed now, this is giving me a headache...
Just so no one out there thinks I've died, my cable modem has been acting up all week and completely crashed a few days ago but (knock on wood) seems to be back up and running now. The Roadrunner people first said it was my whole area, then just me, then the area again... And they had me scheduled for a service call next Monday (gee thanks!), but this morning called and woke me up three times to see if I was up again, who says whining loudly doesn't pay off ;-)
I had decided earlier in the week to take a short hiatus from eBay to catch up on things and rest, so luckily I didn't have any regular auctions running. I had placed bids on three items in advance, and won one of them. I managed to get some of my email to come through and got my invoice for the auction I won, and then had to set my email on a schedule and leave it running all day to get a message back out to the seller that I was having problems and would pay her as soon as everything came back up. I didn't want her to think I was ignoring her. I was actually to the point of driving down to the library to see if they had internet access, I probably should check that out for future emergencies.
I still didn't get anything read, I mostly played with my computer and rearranged files and watched the damn cable light blinking on and off out of the corner of my eye in hopes I could at least download all of my mail during the millisecond it came up. I had a bunch of auctions actually all written up in advance and listed them tonight, but I missed .10 cent listing day yesterday, dammit! And no mail service today, which was actually a good thing because I couldn't print postage with no internet connection anyway. Oh well, probably the Goddess telling me to slow down, I've been too busy lately and we have a busy weekend coming.
OK, let's see what I missed this week so far...
OK, now I feel really foolish. After reading the horrific reviews of Adobe GoLive CS Classroom In A Book and flipping through the thing, I figured I'd just wasted $45. So I went to the Adobe user forums to see if I even needed a new manual for 6.0 to CS/7.0 (still am not sure what's new in in other than the interface) and came upon many more critics of how useless the book is and how the SAM's people are putting out a book within a month or so on the whole Creative Suite release and that I could buy a normal old-fashioned printed reference manual directly from Adobe and it was supposed to be much more useful. So for $29 I could get just the GoLive manual, but for $59 I could get the manuals for the other CS programs (Photoshop, ImageReady, Acrobat, InDesign, Illustrator...) so I opted for the whole set (plus delivery plus tax. I already bought a Peachpit InDesign manual since I was switching from Quark Xpress, but actually found InDesign to be much more intuitive than Quark and barely used the manual. I'm clueless on Illustrator, I never used it or Freehand enough to know what I'm doing, so it will be nice to have a manual for it, and you can never have enough Photoshop manuals ;-) I've got to have an eBay sale on outdated computer manuals again, my shelves are overflowing...
So off I go this weekend to return the book I drove all over town looking for tonight, no wonder my husband thinks I'm wacky... SO glad I didn't open the CD. As soon as I started flipping through it I realized it was basically a rehash of the manual that actually came with my version of GoLive 6, same tutorials, and the illustrations didn't seem to match up to the new version, they looked like they were taken from 6.0.
Wow, I learned something new tonight. You shouldn't use image file names longer than 8 spaces without putting an underscore in them. My best friend was looking at my revised website tonight on her husband's PC and my banner wasn't loading (gulp). I tried redirecting the URL, etc., but it turned out it was because I used too many characters in the name, she said it causes some sort of UNIX error. It looked fine on my Mac, but apparently PCs aren't as forgiving. So I shortened it and it's fine now. Apparently that was the cause of my little glass brick spacer gifs appearing incorrectly also under Netscape & Mozilla, I changed the name on them and now they are invisible as they are supposed to be. I have lots of work to do on updating image names... when you have a Mac you forget that not everyone can use 15 and 20 character long file names, I haven't used a PC in so long I guess I figured they probably overcame that barrier but not so.
I went on a search tonight for a manual for GoLive CS. I figured I'd have several to choose from, so I tried Microcenter first and they didn't have one. The guy said he hadn't even seen one, which is crap because Adobe makes a manual for everything they put out. So I went to Borders books and looked it up on their listings and there is just one manual available for the new CS version, published by Adobe and I got their only copy in the store. I was hoping for one of the Sam's 24 Hours manuals instead (which are half the price and are easier to use) but I just checked Amazon and this is the only one out there, and dammit, Amazon has it for $15 less with free shipping! I think I'm going to hang on to my receipt for this one and leave the CD untouched, it has some really bad reviews it looks like [sigh]. I have a good Sam's book for GoLive 6 but Adobe decided to move all the buttons around with CS/7 so I thought it might be nice to have a paper manual to refer to because I'm still not real comfortable with GoLive after using Pagemill for so many years...
Well, last night I sayed up till 7am working on my main website and got a new home page and two new indexes up, one for all my TV & movie pages and one leading to my weblog and my personal info area. I had made lots of little rollover GIFs and ending up not using any of them, just plain CSS script, which seems to finally be working OK on my Mac version of IE. The visited links weren't lighting up all day, but now they are. I still haven't gotten a manual for GoLive CS, I'm having to refer back to my GoLive 6 book, where everthing is slightly different. When I bought the programs the guy told me it would have manuals, but they're all online or PDF which are a pain, IMHO.
I opened it up in Netscape and all looks fine except I can see my spacer GIFs in the main menu. Looks OK in Safari also, though my version of Safari keeps changing some of the test on pages (not just mine) into something that looks like Beatnik font. No, my preferences aren't set for anything but Helvetica & Courier, so I don't know what the deal is.
I'm trying to streamline and simplify the entire site while not losing any of my Google listings. I wish I could use text links for my webrings to make everything more attractive, but webring.com has that stupid javascript (which still doesn't show up correctly on my home page, the "Welcome you are surfing etc. ring click" text isn't showing up just the word "here" which looks very odd just dangling. When I originally set it all up years ago, I didn't make folders for two of the large categories, but it's not too badly organized. I'm moving all of the TV/movie pages into one category, and putting my book & music review pages, miscellaneous pages and weblog into another. And I'm moving the Gothic Artwork page into the Gothic category. I'm also adding an "About Tish" page, but I haven't got it done yet. Also make new banners and put a linkage page up. I figured while I had the motivation I'd better just start throwing things up and I'll work on redesigning & updating the rest of the site as I go. I want to make my images all pop-ups, add lots of new images, change layouts around, add something more personal to my witchcraft pages... Lots to do!
Omigawd, I was playing with the URL of my error message and tried typing in one different number and the damned thing worked! I just went in and put my form back in and changed the value from 4 to 1, and now it's working, go figure. After over a year I still don't understand how everything works on MT, but at least now I can sleep tonight, err.. today ;-)
Dammit! I'm so close to getting my search form to work I could scream, but I'm afraid it's bedtime now... I've gotten it to go from an internal 500 error to "Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/Search.pm line 173.", and, after fixing the permissions on the mt-search.cgi file, I can actually get the search page to open and work (link top right), I just can't get the form to work.... grrr....
I think I just need to upgrade the whole thing, but I keep hearing about bugs in the latest release, oh well, that will be my project for tomorrow.
More peeves, I'm in a peevy mood today...
I've been trying to move a bunch of my auction images to the new storage site and eBay has been driving me fricking insane all night. They have a bug, which is only getting worse, where they make you login over and over again instead of once as it's supposed to be, and I'd get halfway through updating an auction and it would tell me I'm not the seller and make me login again. Eventually it just completely stalled out and I gave up. I don't even think I'm halfway through one store (with 200+ images) and I still have my main store to work on. I was trying to get them all done before the end of the month so I could get accurate traffic stats for March without the eBay hits.
Even though I've stopped eating/taking everything I can think of that would make me break out in hives I'm still getting the damned things. I look like I had a fight with a rose bush, and my eyes are itching and tearing. Plus the mosquitoes seem to have awoken from their hibernation and I'm one of those people they seek out. They never bite Sparky, they've been after me my whole life, maybe it's my blood type, I dunno.
Never did start my period (sometimes I don't, I'd much rather it be that way than the problems most women my age have, of too much), restarted by BC pills and some of the hot flashes have abated, though I spent the whole morning tossing and turning.
My glasses are REALLY bothering me big time. I actually shilled out big bucks to get some prescription reading and distance ones made, and the optometrist made the reading ones way too strong and put an astigmatism correction on the left eye on both pairs and it makes me dizzy to wear the damned things. He said give it a month and try it, but I don't think I'm going to be able to get used to either pair, and am going to have to have the left lenses remade. My non-prescription reading glasses are getting old and seem to constantly be dirty, which is giving me little panic attacks. I was born with rotten vision, but when I was like 18 I got contact lenses and wore them for about 8 years or so until I got RK. Then everything (except my night vision) was great until a few years ago when basically a combination of the RK, my MS, and age started making my vision just go to hell. And I'm told I can't wear soft contacts again, perhaps special (expensive) hard ones. but anyway, I hate wearing glasses again, even though they're not half an inch thick anymore. It appears like I'm looking through a tunnel and it makes me feel very vulnerable and helpless, which is not a feeling I'm used to...
And don't even get me started on Ralph Nader. The Democratic debates were fun tonight, I noticed Kerry and Edwards were making nice references to each other and kind of shying away from Al and Dennis, who, having nothing to lose, were going all out. I'm still getting Dean emails, I still have a Dean sticker in my car window, his camp is working on some sort of continuing project, but I'm not really sure what.
Damn the heater came on again, got to go turn the temperature down to 69, I'm not looking forward to sweating in the shower before bed (yuck). I'm actually looking forward to being able to have the AC on again.
OK, I look up my weblog in Google and here's what they have currently:
That's not very good... So I'm wondering, did I not put any Meta Tags in my home page when I guild this thing last year? Go and check... yes, I have a very nice description and a bunch of relavent keywords. I'm still not very good with the mechanics of XHTML, etc., still. I look at people's websites and blogs with three columns and all the bells and whistles, microscopic type, and I wish I had that much control over the appearance of my site (sigh).
I have GoLive and I'm still re-learning the new version of it, every time I seem to get proficient at an HTML program they go in and redesign the whole thing. I'm still learning Cascading Style Sheets (I know, it's sad). I have many expensive books on website design and I never seem to have time to even glance at them until I need something desperately. My own main website has been under "new construction" for like a year now with a new design sitting on my hard drive but not uploaded... Lately it seems all I do is sell and buy things on eBay, I think my OCD is out of control. I've been buying little glass kitties, getting a really nice collection, lots of Siamese, Burmese figurines are almost impossible to find. However I had to move most of them off my desk because my own kitty thinks they're toys to bat around. Not that they're safe on my bookshelves from the incredible jumping cat, but perhaps out of sight, out of mind...
Hey, I'm actually getting an entry in before Friday! One more day of the dreaded steroids, I have no sense of taste left, I can't wait to eat food and appreciate it again... Still much too wired, got lots done this week, though. Just answered almost every message that was hanging around in my mail box, so I can go to bed with a somewhat cleaner conscience.
I flipped out yesterday and chunked down $40 for an anti-spam program, I just coudln't stand it anymore. I'd downloaded this last month but it was quirky with system 9, but so far so good on OSX. I killed almost 100 spams so far today alone, poor Entourage just can't handle the strain of trying to filter out all the Viagra ads...
I can't believe how happy I've been with OSX so far! It's so fast and it's really starting to click in my head, I feel so dumb for not upgrading earlier.
Oww.. I've been grinding my teeth and have chewed on the inside of my mouth, that's annoying... got to get to a dentist soon. I packed like 40 packages for Ebay the last two days, talked my poor husband into bringing most of them in, my back went out last night and I didn't think I'd be able to stand in line for the 30-40 minutes it requires. I need to get one of those stamping programs, they don't really make any for Macs, though, and I honestly don't want to have to pay yet another monthly fee for anything.
Got to go find kitty, much too quiet in here. Still have one package waiting to be wrapped and mailed staring at me but it's so quiet in here I hate to make that much noise, got to be done, though.
Got almost everything upgraded to OSX compatible now. The whole system still feels funny but I'm finding little things each day that make me go "Doh!" which is actually a good thing. I love having the little "light bulb moments", as long as I can remember what I did to get there, then it just pisses me off.
I've got to say, OSX is so far much more stable than System 9, of course it took me years to corrupt my old files, it used to be fairly stable at first too.
Got an email from Apple today advertising their new Power Mac G5, the bastards... I got a dual CPU G4 when they were brand new, with a stunning memory capacity of like 1.5 GB, and now they have a damn Mac that can use up to 8 gig of memory, and is like 10 times as fast as mine. If I won the damn lottery I wouldn't even want to try and keep up with all the upgrades, you'd spend all your time doing nothing but reinstalling and updating things, jeez. My best friend spent a fortune on a brand new G3 setup like a year before they came out with the G4's and she can't even get her new printer to work correctly with her "outdated" (maybe 4 year old?) setup.
Speaking of, my printer is still freaking out with OSX. I did manage to upgrade from ClarisWorks to AppleWorks and found, to my delight, that it's pretty much identical and not just another form of MS Word (which I have and don't like). I know it sounds lazy, but I really like the Apple Word processor better. I don't want hyperlinks and crap popping up at me while I'm typing, I don't even want it to spell check me till I ask it... I also don't like the new version of SimpleText... what's it called (pull up the menu bar, go to applications...) oh yes, TextEdit. It brings things by default up in HTML format, which kinds of defeats the purpose of trying to edit HTML and break down code. I was trying to reformat a template on my finicky auction listing program last night and even manually opening it in TextEdit it wouldn't save it in normal text, it kept wanting to save it in RTF (rich text format), which won't work with my program (which is OSX compatible, ironically). So I've put my old SimpleText icon on the wavery little dock, I think it's the only Classic app on there now...
Damn, my heart is racing still and I have to take two more steroids at bedtime, which is like now... I've been doing pretty good till today, I was itching all over most of the day but no hives yet (knock on wood).
Got the kitty a new toy, she's completely shed her little pink safety nail caps on one paw and I didn't want my husband to get scratched so I got her a catnip Kitty Hoots toy with a really long tail so he can play with her. She did get her picture featured on the SoftPaws page, she's on page one right now of the photo gallery (Phoebe) chasing a blue string . And no complaints about the nail caps, they're awesome, she's just such a gentle cat and she keeps getting them caught on things, she has very small nails but the next size down was kitten size. And having the nail caps on for awhile dissuaded my husband from having her declawed, which neither me or the cat could have done. But I can tell she's so relieved to have one paw naked now, the other one still has several caps on it. She's been doing somersaults on the sofa and latching onto all her toys with her newly rediscovered claws (which have been trimmed, BTW). She was a bottlefed baby and she's hyperintelligent as a Burmese so she knows not to scratch things she shouldn't.
It's awfully quiet in here, I'd better go find her and put the both of us to bed.
Rambling, steroid induced update... I got in to see my neurologist last Friday and he agreed to let me pass on the $3000 MRI and instead of intravenous steroids (5 days of a catheter and lots of possible side effects, yuck!) he gave me an enormous 10 day run of oral steroids to take. 2 days each of 20 mg pills starting at six a day and tapering down to one. Scared the crap out of me, usually steroids and I don't get along, but so far just some minor heart palpitations, too much sweating, some itching and my food tasting funny. And, of course, the bizarre spurt of fake energy and overactive brain waves. I figured "no sleep this week" because so far I've been taking 40 mg at bedtime, but I've been taking my Ambien and Klonapin all together and so far not too bad.
I figured perhaps at least I'd get some things done this week with the extra nervous energy, going to work on my new Ebay store, Enigma Arts, where I'm transferring all my postcard auctions to try and keep my listings on MorticiasMorgue a bit less jumbled. I've got the artwork almost finished, I can't do anything halfway, then I just need to transfer a bunch of my PC's over there. I still need to get GothicKitty up, I've been having too much fun playing with Phoebe and snapping endless photos so far, though. She's getting so big, in a few weeks she'll be a year old!
For some reason, even before the steroid regimen began, I decided one night that I just needed to completely upgrade my Mac to OSX. After downloading yet another program that told me "use the OSX version, it's better, OS9 is dead" I just got really pissed and decided to try it. It had been so long since I installed OSX originally that I had to pretty much reinstall it to get it to start up correctly. A lot of the programs I already had (Photoshop, GoLive, Toast, Suitcase...) were already OSX compatible, so it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. I'm still using my old ClarisWorks, I need to get AppleWorks, I've got MS Word but it annoys the crap out of me for some reason. The thing that disturbed me the most about OSX when I first tried to play with it was the lack of the Apple Menu, and all of my beautiful hierarchal menus, desktop folders, labels, scrapbook and little things like that, but I'm getting somewhat used to it. After like 13 years of using the same basic system, it's rather disorienting. I like to put my files in my own folders, dammit, so they make sense to me, and I'm the only one who uses the computer... I switched over to a much more high tech version of Scrapbook, though, which I already had for OS9 called iData Pro. The company that was distributing it wen out of business, but the program creator is keeping it going and giving away free trials on his website, so check it out now, awesome program!
It's nice to have a version of AfterDark back, though I miss Boris ;-) I'm beginning to make peace with the Dock, though it still gets in my way. The font anti-aliasing is rather annoying too, I'm having enough trouble reading right now without making my fonts fuzzier and slightly smaller
The system does seem to be more stable, though, less crashes. It also restarts a hell of a lot faster than OS9 did. When I added an external hard drive to the old system it doubled my startup time, but OSX just bounces right back. It's a bit quirky, sometimes clicking on the weird little transparent menus doesn't work (I have to click on the desktop then back again). I like the updated iTunes and the new version of Fetch is fancy.
Oh well, more later, I need to try and wind down a bit before bed, still have two more steroids to take. I just went in and created the new Ebay store so I guess I'd better go make my About Me page and add my pretty little graphic to the store listing. Those little 310x90 logos are so easy to make, I don't know why more people don't at least make the effort. I get lots of compliments on my Morticia's Morgue store logo, I think it makes you look more professional (and more memorable to people).
OK, I've recently realized that my weblog, like the rest of my main website, has been indexed by Google and that I have no proper description or keywords in place :-( I was so intimidated by the rigors of XHTML when I put this thing in place I think I was afraid to change anything as major as META tags (I had a lot of trouble rebuilding this thing properly when I first began).
Soooo.. if you search by name for my blog, here's the first listing that comes up:
Oh well... I went in and added a proper description and relevant keywords so hopefully my weblog will be properly indexed on future spiderings...
I also found out there is at least one more weblog and a website with the same title, so hopefully no one will get us confused. The latter site has so many pop-up ads I didn't delve past the second page, but it appears to be some sort of gay male fiction site. Being a hetero female (with no pop-ups), perhaps the readers will be able to distinguish us after all.
I've gotta do an "About Me" area for my weblog... Coming soon ;-)
We watched Dr. Phil on David Letterman tonight, lots of fun because I like both of them. I think Dave was a little worried when Dr. Phil whipped out a list of some of the less complimentary things he's been called during the last six months but no blows were struck and both seemed pretty evenly matched. The snow in New York looked really frightening. I've never actually seen real snow (deeper than about an inch or so). The worst we get here on the Gulf Coast is ice and a bit of frozen grey slush. I think our norm for anything qualifying as snow is about once a decade. I have no desire to see mounds of snow up close, I hate cold weather. It was down in the low 30's last night and I was miserable even with the heater blasting and four blankets. This is the longest, coldest winter we've had in years. My nose and my hands have been numb for months, I'll be so glad when I don't have to run the water for five minutes before I can wash my hands again, I'm actually looking forward to the blistering summer this year.
Here are some pics of me, my little brother and our cocker spaniel standing in our back yard in 1973 in what was probably the first time it ever snowed in Houston in my lifetime, that's me in the polar bear outfit, I didn't stay outside very long. As you can see, it's not real impressive, but we did manage to photograph it before it all melted. I think the next time it snowed was around 1984, we had a really bad winter in 1989 again.
I OD'd on carbohydrates at dinner, I made spaghetti and breadsticks for Sparky (his favorite dinner), and then I fell asleep on the couch while he was watching the latest Michael Jackson freak show. That's a creepy thing to wake up to... I'm so tired of seeing his deformed face I could scream. Sparky was doing his impersonation of him all night until I actually went up to him and threatened to pinch him if he didn't stop. He pouted for about an hour, but at least he stopped doing it.
I packed 25 packages for eBay tonight, just finished. No mail Monday for the holiday so I had an extra day to pack at least. I'm trying to think what else I need to do before bed tonight... I have some photos to process and upload of new auctions, I got about 200 emails this weekend, I'm almost caught up on answering them. Last night I played around and made some new banners for my main site, and spent several hours playing with GoLive to figure out what I was doing wrong with my 'floating boxes', it turned out I wasn't hitting the 'don't allow boxes to overlap' option on the main grid. I had a moment of clarity when I realized that cascading style sheets don't need to be very complicated, I live for moments like that. The trick will be whether I can remember anything I learned a week from now... Just checked Adobe's site, there's a new update for GoLive 6, yea! BTW, I'm glad I haven't upgraded my Movable Type yet, they've had three updates in the last few days or so, I think we're up to version 2.62 now. They have a Pro (i.e., not free) version coming out this spring, I hope they don't do away with the basic program...
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Beginning of the new photojournal, just some scary things from around the house. These will open in new windows, haven't figured out how to make them chromeless yet within the confines of a weblog... too much script.... head hurts...
Update! By jove, I think I've got the chromeless thing figured out, what I actually wanted was just a pop-up window to display the images. Don't know if it will work in Netscape, or with older browsers. Check out Kali's Web Shoppe to play with this, it's a lot leaner scrigt than my GoLive generated. I'm still in awe, there must be a catch I'm not seeing, it can't be that easy.
Been mindlessly surfing under the influence of PMS all day, absorbing ideas and killing pop-up ads. I had selfishly (actually desperately) added some affiliate and a couple of strategically placed pop-under ads to my overloaded main website back in October, which is my big season (I always go over my traffic limits at Halloween) hoping to make a tiny bit of revenue. Gotta tell you, though, the only affiliate that has ever sent me any money was Amazon.com, and that wasn't for too much. After hundreds of thousands of hits the last few months I got nada from the three groups I signed up with, so screw them, I'm taking all their crap back off my site, no more free advertising.
I need to upgrade my weblog to the new version of Movable Type, but I have too many hormones running rampant right now and it will be my first upgrade, so I think I'll wait a bit and just work on my main site. I hit SOOO many dead links surfing around tonight, it inspired me to update my own site. I have a cable modem, a G4 power Mac and an updated browser with lots of memory so if I can't get sites to work, I pity the dialup folks. I hit lots of non-navigable sites which really pisses me off to no end also. I'm all for artsy and minimalism, but sometimes people go too far. I've been working on a major overhaul anyway, I just need to get in gear. I'm such a damned perfectionist, if I don't just jump in and do something it will never get done. My site's been an ongoing project for over five years now, I wish I could just play with it full-time :-)
Anyone have any ideas how to lessen the hum from cable modems and external hard drives? I have tinnitus and when I'm bitchy the humming from my own desk can drive me nuts. I have hearing like a dog, I also have a dog's sense of smell. Believe me, I want neither. I think my senses are unbalanced because I was born with 20/400 vision. I corrected it in my twenties with old fashioned RK surgery, worked great, but now that I'm past 40 I'm getting far-sighted and have to wear reading glasses. I also think staring at a 19" computer screen all day is screwing up my night vision. The RK made it fuzzy to start with, I used to see like a cat (lots of animal analogies tonight, I miss my pets...), but it's been declining the last few years. I've been taking betacarotene to try and counteract it, seems to be helping a bit.
Fun stuff I found tonight:
The coolest 404 screen I've seen!
A hall of shame for ugly bridesmaid dresses
Bad advertising pics from around the world
And one of the whores on Joe Millionaire is a bondage actress
Another close call... I typed a nice long blog (If it had been a snake) and stupidly did not save a backup of it, and when I hit "publish" I got this wonderful error message:
mk/dir (my URL path): Permission denied at lib/MT/File/Mgr/Local.pm line 100
Crap! Tried to back up in my browser, afraid that my post had been wiped out, but it kept bouncing back to the damn error message. So I thought, OK, must be something to change in the "local.pm" file. Downloaded it, nope...
Managed to get back to my blog home, yea it's still there! Check my blog URL, not posted... Tried to rebuild the index page, the little pop-up window gave me this lovely error message:
Writing to /(my URL path)/index.html.new' failed: Opening '(my URL path)/index.html.new' failed: no such file or directory
That's sort of scary... Stroke of genius, maybe it's actually something really simple and obvious I need to update! Yes, no PERL script required!
Had to drop the 2 out of the "home2" path in my Blog configuration setup under "local site path" and "local archive path". Rebuild successful, I hope that's all I need to fix in this daisy chain. Next obstacle is upgrading from MT 2.21 to 2.51, this is my first upgrade for MT, so if you don't hear from me again for a bit, that might have something to do with it.
OK, I feel sufficiently stupid... I've been unable to login to my own weblog for a couple of weeks now and after petitioning the MT Support Forum for help (and getting only one response to my cry for help), I've finally figured out the problem (obviously, or I wouldn't be here). For the complete embarrassing story click here.�
After a month or two with no problems, I suddenly got an invalid login/author unknown error message when I tried to login, and being very ignorant of this whole weblog thing (I've only been doing this since September), I searched through and read all of the other questions by people with seemingly the same problem and tried everything that was suggested before even posting a question on the forum, but nothing worked...
I ran the Reset Author Script so I could login with the generic password, and it wouldn't run. I then read that if it won't run through the browser, to run it through a shell access program (I have a Mac, this is harder than it sounds). I managed to finally figure out the commands and do that, and then it told me there was an "Unrecognized character" in the script itself. In the computer world, a new error message (something other than a 500 Internal Server error is actually a sign of progress. So I posted my query to the Support Forum and� waited. Girlie was� nice enough to point out that the reset script wasn't working properly because I'd probably not uploaded it correctly (in ASCII mode). Which, it turns out after I re-uploaded it a few times more (I have a Mac, have mercy on me, OK??) did seem to be the problem with the script.
Now I started getting a new error message (making progress!), "Can't load author". Only the fix for that problem is right back where I started (sigh). Now life is getting busy with holiday shopping, no one else is answering me, so I decided to get past all the hectic "real" problems and come back to this with a clear head. I also don't want to risk screwing up what I already had installed.
One of the main questions that� is asked on the Support Forum is "did your host upgrade or move anything"? I actually asked my webhost this and was told they did a hardware upgrade at the time I began having problems, but that it shouldn't affect anything. Wrong!! On a whim tonight I figured what the hell and went in and changed the path on my mt.cfg file by dropping the "2" out of the home address. Presto, it suddenly works again. So I guess the moral to this story is don't believe everything your webhost tells you, they may be unaware if a path has changed slightly. The only difference I noticed in any of my related programs was I suddenly couldn't go backwards as far as I used to be able to on Fetch (back past www). Having three potential "home" addresses to choose from, I chose the plain "home/www/" and it worked.
Now if I can figure out why my Word 2001 keeps crashing on startup. It's happened before and I somehow blindly managed to fix it, but of course, I can't replicate the same repair this time, even though I swear I'm doing the same steps to fix it... OK, now I'm going to retro-post the bizarre dream that had me login to this frustrating mess to start with.
My email has been down all night, but I didn't really mind. I've been playing with Style Sheets and Rollover scripts in GoLive instead. (I admit it, I'm an HTML wuss, I've always worked with Pagemill and GoLive, though I can go in and fix my own code when it's screwed up). The CSS thing makes a lot more sense now, but I think I screwed up my pretty little Java rollover by redoing some images. I've always worked strictly in HTML, and I feel like a bit of an amateur now that I've seen all the tricks I can do with CSS. I've given up for the night, too much code gives me a headache after awhile.
Todayís dream starts off with my hanging out in a New Age/Witchy shop, sort of like the cool one in ìThe Craftî, another recurring theme. Iím wandering around admiring at all the pretty things, lots of silver jewelry and crystals. Itís sort of a New Orleans or antique warehouse style store, with the front completely open. I know the people that work there. One of them is a large black man who comes up to tell me that the people have arrived to talk to me about the Batgirl game idea. Cool, I walk up a concrete ramp (like in a parking garage) to go up and see them...
Upstairs there is a table and some chairs set up and there are several rather devious looking, almost mafioso types that are there to speak with me. I start explaining my idea for a new game, Batgirl vs. Catwoman. About halfway through they interrupt me, though and someone says ìHey, she canít be a part of this, sheís a Mooreî, and my mom is suddenly there explaining that sheís the Moore, Iím adopted and she pulls out some sort of brochure that has a picture of me as a child, which is apparently what they are complaining about. I ask why they wonít tell me who they represent, and they say Iíll never find that out, to forget about it, theyíll never tell.
Iím trying to remember the rest of the dream that follows... Suddenly Iím on the run being chased because of something I know (recurring theme). Iím one step ahead of them, sometimes hiding out on the same elevator as them, but they donít see me. I end up in a restaurant, pretending to work there, though I canít figure out the difference between a microwave and a toaster oven and the workers start to become suspicious that I donít belong there. There are two other girls with me who realize we need to get the hell out of there right away, so we run and jump onto a moving train only to see our pursuers running behind us, but unable to catch the train.
Then Iím on the train with my husband, who for some reason looks like a young Dick Van Dyke. We are working as some sort of strange, highly skilled pickpockets, justifying taking other peopleís money out of desperation for our cause. We are fleeing by car, motorcycle, on foot, and eventually out running through a strange landscape with lots of sudden dropoffs into huge gorges, that I jump over fearlessly and easily, though my husband is afraid (Iím very afraid of heights and falling, so this is very empowering!). I think I wake up when I realize that weíve finally managed to escape because there is no way the people chasing us could ever manage to cross the gorges, so we are safe for now and can stop running.
Normally I really hate having the ìbeing chasedî dreams, I always wake up panicked and exhausted from them, but this one wasnít bad. It somehow made me feel smart and clever, and incredibly athletic. All in all a pretty good dream as dreams go.
Now I'm off to bed for the 10am vet appointment, I should manage to get at least 5 hours of sleep.
Thursday afternoon and evening it was storming here in Houston, the power flickered but never went out. My email was still down (seems to be back up now), so I decided to redesign my husband's website though I had lots of other things to do, filling the creative void I guess. I reworked the entire website, finishing up at almost 7am. I learned to make those pretty little navigation tabs with the guidance of Scott Kelby's Photoshop 7 Down & Dirty Tricks (page 149, I had to look through four books to find the trick) and spent hours adding type, color, etc. Looks good, IMHO. Now I just need to finish redesigning my own main website, especially my Halloween area, which is 98% finished in GoLive, sitting on my hard drive waiting to be uploaded.
Suitable mood music for the weather and introspection included:
Deep by Peter Murphy
Haunted by Poe, one of my favorite albums
Tales of Mystery and Imagination by The Alan Parsons Project, a classic rock album based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, a desert island staple
Formica Blues by Mono, haunting retro music that would make a great 60's spy movie soundtrack
Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd, another must have
A million thanks to Kristine of kadyellebee� for her help in fixing my rebuild problem! Check out her blog, it's amazing! It's wonderful not to see that stupid error message anymore, my head was getting sore from slamming it against my desk too...
For her fix and the support transcript, see the posting here�.