Month: February 2007

So we can make you do this, too!

So at work, a couple of months ago, our webmistress left for maternity leave a little prematurely, and two months later (!), we need some updates and whatnot to our website.

They company has a lot of people that can deal with: HTML, source control, and reading English instructions and following them.

But somehow, it becomes my job, “at least until we find a webmaster”.

They have yet to interview one webmaster, and from past experience, it’ll take forever before they actualy know what they want, then another lifetime until the interview a lot of people, and then, after an ice-age long wait, they’ll hire someone.

If I wanted to be a web developer, I wouldn’t have gotten so attached to hardware, software and networks. Ugh.

Advertising, yet again.

So this weekend, I drove out to the folks, and had a nice time with them, and my sister’s family. It was very nice, we had some great food – Friday night, tacos and refried beans, oh, the memories from Texas, and on Saturday lunch – a whole spread of everything that’s good, thanks to my momma.

Cervesa, tacos and some wine was there. The wine was a nice Carmel young blend, but the bottle left me a little confused.

Continue reading Advertising, yet again.

I did break something!

So it turns out that I did do something, although I’m not sure what.

I was having theme troubles, and it wouldn’t display properly – sometimes yes, sometimes no… So I killed all the plugins and themes – and started fresh.

Reset the plugins properly, and added a few more. A cute one is the Snap Preview Anywhere plugin – hover over the link and see what this plugin does.

I also want to take a moment to mention Continue reading I did break something!

I think I broke something.

So it seems that I might have broken something when playing around with the design of my blog, and I think it’s related to the theme I used.

So this is an alternate theme, and I am currently open to suggestions on anything and everything, so drop me a line with your favorite style, idea or just a BOOYA!

So I hope your eyes can handle the theme for now, and we should be back to our regulalry scheduled programming… err… site view as soon as I get it sorted out.

Fun with XHTML, CSS and much, much more!

So I’ve upgraded the blog to WP 2.1, and that came with it’s own set of headaches and incompatibilities.

Some of you may have seen the site when it was stuck with an alternate theme for a bit, but it’s OK now, Timmy. Everything’s going to be just fine. Just calm down, and put down the meat cleaver, and we’ll all talk about what to do when open source software that you use absoluetly free of charge stops working, and you want results NOW NOW NOW…..

So I spent some time snooping around and getting updates, and reading more and more on what’s going on and how things can be done, and it seems that anyone with about an hour on their hands could do this too.

But I bet none of them could do the heavy digging into code on their own, like I do.

So there.

Oh, and yeah – I’ve updated my Blog Tech page with all the links and versions of what I’m using.

Magic trick, woo hoo!

So I found a nice little trick that someone put together and saw a good performance of it.

It’s a quickie one, a three card monte, and it took me about three minutes to figure it out. I also jotted down how the cards move, and I must say that it’s performed with a certain degree of elegance.

Enjoy.

EDIT: The “three card monte” that I referred to before is actually not a magic trick, but typically refers to a con, trying to get you to find the queen, etc.
I tend to use the term loosely when referring to any magic trick with three cards.

Thanks to Paul again for his attention to detail.

Weekends? Damn, man, they is fo’ wimps, yo!

So this weekend I hosted Dan for dinner, simple pasta, as Tha Siz was away, studying for some major exams.

Then this morning, I left on a wild Harley rider chase, that didn’t end with any results. On the up side, I ended up going to places I didn’t think I’d see anytime soon, and I also tried to barrel my way into kmelion & zachkessin‘s yishuv, but it was locked up tighter than I felt like breaching.

So I made it home, and found out that the Internet Service Provider (henceforth: ISP-from-Hell) has once again failed to provide full-time service, and my office is effectively off the grid as of about 3pm today. No email, no VPN, nada, nothing, zilch. You get the idea.
So the CEO catches me on chat on a different issue (which I resolved) and I inform him,
and I give my boss a ring and let him know as well.

See, the way it works is like this:

A service provider (let’s call them “GC“) that already has a stake (and equipment) in our building, leases service from a much larger (and VERY reliable) service provider (purely for clarity’s sake, let’s call them “NV“).

So GC leases a line with a specific capacity – let’s say 3MB (the actual capcities and rates are less relevant, you’ll soon see why). GC then sells line capacity to Customer A, Customer B and Customer C.

The only problem is – Customer C (me) has a contract for a 2MB line, while A & B have a 1MB line each. Now, it doesn’t take a math genius to calculate that something is wrong with this – but in comes trotting the concept of “line sharing”. Effectively, I get prioritized traffic for my 2MB of data, quashing the others on the same line.

But that’s not the main problem today – it seems that a main router is no longer capable of routing, and the specifics are a little blurry as of yet. The line has been down for over five hours now, and answers are still not forthcoming.

It turns out that NV has actually purchased GC, and that moving from one to the other might be feasible and even a good idea to replace GC with NV.

This open up an entire new array of options, including adding a router and using something called BGP to allow for fail-over communication line capabilities.

I foresee a change in our ISP future. Let’s hope it’s for the better.