The 20th of this month was my 5 year blogaversary. The first post was January 20th 2002. I’m on my third hosting provider and my second blogging platform since that time. I’m still at the same company and the nearly three-year-old who was driving me insane at that time will be 8 tomorrow.
Jan 312007
Nov 242006
After nearly a year on WordPress, I finally moved all of the photo albums that had been in Gallery to Flickr. I also corrected all of the internal links that were based on my old content management system. Of course, this won’t fix all of the external links that have also been bad for the past year. I did some work on a redirect that’ll translate the old URLs, but it’s probably too late for that to do any good, not sure if I’ll finish it.
Aug 082006
Somebody must think my blog is a depressing read because I’m getting completely hammered with spam for an antidepressant that rhymes with “smell boot trim” over the past 24 hours. I’m not the only one having this problem as David Sifry’s latest State of the Blogosphere says that 70% of the pings that Technorati receives are from known spam sources.
Janet Jackson is still hawt. I had a bit of thing for her on Good Times and Different Strokes. I think my infatuation reached it’s peak around the time “Anytime, Anyplace” was released. I was living in NYC at the time.
Speaking of NYC, JMG posted about rents there today. I had a one room apartment in the East Village for $800/month and it was a dump. I imagine it’s probably doubled by now.
The Internets are full of tributes to Love frontman Arthur Lee who died last week. Where the hell have I been? I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of this band and neither had The Wife. We consider ourselves fairly saavy. Why didn’t anyone tell us? Bastards.
New Rescue Me tonight. Season three is drawing to a close and the show still doesn’t disappoint. The opening sequence last week was awesome. Fire plus apartment marijuana growing operation equals stoned firefighters and ensuing hilarity. I’m sure that must’ve actually happened at some point although the smell should’ve been enough of a clue to don the respirators.
I watched Zathura on Sunday night with the kids. There’s lots to recommend it. I’d kill to have the house in the film. The set design is excellent. Several funny lines from both kids. I had a hard time separating Dax from his Punk’d persona and I’m inclined to like almost anything Tim Robbins does. I liked it better than Jumani, the other Chris Van Allsburg book I’ve seen adapted to film. I never saw Polar Express. Plus, Peter Billingsley, aka Ralphie from A Christmas Story was a co-producer on the film. How could you not like that? And as a completely random aside to see if Scott H. is reading this, any idea why Peter Billingsley got a “thanks” credit on Mysterious Skin?
P.S. This is a personal best for most IMDB links in a single post.
[tags]mysteriousskin, peterbillingsley, zathura, rescueme, love, arthurlee, janetjackson, spam, davidsifry, nyc, realestate, joemygod[/tags]
Jul 132006
Letting del.icio.us autopost my links for the day has turned this into a bookmark blog. It wouldn’t be so bad if I’d actually post something here once in a while. I’ve been channelling most of my blogging energy over at the Austin Metblog. I resurrected the sidebars that show what I’m currently reading, listening to, watching. I’m using the AMM plug-in for that. It’s pretty sweet. I never did port over the comments from the old blog. I may get around to that this weekend. There are at least three or four other projects that I’ve started, but never finished.
I’ve been spending a lot of time with my new obsession, Rescue Me. I think I blew it off originally because I thought it was going to focus too much on 9/11. I probably also dismissed it because Denis Leary has had so many failed TV shows. I’ve always found his stand-up a mediocre substitute for Bill Hicks. However, the show is amazing. It’s funny. It doesn’t pull any punches. All of the characters are flawed, but you are drawn in by them. The second season finale is what grabbed me and then the new season has kept me. I picked up the first two seasons on DVD a couple of weeks ago from Target. They were a steal at $19.99.
Home life has been filled mostly with finishing the bathroom remodel that began at the end of March. Now that it’s actually finished, I intend to get a little before-after action going on Flickr. Look for that this weekend. We watched a lot of World Cup last month and mourned the Mavs loss in the NBA finals to the Heat.
My in-laws bought a house two blocks away and are in the process of remodeling that. It appears they’ll move here in September or October if nothing changes. The Boy has various summer camps this month.
[tags]rescueme, metblog, austin, family, amm[/tags]
Feb 252006
For those friends and family that made it through the site move, I’m obviously behind in moving everything. I’m moving the “Picture of the Week” for the kids to Flickr. I’ll have a Flickr set for each kid. You’ll have to be a Flickr member and I’ll have to mark you as friend or family in order for you to see the set. The Boy’s is there now and I’ll have La’s up by Monday. It appears that the comments didn’t make it through the move either and I’ll have to do a custom import for those. I also still need to see if I can get a Rewrite Rule working so that the old posts in phpNuke will go to the new location in WordPress. Yeah.
Jan 262006
I managed to get all of the old posts loaded last night and the Paul Tatara Movie Review Database (TM) is back as well. I’ll move on to the comments in the next day or so. I also need to see if I can get a rewrite rule working so that you can still reach the posts via their old URLs.
Jan 252006
Gloria Gaynor would be proud. I’m in the process of making a break with my old hosting company and hoping that the new one treats me a little better. I’m taking the opportunity to scrap the old website as well, so things are going to be a little screwed up for the next several days. I’ve got to figure out how to import all of my old posts into this new format and it’ll take some time to move over some of the other stuff. I haven’t settled on a theme yet, so feel free to suggest your favorites if you’re a WordPress user.
Dec 162005
Sometime early last week the database powering my site got corrupted and apparently MC Host only keeps one day of backups. Since I noticed it a day or two after it happened (I was out of town), I was screwed. Luckily, I had backed everything up myself just before Thanksgiving. Since I got crappy with them about the data loss, they blamed me for the corruption:
Also, you may want to look into the reason this has happened, which appears that some table entries are zero and others are incomplete, which may have been caused by an unfinished write from the script to the database.
I’ll be looking into that claim myself, but can any mySQL gurus make sense out of that quote?
Anyway, the magic of Google allowed me to recover the two missing posts and repost them. Not sure if that means dupes for anyone reading this site via RSS.
Nov 182005
Stepan informs me that the title of one of my past posts has broken my RSS feed. My apologies to my vast RSS subscription base. I’ll dig in there and fix it this weekend or see if phpNuke fixed it already and I’m just behind on updates.
May 202005
I’ve been using AllConsuming for my currently reading or “Legere” block over there on the right for quite a while. Unfortunately, it was hacked a little over a month ago, so the creator, Erik Benson, decided to revamp the site and rewrite it using Ruby on Rails, which boasts quick development time. I think he even challenged himself to do it in 24 hours as some sort of contest promoting the platform.
Anyway, he did get something up and running…only it doesn’t completely work. He’s reformatted how items that you’re consuming are displayed and I can’t seem to edit old items without running into errors. I don’t want to nag the guy over a service that he’s providing for free, but until he gets a chance to work out some of the issues, I’m going back to pulling my own images and linking to Amazon directly. The convenient thing about allconsuming is that I didn’t have to host the product images myself.