It was not totally broken — the theming and images were all busted, so the content just spilled down the page in true-to-html form that this stuff does (yay).

But, this past week was also just totally hairy at work. With a dozen unique projects running simultaneously (some HUGE; some trivial) and a release to production last week, there was funfunfun all week long (where by “fun” I mostly mean trying to keep some people calm and trying to motivate others to freak out. Not really, but yeah.

It wasn’t until this morning that I was able to try to figure out why WP was mis-behaving. And after about an hour of troubleshooting, I came to a pretty simple conclusion:

There’s no way I’m ever going to figure out why this shit’s broken.

So, instead, I downloaded the very latest version and installed it in a new area and ran an upgrade on my old database (non-reversible, yay!) and tweaked a few config files.

w00t. We’re back in business.

It’s not the exact same, though… I really liked the way I’d tweaked the Prozac theme and that did not come over, so things look different (of course, most of you read this in an RSS reader, so who gives a crap, right?). But then there was trying to figure out why all the photos were busted and blahblahblah.

Anyway, we’re back in business. Not that it matters much, I really don’t blog enough. Stupid twitter.

Oh, and I should probably make sure uploads still work… here’s an unrelated graph (complete with alliteration):

Well, this latest comes straight from Wired (Tired?).

Danny Dumas spent a few minutes with the Samsung Instinct and determined, “it’s definitely good enough to rank as a solid second-tier player in the smartphone space.”

I have to assume that Danny didn’t write the headline for his article and whoever did either read only his first paragraph, or has never actually used an iPhone. The headline gives the reader hope… at least, that’s what I think about when I hear “run for the money”.

That means that the runner-up came damn close and actually threatened the winner.

But then, pretty much the entire sub-500-word article whines about how incredibly sucky the Instinct is:

• “it’s … not quite as polished” (which, from the text, seems a bit of an understatement.)
• “The web browser shows some terribly rough patches”
• “the narrower body … really cramps page size”
• “typing on the Instinct can be rocky”
• “Call quality is fair”
• “No WiFi”
• “Clearly cellphone-quality photos”
• and my favorite: “Includes a stylus … but provides no slot to stow it.”

I don’t have an iPhone (DAMMIT!), but Meredith will be getting the new one when it starts shipping (JEALOUS!). Even with the fact that we’re Mac fanatics, there’s the beauty and the ease of use that makes the iPhone the top choice for a truly wonderful device. I get the “mac bigot” ridicule pretty frequently, but at least 6 friends who’ve ribbed my Mac-headedness are now contemplating Macs because their iPhones "are such a joy to use."

Despite the fact that they do look mechanically very similar, which one’s icons look like crap and which one’s icons make it instantly apparent what the task is? Which one would you rather use? The iPhone is so simple to use… whether you’re surfing or reading e-mail or listening to music or looking up directions, it just makes sense. I haven’t used an Instinct, but I’m guessing it uses the same tired point-y-click-y that all the other crappy smart phones use.

That’s what made the iPhone so perfect (well, as perfect as you want to admit a block of metal and silicon should be) — it’s been designed with the people who are using it in mind. If you ever have used an iPhone, then take a second to re-read that abridged list of Dumas’ complaints.

Duh. Seems pretty simple really…

“Run for Its Money”.

Har.

I think the real headline should be, “Another Tired Knockoff Misses the Mark Completely, Despite Attempt at Near-Infringement Level of Mechanical Copying.”

I think it’s the best comic book movie since Sin City, and blows Transformers and the last two X-Men movies into oblivion.

No shit.

I caught this off Daring Fireball, and I generally don’t operate in the true ‘blogosphere’ of link-linking, but seeing as how I’ve railed on Sony before, I found this to be particularly hilarious as I read it:

Scalzi on Why It Won’t Work.

Casper is my laptop. It’s a mac. A very nice, pretty MacBook Pro.

It also uses DHCP on the network, so on any given day, my server (call him Vader) doesn’t know what Casper’s IP is and I don’t really want to have to force it.

And that’s where Bonjour comes in. Hopefully.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Ultimately, I’d like to be able to type something along the lines of ‘ssh casper’ from a terminal on vader. Let’s all keep our fingers crossed.

[I have removed the iframe that was here and replaced it with a direct link because it was disruptive even to me.]

Heineken Video

1. My cousin Kelly’s wedding
2. My wedding
3. My cousin Michael’s wedding
4. Senior prom
5. Junior prom

Uh, yeah. That’s it. But bowties… they’re pretty cool. I love their whimsy and the way they look much better with short-sleeved oxford shirts than a necktie does.

I think I will look to Mr. Kevin Greene for inspiration and perhaps go out and pick up a bowtie or two and maybe a new oxford shirt to wear with it.

Oh, but back to our story — we were going to be on the lake in a boat, so I thought we’d do the same thing — set a waypoint at the dock where we got on the boat. Then we could tool all over the lake for the day and not have to worry about keeping track of landmarks (yes, I’m fully aware that a GPS is not a replacement for quality orienteering; we’re on vacation — NOT hiking the Andes).

Except that as we drove through Marble Falls on our way to the cabin, the display on my GPS went all wonky. Well, Meredith did not want to go on the lake without the GPS, and I’ve been itching for a new one ever since my dad got the top-of-the-line Garmin eTrex a few months ago. It does maps and jacks into the ‘puter and all that jazz. So, yeah, I picked up a new GPS at the local Mart of Walton (Sam, that is). It’s a Magellan eXplorist 210 and it does maps and connects to the PC.

Flash forward to today (oh, in case you’re wondering it did a yeoman’s job of navigating on the lake)….

I did a little poking around at geocaching.com and found about a dozen caches near our house. I even downloaded a file with all of them as waypoints. Then I had to figure out how to get them onto the GPS; I really didn’t want to have to enter them all by hand. I remember how well that went over a few years ago, when I got my first GPS. I spent several hours hand-entering several geocache waypoints into the GPS and then went out to find the caches, but didn’t actually find any because by that time it was dusk and I was a complete newbie to the whole ordeal. Talk about off-putting!

Anyway, I plugged the eXplorist’s USB cable into my Mac and lo-and-behold, the damn thing mounted as an external disk. I was able to see all the waypoints, tracks, routes, and et-cetera. VERY COOL! At that point, I just needed to figure out how to convert the geocaching.com waypoint file format (.loc) into a Magellan waypoint format (.upt). A quick Google search later, and I have Chimbisimo to thank for pointing me to GPSBabel! What an awesome tool it is! It instantly converted the .loc to a .upt and I was able to drop it right onto the eXplorist!

So, to make a long story short (TOO LATE!), Hays and Griffin and I went geocaching this afternoon. We hit nine spots; found four; didn’t find four; and had one inconclusive. These designations are all from the geocaching.com website.

Our four finds:
GCZH8V – Our very first geocache find, ever! Woohoo!
GCJXA8
GCP8KE
GCWP7P

The four we didn’t locate:
GCWP6Q
GCWP69
GCNA12
GCWP75

The inconclusive one was GCXPNG, where we did find a non-permanent chewing gum box, but it was empty, so I added a short note to it and put it back where we found it (under cover, no the green one).

I downloaded the track log from my GPS and then ran it through GPSBabel again to generate a Google Earth kml file. I then loaded that into Google Earth and massaged it a little and cleaned things up and organized them a bit. If you’d like, you can download a KMZ file of our trek. It should load directly into Google Earth (I tested it on Meredith’s computer, and it worked fine).

I think maybe next weekend we’ll go hunting for GCRK4C, GCW71A, GCW970, and GCWP82.