Goodbye Green Mountain Geek

Posted by Kirk M on March 13, 2010

Once upon a time, back in 2008 sometime, I had an inspiration to split off all my technical/geekish type posts from this site and give them a home on site of their own. Thus was born “Green Mountain Geek” (Okay, it was a stupid name. I was eating Brussels sprouts at the time I thought of it so I claim no responsibility.)

For awhile me and it did well enough, publishing posts about WordPress, Firefox, OSS (Open Source Stuff) and various other geekish and non-geekish type subjects of interest. People even read it.

Now it’s 2010 and the last real post to the site was back in the Fall of 2009 sometime. It became readily apparent to me that I really had no intention nor inclination to write anything more for my poor attempt at a (personal?) tech site. That was okay though. There are 1,536,679.5 similar websites out there already so I doubt anyone would miss it very much if and when I chose to take it down.

But I ended up leaving the site be since there were 2 or 3 of the more popular posts that were still getting a fair amount of traffic. It wasn’t costing me anything anyway to leave it online and the domain renewal was still months away. And keeping it updated with the latest WordPress bug and security fix point releases and plugins took up very little of my time.

Then it started to act up.

Strange things began happening. Things like empty directories and files being created within the WordPress core files, the Dashboard RSS feed widgets not loading when plugins were activated and just general weirdness within the WordPress Admin itself.

Since Green Mountain Geek was basically a duplicate of this site in every way, shape and form (albeit with different content), built with the same version of WordPress and plugins along with the fact that I couldn’t find hide nor hair of any sort of hack or SQL injection attack—I was thoroughly stumped.

It was sometime during the third day of working on the problem that it finally dawned on me that I was wasting a lot of valuable time on a site that I hadn’t actually posted to for months and that I really had no intention on doing so in the foreseeable future. So why am I trying to fix it? The time had obviously come.

So I rolled up the database into a nice .gz file and downloaded it, downloaded and zipped up the “Uploads” folder since the images might come in handy one day and stuffed both of them in their own folder located at the far end of my Home directory on my local hard drive.

Then I nuked the site. The resulting explosion was quite colorful.

No regrets. I came, I saw, I wrote, I quit.  Besides, a site with a name like “Green Mountain Geek” was probably doomed to failure from the start so no big loss there. I did learn one invaluable lesson though…

Never try to think up a name for a new site while eating Brussels sprouts.

Posted in Info | 5 Comments

Barium me not.

Posted by Kirk M on March 9, 2010

There are a few things in life that I’ve always hated doing that, over the years past, I always seemed to end up doing anyway. The top of my list of things I hate doing are:

  • Moving
  • Changing out drum brakes
  • Rebuilding Harley Davidson Sportsters
  • Drinking barium

So far I seem to have managed to distance my self from the top 3 but the 4th just seems to be coming back to haunt me on a disturbingly frequent basis. Like today for instance.

Today was another trip to the VA to be poked, prodded, peeked at and, yes, given a pint of barium to drink whilst doing various low impact gymnastics on a cold, hard, x-ray table. This was made all the more interesting by being occasionally semi-crushed with the x-ray machine itself while the doctor running it did his best to flatten me out like he was ironing some recalcitrant pair of pants that refused to unwrinkle.

This lovely adventure was filed under the phrase; “Upper GI”.

Anyone who has undergone this procedure will know well enough the joys of lying on a rock hard slab with your limbs and body in various unnatural positions and trying to suck down swallow after swallow of this amazingly thick, nasty tasting liquid through a straw while holding your breath at the same time.

I should get paid to do this I think.

The good news is that my last major episode with RLS (plus!) jerking me violently out of a sound sleep a few weeks ago didn’t appear to have damaged the fundoplication surgery I had done last May. The bad news is that I’ve been feeling more and more like I did before the surgery was done in the first place.

So the endoscope is next but that I don’t mind as much. They give me lots of good drugs and I don’t have to drink any of that bloody barium.

There was a bit if fun during the events of today though. While I was being maneuvered around on the table I found myself in a rather ridiculous position when the straw was once again thrust into my mouth and I was told to drink. Since this was near the end of the session the level of liquid was low in the cup so the x-ray technician assisting the doctor had to bring the cup to a more upright position. When she did so the straw, which is made of a much thicker plastic that your standard McDonald’s variety, flipped out of my mouth during a full draw, caught itself in my left nostril for a split second and then catapulted a full load of barium onto the ceiling above the x-ray machine.

The doctor and the x-ray technician were still staring at the ceiling when I left and muttering something about getting someone up there to clean it off.

Posted in Life as a veteran | 2 Comments

Some people just deserve to be shot

Posted by Kirk M on March 2, 2010

Once upon a time, before I met my wife, she had a friend named “Joe”. Once I met my wife for the first time it wasn’t too long until I met “Joe” for myself. Then we all became friends.

Years passed and “Joe” began to dabble in real estate, the rental kind. One of his first purchases was this lovely old two story, single family home that had been separated some years back into a first and second floor apartment type setup. To make a long story short, 5 years ago he offered the ground floor apartment to us. He needed someone he could trust, he told us, and promised my wife that she would always have this place to live in for as long as she lived. He even went as far as to tell his son, who would inherit his estate and business when he passed on, the same thing.

Several months ago, “Joe” invested his hard earned dollars into starting up a business for himself–a sports bar and restaurant establishment right here in town. Unfortunately, once he started renovating the building he bought to accommodate his new establishment, he underestimated the cost of said renovations by a rather significant amount.

Now, by what “Joe” tells us, this money he scheduled to pay for the renovations is actually his own. No loans involved so far. And “Joe” has an excellent credit rating by the way. I know this because he had me use my computer to look it up for him. So now, he’s looking at taking out a short term loan to finish renovating his future sports bar and restaurant.

Apparently he decided not to go that route after all.

Instead, he’s decided to sell the house we are currently living in for some quick cash. The house he promised my wife she would always have to live in for as long as she lived.

Yes, it’s his property and yes he has every right to sell it but I also happen to take a man (a friend, no less) at his word. That plus the fact that he made a promise to my wife who had been his friend for years before he ever became her landlord.

And promises like that are sometimes more important and binding than obtaining some quick cash.

One question remains though.

Can I just shoot him?

Posted in Just Thinkin | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Ever want to hang a cat?

Posted by Kirk M on March 2, 2010

Being the kind of person who is forced to take prescription medications for various ailments, one of which I consider the equivalent of a nuclear explosion in a tiny blue pill, the time of day is often very critical due to the effects/side effects of certain medications. Especially at night which is when I take the tiny blue pill as I must be in bed before the nuclear detonation takes place.

Staying up late one night while doing a bit of research and after taking my nightly meds, the tiny blue pill detonated. The effects hit me just about the time I realized that I had foolishly forgotten that I had taken the thing and that I was not yet in the proper position to handle the inevitable side effects, meaning flat on my back.

So I made a mad dash for the bed, shedding cloths all the way, only to find that one of our four cats had inexplicably loosened an obviously full bladder onto our quilt.

Our handmade quilt.

Through the blanket below it.

Through the sheets and mattress pad.

And into our brand new $800 mattress that we spent 5 years saving up for.

It was thoroughly soaked.

The time in which the deed was done was obviously long past so I had no idea which one of the four were the guilty party. As this had never happened before, I wasn’t even able to make an educated guess as to which one had perpetrated this unforgivable crime. So as a result, I decided to shoot all of them.

Good thing for the cats that my wife was able to wrestle the rifle out of my hands before I slipped the clip in and slammed a cartridge home because anything with four legs, a tail and a fur coat would have been toast for sure.

It was that tiny blue pill, I swear it was. Otherwise she would have never gotten the rifle away from me.

So there we were at 1:00 am in the morning running the bed clothes through the laundry and sucking cat piss out of the mattress with a rug shampooer. I don’t recall much past that point due to the rather nasty effects of that damn pill but I do remember snatches of cleaning out the tank of shampooer and putting it away. Everything’s a blank after that.

So I swear I don’t recall making the four cat sized hangman’s nooses hanging from the top of the door frame to the bedroom that were waving gently in the breeze from the ceiling fan the next morning. Fortunately (for the cats), they were unoccupied.

Posted in Life at home | Tagged , | 6 Comments

Can you read this? (and other online complaints)

Posted by Kirk M on February 20, 2010

I’ve been wanting to write this post for awhile now. I just had to wait long enough to get good and peeved about things until I did. Well, today is the day although It may very well turn into a multi-parter as I find other things to complain about. And it’s all to do with my daily romp on the Internet and my problems with it.

(Warning: This is a long, rambling post and a complete rant on my part. Just so you know.)

Can you read this?

This is my top complaint, especially in the light that I don’t remember things really being this bad before.

Can you read this? Is it legible to you? Do you consider this comfortable reading? It certainly isn’t to me:

teenie, tiny, font

No kidding, this is the actual size of the font and this is a main stream news/opinion site—The Huffington Post. The thing that really gets me is that their headlines are HUGE(!) and the article title fonts and image captions are very readable and usually in bold. But the body text? You have a microscope handy?

Not main stream enough for you? How about eWeek? The text is no better believe me. And it’s not my browser settings either in this case as other websites I meander through on a daily basis have proper sized fonts that are easily readable.

Okay, so I could spend extra time zooming in and out of websites that insist on using these teeny, tiny fonts until I can actually read the thing but that blows up the images into a pixelated mess. Zooming just the text also has a problem in that many of these sites don’t scale properly with the increased text size and captions, links and buttons often go missing.

The point is that there is no reason for using these idiotically small fonts—none whatsoever. With display size being what it is these days, these site owners can afford to increase the font size to something more readable so that the reader doesn’t have to resort to using a magnifying glass. Virtual or otherwise.

Not everyone in this world has 20/20 vision, especially older folks like myself. Or am I just so much chopped liver?

Newest comment first?!!?

(Does not apply to social sites. They’re just weird and illogical by their very nature)

Look, I’m a nice guy most of the time and tend not to criticize when I know damn well that my discontent is more subjective than objective but this new thing of having a comments thread start with the newest comment rather than the oldest makes absolutely no sense to me.

A comment thread is supposed to be progressive in nature, not regressive. I don’t know about you folks but my thought processes don’t run in reverse.

So how am I supposed to follow a line of thought in a comments thread if I get the reply to a comment before the originating comment? It’s completely bass-ackwards. Makes no sense to have the most recent comment first unless it’s based on some ego thing, making the latest commentator feel special or something and even then it makes no sense.

Alright, so I can live with this illogical reverse-comment-threading thing as long as there’s an options section at the top of the comments that allow me to arrange the comments in a more logical order, meaning oldest first.

But then there are those other sites that don’t provide these options. They just go ahead and decide to list the newest comment first, like it or leave it, which forces me to navigate to the last comments page and scroll up??!! I’ve actually stopped reading certain sites because of this as the comments on any given article/post are sometimes just as relevant as the article/post itself.

But not when they’re in reverse order they’re not.

So to all you site owners who have opted for this newest comment first thing, please provide the option to rearrange the comment thread to something that makes a bit more sense?

It’s losing not loosing! (or proofreading is everything)

I’ll readily admit that grammar, sentence structure and proper punctuation aren’t exactly my strongest suits but I’m no piker when it comes to putting together a post or comment either. That being said I offer this singular advice:

It’s ‘losing’ not ‘loosing’!

So why do I pick this one out above all the other misuses of words and their meaning? Because this is the one I see all the time, especially in the comments section. And I don’t mean from folks whose native language is not English either, I’ll never berate them for trying to express themselves in one of the most complicated and confusing languages the human race ever invented (especially American English). No, these are people who were born and bred to the English language that I’m speaking of.

It’s not even a hard one to distinguish between one and the other as even the different spellings rather obviously reflect the correct pronunciation and/or meaning (unlike ‘there’, ‘they’re’, and ‘their’).

Here’s an example for you:

“Are the Republicans loosing their minds or what?”

Wrong.

The proper spelling is:

“Are the Republicans losing their minds or what?”

The word “loosing” is a verb:

Verb meaning: “to loose” (third-person singular simple present looses, present participle loosing, simple past and past participle loosed)

   1. (transitive) To let loose, to free from restraints.
   2. (transitive) To unfasten, to loosen.
   3. (transitive) To make less tight, to loosen.
   4. (intransitive) Of a grip or hold, to let go.
   5. (archery) to shoot (loosed an arrow)

Or another way to put it…

“The elf stood at the tree line overlooking the battle loosing his arrows so quickly that the enemy below began to believe that there were a line of archers firing into their ranks.”

Same applies with the word “loose”.

“It sounds like the guy is about to loose his mind.”

Nope.

“It sounds like the guy is about to lose his mind”.

“Loose, loosed and loosing” are pronounced as they appear; with a long “S” sound. While “lose and losing” are pronounced using a “Z” sound as in; ‘looz’ and ‘loozing’.

Okay, everybody got that? Make sure, there’ll be a quiz later.

If anyone gets the idea that I’m just picking on them, I’m not. When writing a post or an article or even just leaving a comment you’re probably trying to make some point or get some idea across to those who read the post, article or comment, right? So you can believe me when I say that this kind of mistake can lower the credibility of what you write by a not insignificant amount.

Alright, this post is getting a bit long here so I’ll stop now. But I’ll probably start up again with another post later down the road as more of these pet peeves come my way. Don’t misunderstand me though, as I know very well that I’m far and away from perfect when it comes to my own writing ability. If you don’t believe me (heh-heh, right…) then check out some of my other posts and you’ll have no doubt.

But at least my fonts are of proper size, my comments are in logical order and I know the difference between “loose” and “lose”.  :P

Posted in IMHO | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

I’ve given it a lot of thought

Posted by Kirk M on February 15, 2010

I’ve given it a lot of thought. I’ve taken plenty of time, considered all sides of the situation and the consequences thereof.

I’ve balanced the losses to the gains, the assets of having and the liabilities of doing without and finally, after days of agonizing over all the possible options, I’ve come to one single conclusion…

……

……

Unfortunately, what with all the thinking I was doing, it seems I’ve forgotten what it was I was agonizing over in the first place.

Oh well, carry on then.

Posted in Just Thinkin | Tagged | 5 Comments

Thank you for your patience

Posted by Kirk M on February 13, 2010

Obviously I haven’t posted for the last several days. There’s a simple reason for this.

I haven’t felt all that well.

In fact, I’ve felt absolutely lousy and yes, it has to do with those blasted disabilities of mine (may they rot in whatever area of hell is reserved for disabilities that hinder the lives of man). And I do so hate writing posts about these disabilities since it makes me sound like I’m bloody whining all the time. Be that as it may, that was the reason for not posting–again.

Not one to let these problems remain unchecked, I traveled down to my so called “local” VA medical center yesterday, “so called” since it’s around 120 miles away from my humble abode, and whined and complained to my doctor instead. Once I finished whining and complaining she then gave me the third degree for waiting so long to see her. I accepted this dressing down as she can be rather dangerous when she’s miffed.

To make a long story short as possible since my beloved is coming to pick me up for a journey to our local supermarket shortly, I am now scheduled for an appointment with the neurologist in hopes that he or she can find new ways to keep my body from exploding without warning. And then another with the gastroe gastroentero gastroenterol gut doctor to see if they can check the condition of my fundoplication surgery for any damage (due to the above explosion) without resorting to having me travel all the way down to Boston, MA to get this done.

One can always hope.

Suffice it to say that all this increased bodily aggravation has led to several mostly sleepless nights so as a possible temporary solution to the problem I’ve dropped a tiny bit of ginger root into my afternoon tea in hopes that it might wake me the hell up long enough to get back to writing on a daily basis.

Thank you for your patience and have a fine day.

Posted in Life as a veteran | Tagged | 2 Comments

Weather Lucky

Posted by Kirk M on February 5, 2010

I woke up this morning, fired up the ‘puter, checked the big weather map and saw this:

Looks like my new improved weather shield is working just fine (I never admited to owning the original shield by the way, I just passed it off as magic). I recently upgraded my equipment to handle most of the northeast portion of the US as I figure the mid-Atlantic and southern states need more snow handling experience. I have seen the Day After Tomorrow after all. Not all the time mind you as the northeast needs the occasional snow storm just to make sure the wells are nice and full in Spring.

Unfortunately, since my upgraded weather shield requires significantly more amperage, my direct power tap into the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant seems to have weakened the reactor cooling piping a bit and ground water tritium levels are on the rise again. My own fault for tying into a nuclear plant that was built in 1975 I suppose.

I guess I’m going to have to poll the folks down in Vernon, VT to get an idea what they would rather prefer–more snow or the possibility of hooking a 3 headed trout next summer?

Posted in Just Foolin | Tagged | 4 Comments