Author Archives: Kirk M

JT Evening News – 8th Edition

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Well now, I haven’t done one of these for quite awhile. In fact I had to go back through the archives just to find out what the last edition number was so I didn’t duplicate post titles and all that. So, in direct violation of my own long winded tradition of blabbering on aimlessly and without further ado, I present the 8th edition of the JT Evening News, written whenever I damn well feel like it (and bound to be terribly boring).

Going Default

As all of my loyal readers may notice (all 5 of them), the theme’s gone default. And in this case, this particular default theme is “Twenty Eleven” in the new WordPress tradition of coming out with a new default theme every year…except this year…at least not yet anyway.

The reason for this is that my old reliable theme, Weaver II, suddenly became somewhat unreliable in that it appeared to stop talking to the built-in WordPress post editor (TinyMCE). You see, if these two start ignoring each other then the editor refuses to follow the theme’s post layout within the editor itself (font, font size, etc) which means formatting a post with images, asides and all that wonderful stuff comes out looking all wrong on the site itself once the post is published. Can’t have that you know. I chalk it up to the old “one-too-many-updates” syndrome that can make any type of long-installed software go all pear shaped.

When I get time I’ll paw through through the database, remove all things related to the theme and try again. Until then you’ll all have to put up with the default look of things. Besides, it’s the content that counts, right? Probably should write more of it then.

Why I’m Not Running WordPress 3.4 Yet

Okay, so does the above title of this section make any sense? No, not really since WordPress 3.4 hasn’t been released yet. But anyone that knows me at all knows that I’ll run just about any type of pre-release software on anything over the latest stable version (yes, I’m that crazy) including WordPress–but not this time. Maybe I’m getting old(er) and less inclined to trust my site to beta quality software. Perhaps I have a bad feeling about this particular release although I haven’t seen anything to justify this. Either way, this old blog of mine is just that–old, and has been through a myriad of changes, reboots, reloads, recoveries, patches and overhauls plus plenty of mistakes on my part as I was learning the ropes.  And after all that there’s one thing that stands out:

It’s still here! (although I’m not entirely confident in the soundness of it’s structure)

So I believe I’ll go “stable” from now on. I’m getting to the point in life where I’ve forgotten most of the “tips and tricks” I’ve ever learned or come up with so I figure it’s time to play it safe so to speak. At least with this old blog of mine. I have my Linux distros to screw up so that will keep my inner geek happy enough.

Saying Goodbye to a Fellow Blogger

My good friend, Elaine, of Elaine’s Place called it quits a short time ago. Closed up her 6 year old DYI WordPress blog and went fishing. Okay, maybe not fishing but being both mother and grandmother and retired RN (although she looks more like a retired fashion model that forgot to age) I’m sure that spending time with her husband and extended family plays a prominent part in the decision. I can’t blame her at all for chosing her family over blogging that’s for sure and she’s hardly the first blogger to call it quits by far. Still, I will miss her posts, most of which were medical in nature during the later years. I’ll also miss her “Help! Something is broke!” emails as well. We certainly fixed a lot of interesting WordPress type problems along the way.

Stay happy, Elaine.

(I’m actually responsible (to blame?) for getting her into WordPress in the first place, you know. Not sure she’s forgiven me for that yet. Elaine, are you listening?)

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Okay, that’s it I guess. At least I can’t think of anything else that might be the least bit interesting. Also, the ear infection I’ve been dealing with the past couple of weeks absolutely refuses to go away despite an entire regime of industrial strength antibiotics. And right now it feels like someone has stuck a knife into the backside of my jaw and is currently twisting it about.

So I’m off to find my cordless drill. I think drilling a hole in the right side of my head to relieve the pressure would be just the thing.

 

 

The Doctor is Not In

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My doctor’s gone missing. I had called up the VA last week in hopes to speak to her about a rather bad ear infection I had (and still have) only to be informed that she was, in fact, not my doctor any longer.

Excuse me?

It took me nearly 10 years to finally find a PCP* (no, not the drug) that was finally worth his, or in this case, her salt and since then I have enjoyed a worry free doctor-patient relationship. She actually listened to what I said, understood that I wasn’t some sort of a hypochondriac, understood that I was more than trustworthy with my medication and that I was fully capable of self medicating (adjusting medication as needed and knowing what meds could be adjusted) plus the fact that I knew my own body better than anyone else possibly could. More to the point, I trusted her judgment and diagnosis, something I found hard to do with my last PCP.

*PCP is short for Primary Care Physician by the way. Makes me wonder if the committee that decides on these abbreviations and acronyms are kept isolated in an underground compound with nothing to do except watch 1960s reruns of “Leave it to Beaver” and “Father Knows Best”. This has to be the same bunch that attempted to change my Navy rating of FTG (Fire Control Technician) to Tactical Weapons Advanced Team. Just shorten that puppy up and see what you get.

So here I am without a doctor once again. The VA assures me that all my medications can be renewed and refilled just as before without interruption, etc, etc until I get reassigned. Well, that’s all fine and dandy but my worry is who I’m going to be reassigned to. I’ve already had my fill of interns from the local hospital down there who, after I’ve answered a couple hundred questions about how I’m feeling at present, have to run to their supervising doctor (who is in some other office), give their version of our conversation…which is usually wrong, listens to what their supervising doctor tells them and then runs back to the examination room I’m currently occupying to put forth their diagnosis and what should be done as if they were the ones who came up with it in the first place.

I’ll have no more of that, thank you very much.

The VA has recently opened up a clinic right here in Newport, currently located at our local hospital which is but a short drive from my house. It’s open Wednesdays and Thursdays and is actually due to move to a larger facility which is even closer to my house. And although I’m a bit concerned about moving my primary medical care away from a major VA medical facility, it sure beats the crap out of the 4 hour round trip I usually have to make. I’m supposed to contact some woman that goes by the name of Ellen (I think) on Wednesday so here’s to hoping.

Still, I wish they hadn’t taken my doctor away.

 

Feed a cold, starve a fever?

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I’ve been sick. One of those “all-week-sick” types of sick–and it sucks!

It’s not one of those specific types of sick like “a cold” or “the stomach flu” or “a sinus infection”. Oh no, it couldn’t be that easy. This is one of those non-specific bugs that start somewhere in the middle of your body bringing nausea and cramping as well as eventually swelling your abdomen so badly that you can’t wear anything but that too-large pair of sweat pants someone once gave you who seemed to think 5′ 11″ at a 157 pounds requires an XX-large. But it doesn’t stop there.

Give it a couple days and you’ll find it’s spreading to your head via your lungs, trachea and throat with a quick stop at your larynx for a sandwich and coffee. Arriving at your head it quickly invades your sinuses, inner ear and nasal passages until you feel like the room is heaving about at the equivalent of a sea state 7. By this time you’ve probably used up every face tissue in the house and started raiding the bathroom for toilet paper. Then some inconsiderate SOB decides to stick a knife into the back of your jaw on one side of your face so chewing something like your supper takes you until breakfast.

And did I mention the headache? And the fever? No? Well, I should have!

So while I staggered carefully around the house looking for something extremely soft to eat, like a cup of air, I tried to recall that old adage about colds and fevers. Which one do you feed? Which one do you starve? I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me but I really can’t blame myself for not remembering. After all, it’s hard to think when your stomach’s lurching and your head is pounding and the room’s bobbing about like the ball’s view of a basketball game and…did I mention the headache and the knife stuck into the side of my face?

So which one is it? Feed a cold, starve a fever or starve a cold, feed a fever? What if you have both at the same time? I wish some would let me know–I’m getting hungry.

Google should love my site now.

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Okay, so I’m a bit behind on this but I figure that Google, with their new search algorithm that supposedly penalizes ‘overly optimized’ websites, my old blog here is destined to become mighty popular. That is if I manage publish a new post here more often than once a month.

But really, I don’t optimize this site worth crap–never have as a matter of fact. I actually tried long ago when I first started out but my use of post “descriptions” that were less than 160 characters long (that show up in search results) and especially the proper use of tags and categories was and is abysmal at best. If I had it to do all over again I’d have set up just one category and toss tagging right out the window for all the good it’s ever done me. It would be different if this was one of those “single subject” blog/sites but old JT ranges all over the place like a somewhat demented chipmunk in a nut factory. How do you optimize something like that?

So I’ve made a decision. I’m going to stop agonizing over my inability to post on a regular basis. I’m going to stop kicking myself for not being able to tag posts properly etc, etc. And I’m certainly not going to lose any hair about not overly optimizing my site (I’m losing it fast enough as it is). Nope, no more worrying about stuff like that, not even a little bit. After all these years of posts and tutorials by so-called pro-bloggers on how to totally and completely optimize your site for search engines now we find it was all wrong–never should have done it.

Heh, guess I’ve had it right all these years after all? Google’s just going to love me now!

 

How about some objectivity instead?

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The question of President Obama being a Christian or not has come up once again in this year’s election fracas–of course. It’s better than that “birther” thing I suppose since that was rather silly anyway. This time around it was Rick Santorum and Franklin Graham (good old Billy G’s son) that felt it necessary, once again, to question Obama’s faith. (sigh) Yeah, whatever.

Personally (and objectively I hope), I’d rather have the President of the USA not be affiliated with any religion whatsoever. Not anti-religion and not atheist per se, but someone who believes in freedom of religion as well as freedom of speech, right to bear arms, etc, yet is not swayed by one particular religious belief/belief system or another.

In my experience I’ve found that being associated with any one particular religious belief system often impairs a person’s ability to think objectively and if it’s one thing I want my president to be able to do is think objectively as well as responsibly. There are people who are exceptions to this of course, being able to separate religious belief  from thinking objectively about any given situation (or objectively as any human being can), but I’ve found them to be few and far between.

Separate church and state, remember that one? That little credo should be an absolute requirement for anyone taking office whether it be President of the USA or mayor of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota ( anyone?….anyone?). As far as I’m concerned, if you can’t hang up your religious belief at the door of your public office, virtual or real, then you shouldn’t be in office.

Ah, whatever. Great idea but one hardly used in practice.

Bringing this kind of crap up during an election year may be typical but it’s crap nonetheless and frankly, I’m tired of hearing about it. Hoping that any politician anywhere might be able to think objectively is a fool’s hope at best. But a fool’s hope is still hope whether it amounts to anything or not.

No point to this post–just thinkin’.

 

A laptop I can finally appreciate

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In all my years as a computer/electronic/anything-at-all-to-do-with-gadgets type tech and all around geek, I could never really justify owning a laptop. For one thing the cost factor weighed in pretty heavily. The second reason was the generally poor performance of most laptops as compared to the equivalent desktop PC, that plus the increased difficulty of fixing or upgrading the machine yourself. But the chief reason I never could justify the cost of a laptop is the fact that I was never all that mobile in the first place. Who needs a mobile PC when they don’t travel?

That all changed when I started using a Linux Distro as my primary OS a few years ago. My old but geeky nature could not be suppressed and I went full bore into testing, breaking, fixing and submitting bug reports for new pre-release versions my favorite distro in hopes that the final release of said version would be as bug free as possible. And, as a good friend of mine once told me who does all his computer type work and play on his laptop, including writing posts for his rather popular blog, “You’ll appreciate the portability”.

Portability? He’s no more “mobile” than I am for heaven’s sake and he has a perfectly serviceable desktop PC so why does he need a laptop? Okay, so he does go on holiday a lot more often than I do and he does take his laptop with him but is that it for reasons to own one? It turned out that I would more than appreciate his words last rather than first.

So in the end, I finally found a couple of reasons for owning a laptop. The first reason being the opportunity of testing out my favorite Linux distro on something else besides a big old honking quad core PC with tons of memory and a dedicated Nvidia GT 430 video card with it’s own memory. Laptops are notorious when it comes to doing a clean install of any OS. The second reason, which I realized later, was that I could enjoy reading the news, perusing my email, doing a bit of  whatever-came-to-mind and writing up posts for the blog from the comfort of my overstuffed couch in front of a warm wood stove rather than my inadequately stuffed desk chair up in a cold upstairs room.

But the cost was still the prohibiting factor. And I simply couldn’t justify spending the better part of a $1000 or more (I don’t do “budget” or “cheap”. High quality is a must) for a laptop that had any sort of real quality to it. So I bought a laptop for $200 instead

Enter the 2008 Lenovo Thinkpad R61.

Lenovo Thinkpad R61

Intel Core 2 CPU, 2 GB DDR2, 100 GB/7200 rpm hard drive, CD/DVD burner and Intel X3100 HD graphics and a 14.1" wide screen display

I found the thing on Ebay of all places with $199.95 price tag hooked to the “Buy Now” button. Top Rated seller and all that. The specs didn’t look too bad for a $200 laptop either and no operating system installed which was just as well since I was planning on wiping any pre-installed OS off the drive anyway. For that price plus the fact it was a rugged old Thinkpad that had a built-in magnesium “roll cage” that a Nascar fan would appreciate, I bought the thing.

So here I am, happily ensconced on my overstuffed couch in front of my warm wood stove typing away on my new old laptop. I had installed Linux Mint 12 on it the day it arrived, an install that went so well I fell asleep out of pure boredom. Not a single problem encountered. Fast, with a nice bright readable wide screen display and built like a brick outhouse. It’s not the prettiest of laptops but I’ll take practical and well built over pretty any day.

But wait…I was going to use this for testing Linux distros wasn’t I? But now that I have this lovely little beast setup just the way I want, I find myself balking at using it for testing purposes. My friend was right after all–I do appreciate the portability of the thing, never mind the comfort of the couch and wood stove and all that. So what to do? Ah, I see there’s one unit left, exactly like this one, from the same seller on Ebay. Same price too.

I’ll just have to buy it.

Still here and all that

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Just a quick note to let all my readers know (all 4 to 5 of them) that I haven’t disappeared or died or anything like that. Between the new store, legal business and just feeling lousy in between, it’s been rather hard trying to think up a post. The brain’s been in suspension of late I’m afraid.

Not to worry though. This old site isn’t going anywhere and I have every intention to get back to the keyboard. In fact, I’ll give you fair warning now that I believe I’ll post about the more technical side of things again as I used to do. Maybe even about Linux (gasp!). For those of the non-technical nature feel free to ignore these type of posts as they might tend to cause a rash.

Meanwhile, hope you’re all having a wonderful day and that you folks in the northern hemisphere are surviving the Winter without too much trouble.

Sounds like a good thing to say anyway. See you soon.

Not worth breaking into

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I did something rather unusual for the New Year this year. I changed all my passwords. Well, I changed most of them anyway or, at the very least, modified them a bit. I have several Gmail accounts you see, each used for different purposes (no, nothing dirty or underhanded so get that thought right out of your head) and I can’t say that any of these accounts have ever been compromised but what the heck? Now no one can say that I don’t take security seriously (Oh, I do, I do!).

Then a good friend of mind who runs a rather popular blog mentioned to me during a chat that he was getting a lot of unauthorized login attempts on his WordPress powered site. People trying to break in to the back end of his blog by going through his login page in other words. I asked him how he knew this and he told me of a certain WordPress plugin he uses that can not only be set to limit login attempts and locking the login page after so many failed attempts, etc, etc but can set to log these lockouts and send email notifications to you about such things as well. And he had a long list of locked out attempts to prove it.

My, my, it must be nice being so popular.

So I had to install this marvelous little plugin myself just to see how many underhanded folks were trying to break into my little corner of the world. I installed the plugin straight away and then sat back in great anticipation, dreaming of having my own long list of lockouts to gaze upon and admire. One day went by and then another and then yet another. The morning of the fourth day dawned and…

…nothing.

Absolutely nothing, nada, zip. No attempts, no one even knocking at the door. I’m so disappointed. Obviously I’m not controversial enough for anyone to bother with hacking into my site in order to teach me a lesson I so richly deserve, etc, etc yada, yada. And here I was all ready to be righteously indignant about all these break in attempts and to write many posts about the utter audacity of those who would do such a thing and so on and so forth. But now I have no reason to [sigh].

Oh…wait. I have a lockout! Just a minute while I check i…What?!? The IP listed leads directly to my own web host??!!? How DARE they!! (righteous indignation flares). I shall call them forthwith and have at them I say…sputter, mutter, grumble, mumble!

Life is good once more.

(And yes, this is a very silly post but I just couldn’t help myself)