Finishing up my thrice-weekly rollerblading tonight, as I passed by a minivan parked in a driveway not to far from home, a five or 6 year old kid standing on the passenger seat called out as I passed, “Old man skating!”
Ow, that hurt. And to make sure he had his parents attention, he said it again, only louder this time, “OLD MAN SKATING!”
Maybe I ought to look into some of this stuff?
If you are a regular reader here you know that the one show left on TV that I make a point of watching is The West Wing (it probably should have it’s own category.) But the last couple of Sunday’s I just haven’t experienced that same magic. I’m thinking it is this whole campaign thing, I really enjoy the White House stuff a whole lot better. It was OK when a couple seasons ago Bartlet was running for re-election, because we still got a healthy dose of, well, the West Wing goings on. I am beginning to think, as happens with most TV shows and me, I lose interest. I want the same old comfortable stuff and they move on or I tire of the same old stuff they are giving me and I want them to move on. Oh, well, there are always the repeats on Bravo.
Tried this evening to get the gravatars back. It worked fine in MT, but I couldn’t get the WordPress plugin to work right for me. I tried several different parameters for the plugin, but it wouldn’t work consistently, so I pulled it from the comments area.
They have this rating system so that some people can use more provocative images if they want and bloggers can choose not to show them. First I left any rating out of the plugin and it would show one person’s image but not another’s. So I cut and pasted the example into my template with it’s “R” parameter and the gravatars shown would change. Then I plugged in “X” and different ones would show. Keep in mind that everyone of the gravatars used by my comment posters are innocuous at best. Making matters worse was when I tried jockeying the size while keeping the rating the same, different ones would show than with just the rating. One combination caused no gravatars to show. At one point I would get a brief wink of the image before the square would turn black…
Sorry commenters, but you will just have to live with seeing your name there.
Well, so far this I am 0 for 2 in watching the TV shows I want to watch. First, I missed Sunday’s “West Wing” premiere and last night I missed the “Best of the Beatles” on PBS.
I read the article in the paper a week ago about the show that said it was going to be on 9/28 at 10:00 PM. I made a mental note to watch it. Some one at work who knew I was a Beatles fan handed me a copy of the article in case I missed it. Knowing PBS can be wonky with their scheduling and that I have access on cable to both the SC and GA channels I went to the PBS website to check the times and dates they were going to show the program. Both confirmed the paper’s 10:00PM start on the 28th. As an extra precaution against losing this info out of my sieve-like brain I subscribed to their handy email reminder thing.
Sure enough when I got home from work yesterday there was my reminder email. At about 10 minutes ’til ten I shut off the FRS radio broadcast (mercifully I might add, as they were losing 7 – 2 to the Blue Jays) and made my way into the living room. Flipped over to the clearer of the two PBS channels and waited. They were running a thing about Pop Music as it related to the protest movement and it was fairly entertaining. At 10 o’clock I waited for it to end, but it didn’t. Huh? Checked the other station and they were both in lock step showing the same show. I watched for about 15 minutes thinking maybe they were running late or something, but the protest music kept right on coming.
Plodded back to the PC and checked the PBS website and lo and behold the Beatles show ran from 8 to 9:00PM. Shit! Opened the reminder email back up and it said the show started at 8. I guess I should have read it more carefully…
Ignore my last post. West Wing was on tonight at 8:00PM. When I finally got myself comfortable on the couch and surfed my way to NBC the show was just going off.
This sucks on so many levels. One, 8:00PM is too early to wrap up the day. Two, I missed the season premiere. Three, now I don’t feel like watching the show at all any more. Four, how could I have missed the start time?
I’m seriously thinking about giving this up. Why you ask? I’ve let the bastards get me down, that’s why?
This morning I was greeted with another “The domain mr-miata.net has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.” emails. Between yesterday and the first third of today over 5-1/2 Gigs of bandwidth was sucked up by referrer spam from porno sites trying to increase their page rankings by leaving their demon seed behind. That is more than half of my alloted 10 Gigs a month transfer limit.
So I spent an hour or so going through the raw access logs and adding about 20 IP addresses to the deny list. I did this a month ago and now they are back with doubled efforts. For now I seem to have quelled the tide again, but next month they’ll be back, probably with again double the IPs…
Maybe if I tried a different blogging software. I have used Greymatter and Pivot before, don’t remember about GM, but pivot suffered from referrer spam too. I could step backwards and return to blogger, nah, probably not that option. WordPress…maybe. Time to learn another templating system…I don’t know
While trying to swap out the secondary drive on the PC with the former main HD I discovered that my Dell will not finish booting to a DOS disk if there is a USB card reader plugged into a USB port. Stumped me for about an hour. Tried 48,000 permutations of jumper settings on both drives and which connector on which drive and in a fit of desperation power cables to the drives.
(Before you ask, I needed to to boot to a DOS disk so I could unpartition my old 30G HD and make it one big back-up drive.)