avablog

So there’s no arguing that our house is really very nice. It’s a bit on the small side, sure, but it’s got loads of charm and it’s in a good neighborhood. The only complaint I have — and this is a relatively recent complaint — is that our master bedroom has a rather unfortunate HVAC […]

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My friend Dan approached me today with a challenge: Find a good stereo setup, comprising a receiver and speakers, for around $1K. I haven’t shopped for honest-to-goodness stereo equipment for quite a while, so I’m looking forward to digging around to see what I can find. My first thought on speakers was to go with […]

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Whew, this thing is a challenge. I’ve got PHP5 and MySQL 4.0 installed on the Cube. Due to the (apparently) bleeding-edge version of PHP I’m running, I have to install a number of changefiles for phpBB2.0. As if that weren’t enough, I’m having some issues figuring out how much I need to do to the […]

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I’ve been messing around with the CSS for WordPress and Gallery, and I’m getting closer to having a consistent look through the three major pieces of the nicheplayer.net Web site. I chose nicheplayer.net as a nod to Apple, the computer industry’s perennial whipping boy (SCO notwhistanding). Rather than have little “Made On A Mac” gifs […]

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Leah really seems to enjoy the iPod Shuffle already. I stopped by the iTMS last night and picked up an album’s worth of Top 40 tunes. Those, combined with the music Kevin’s sending along, will be a good starter package for her. Even cooler than the Shuffle, though, in my book, is the Style Master […]

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Leah’s early birthday present came today. The 512MB iPod Shuffle arrived around 1 via FedEx. I’d ordered it about an hour after Steve’s keynote at MWSF, and I understand there’s a bit of a wait to get one now. Hopefully Leah will find it useful for working out, though we have to work on getting […]

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It’s been a long day of messing with CSS for a Web site I offered to help with for the local free lunch program. I just copied most of the CSS from this site and stuck some text into it, and voila, a new site. It’s not much to look at, and there are sure […]

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I’m running between three different computers and two different platforms as I collect information on configuring WordPress, so I thought I’d just make a post here that collects some of the best notes I’ve found from various places. Mostly, these notes deal with plugins, hacks, and CSS code for including images in WordPress posts. The […]

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This is just a post to check and see if my changes to the wordpress database worked OK. Turns out the default install of WP 1.2.2 (Mingus) fails to create a needed row in the wp-options table that allows the user to save an entry for the offset of GMT, which in my case is […]

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If you’re like me, you’re usually scouting around for interesting music. Whether new or old, major or indy, there’s more good listening floating around out there than any one person can get a grip on in a lifetime. My SLiMP3 library is sitting near a measly 6,000 songs, and there are genres I haven’t even […]

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I made this recipe (doubled) for the recent progressive dinner we had with a group of friends. It turned out well. I wish I would’ve had some real mayo and white wine on hand to use in place of Miracle Whip and lemon juice, but it was tasty all the same. Served with an assortment […]

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Now that the site is up and running reasonably well (stupid, lingering MySQL host problem notwithstanding), I need to think about how to modify the look of this blog, which as of this post is pretty much at its default settings (I’ve modified the color of the header to match the background color in Gallery, […]

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I received my copy of “Teach Yourself Perl in 21 Days” from Amazon today. It looks really interesting. What will I do with it? I dunno. But my understanding is that Perl is a pretty easy language to get the hang of, and taking 21 days out of one’s life to learn something new can’t […]

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One of the things that I find frustrating about working up Web stuff on my Cube is that I can usually get most things working to a usable degree, but there are often a couple niggling little issues that make my installs less than perfect. In this most recent case, WordPress and MySQL are conspiring […]

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Now we’re getting somewhere. bOINGbOING comes across with a story today on a Danish unit that’s released a beer recipe under a Creative Commons license. I’ve always toyed with the idea of brewing my own beer, but when I had the time and freedom to do it (college), I was living in a house subject […]

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Well, it’s MWSF day, and S.J. kicks off his keynote address in about two hours. Should be interesting. It’s nice to be in a situation where I’m not presently lusting after any hardware or software. Of course, Steve and crew have a way of creating tech appetites in me that I never knew I had. […]

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Wow. It’s amazing just how slick everything can get, and how helpless we all are, when an ice storm hits. We left Ava with Grandma Mary this morning and slid into work. I assume the part we need for the Volvo is not going to make it here from C.R. today, so add another day […]

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After much fussing with a couple differrent blog packages, WordPress finally seems like it’s going to work. It was a long road, much of which I’ll describe in a subsequent post, just to consolidate my notes. Suffice to say, setting up my own blog on a home server was not the cakewalk I was anticipating.

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