avablog

It must’ve been back in the early 80s when my grandmother first introduced me to an Apple ][e. Something clicked (and it was more profound than a mouse button). I suppose if she would’ve gotten us a Commodore or some other box I might be making $250,000 a year right now, if I weren’t retired […]

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I’ve been thinking about the purpose of blogs. Or at least this blog. And I’ve come to the conclusion that this particular blog is really meant mostly for the dissemination of information about our daughter, along with tidbits about our daily lives. Set the world on fire? Probably not. So, in the spirit of isolation […]

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Apparently some mail servers are grabbing the registration confirmation e-mails sent out by the blog and grinding them into dust. If you registered and did not get an e-mail containing your username and system-generated password, let me know. Your user has been created, you just didn’t get your confirmation e-mail. I’ll reset your password, send […]

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Surprise, surprise. I’ve upgraded the WordPress software to version 1.5 (from 1.2), and I need to do some work before I get it back to the way it was (now done, pretty much). Hope I can do it. In the meantime, get your e-mail addresses and passwords ready, because I’m going to be locking this […]

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A while back Kevin and Rachel were in town for a visit. While they were here, Kevin and I took a look at the PC he helped me build last year. In particular, we were looking at the copy of Half Life 2 I’m running, which Kevin and Rachel (I think?) got me for Christmas […]

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Thought I’d just make a quick entry about a project Kevin recently worked up for my mom. Her ISP’s spam filters were choking on some e-mails she was trying to send with very long recipient lists. Their suggestion was to break the lists up and send multiple messages. Probably not a terrible solution, but why […]

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The coolness of Apple’s products is only surpassed in measure by the geekiness of the people who use them. Some freak turned four Shuffles into a 1.2GB array using a four-port USB hub. I love it.

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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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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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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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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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