RedJen's Rearview Mirror

I'm getting closer to actually having the rewrite of my site done. For me, that's impressive. Well, closer is definitely one way to describe this. I've finally manage to rewrite and update my site. Now that it isn't so completely out of date, maybe I'll even admit to having a site at all.

I’m in the process of moving all my web files from my RoadRunner account to the new domain (www.redjenosu.com) I’ve had set up. Now that I’ve moved my journal to the Moveable Type set up, I’m no longer pleased with the rest of the page layouts. Sigh. I guess that means I’ll be working on fixing them up in the near future as well.

First - Duplicate all the content from previous site to new site. [Done]

Second - I have to get the redirects onto the old website so that I don’t have to send out email telling everyone I’ve suddenly changed addresses. [Done]

Third - See if anyone notices... [Done]

Five pages of pictures involving kids, pets, paint & friends:
* Page 2
* Page 3
* Page 4
* Page 5
* Page 6

Six pictures from my trip to Ohio:
* Page 7

I’ve redone the entry page to my photo album and added a page of pictures of some friends and myself posing as characters circa 1920. Now I want to rework some of the actual photo pages, but that will have to wait until later.

I, RedJen, hereby promise to avoid the gratuitous use of pictures in my Musing entries and to contain the majority of my pictures to the pages of my photo album.

Posted this the twenty-fourth day of June, in the year two thousand and three of the Common Era.

I’ve gotten a bit of a bug to modify the look of my site. I’m not sure exactly what it will mean, but most likely it will be minor. It will probably mean a change in color scheme and possibly a slight layout shift. I’m not sure when it will happen either, as I haven’t found a set of colors that I like yet.

So maybe saying I wanted to modify the look of my site was a bit of an over statement. I have however altered some of the colors, the font of the dates and altered the links in the sidebar to display as bold. This has turned out to be more of a tweaking than a modification.

I had been playing around with a scarlet, gray and white color scheme for a few days, but I couldn’t seem to get it to a point that I liked, so rather than completely give up, I decided to alter the part of my current configuration that I like the least. For now, this works for me.

Here is to 100 entries!

I’ve decided that I really want to keep my Musings entries to what is going on around me or inside the confines of my thoughts. As I’ve found that I like playing with some of the random memes that occur out her in cyberspace, I’ve created a new space to keep memes, surveys and whatnot. Predictably, it is called RedJen’s Memes. So that’s part of what I did this morning, that and sleeping in. Sleep is good.

I’m testing out another site tweak. I’ll figure out these cascading style sheets yet. It took me way too long to fix a problem that stemmed from having part of my menu items outside of a necessary style sheet tag.

I’m beginning to think that Omega suspects something is going on. She’s giving me the eye. Real squinty and pointed, like she knows there’s something I’m not telling her and she already knows she isn’t going to like it. If I had my camera with me, I’d take a picture, but I’m not going to go downstairs to get it, when she’ll probably relocate by the time I get back upstairs. I think I’m going to take my chances and get some sleep anyway, she’s been watching me sleep for almost 9 years now, I’m hoping that by now I can trust her not to lead the other two in a coup while I’m sleeping.

Hurricane Isabel – left a lot of leaves and twigs in my yard. Now I know why I “had” to buy a rake.

Health – is getting steadily better. I’m acting a bit like a narcoleptic at this point, I’m still coughing and sound like a horse frog, but feeling much better.

Work – will be there next week. We were closed yesterday, so I didn’t have to spend my planned vacation day and I’ve had today scheduled off as a vacation day for the past month.

Website – I’ve changed my Guestbook implementation and migrated the existing entries. I may need to revisit where it is on the site, it is under Meet RedJen, as it doesn’t seem to get much traffic.

Tonight (Friday) – has an event at NC State, if it doesn’t get cancelled. I’m a little confused about what being open under a Weather AX means.

Saturday night – is still on for the Triple Threat party.

So I think I managed to write most of the angst out over certain people. I swear I’m an adult!

Today was good, okay, long, fun and a learning experience. I was able to go back to the gym for the first time in a week. Too bad I still can’t completely fill my lungs with air, but I’ll take a slightly modified workout over none at all. Work was work and it got long. A friend and I went to a playground and took a ride on the swings. It was so fun to laugh, kick our shoes off and just be. Tonight I finished figuring out how to rework my new photo gallery into the existing website. You can check it out here. It also has pictures from the Triple Threat Party we had last weekend.

Today was the first full day of Autumn. ShaeSin’s got her groove back and I’m starting to have fun. This could be an interesting change of seasons.

meme n (mëm): A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted from one to another.

I’ve brought my Memes back into the Musings Site. I haven’t been doing enough of them to bother keeping up a separate area for them.

If someone knows what happened to the web server, they aren’t telling me. There started being issues again on Tuesday and on Wednesday my URL wasn’t recognized at all. Well, the site was back up this morning, but I have yet to hear back from the company hosting my site. Everything between 10/16/2003 and today is pretty much gone. On the up side, the changes I made to the photo album and guestbook were preserved. On the down side, I haven’t heard anything back about recovering the missing journal entries for not only my site, but also from Ranting Virgo and NJS for that time period. I’ll post more updates as I find out what is going on.

I’ve taken the lack of response by the Zanuc support team to the Better Business Bureau. We’ll see what happens. If for some reason you come back to my site and find nothing here, I’ll be back up as soon as possible.

What really sucks in all of this is that I didn’t have ANY problems with this group for six months, then all of a sudden I can’t get anyone to answer emails and either they no longer have a phone or it has been relocated by the Federal Witness Protection Program.

The good news is that the support people at www.eNom.com, the registrar that Zan-Suck is a reseller for modified my domain registration so that I could update the information on it myself. If all goes well within the next couple of hours my domain should be resolving correctly. Once that’s done, I can start working on operation www.zan-suck.com.

Enough tweaking for one day, I think I'm going to read a book for a while and hope that the power doesn't go out.

-RJ

Okay I blasted the company that previously hosted my website for poor customer response (if you are curious, see my Things that SUCK! page), so it is only fair that I report on my current host, iPowerWeb.

When I got up this morning (involuntarily, due to coughing), I found that my site was having problems resolving and was instead pulling up a default page from the host company. After making sure that all the files were still in place, I opened a support ticket at 7:05 am EST. I received an email at 7:32 am EST apologizing for my problem and saying that my ticket had been escalated to the technical support team. At 8:02 am EST, I received a second email again apologizing for the inconvenience and saying that proper adjustments had been made.

In less than half an hour, my problem had been acknowledged and in less than an hour corrected. This is the type of response I like to see. (I still haven’t heard back from Zan-SUCK.)

It should be noted that iPowerWeb is located on the West Coast and as such, the quick responses happened between 4:32 am and 5:02 am PST. Now I need to write an email to the Customer Service department of iPowerWeb, thanking them for the good service.

It would appear that I spoke too soon on things being resolved. It looks like they did a server upgrade on the Apache code that runs the servers and some of the settings are having issues. The good news for ShaeSin and Desufnoc is that I backed up the entire site earlier today, which means there won’t be a Zan-SUCK repeat today.

1:10 pm EST - So I’m sitting on hold with iPower right now. I have a feeling that they are having more than a few issues. The toll-free number they have listed was ringing busy, but the direct number listed got me into their support queue.

I’m beginning to think Dominion is outside my house. My cable just flashed off and is now trying to reload. That was a close call, but cable has been restored. Having so many technical things going haywire at once makes me think of Dominion. It may not be fair, but among my friends, Dominion has been deemed the bringer of Gremlins and odd occurrences. Not that it’s fair to him, but at this point the theory has proven true a few too many times to be a complete coincidence.

1:21 pm EST – I just got finished speaking with someone on the support team. As I suspected, there was a server code upgrade last night and as a result of a "glitch" the configuration file that normally points to my server space was altered to point to the base directory of the server. In order for the fix to take effect, the server has to be restarted, I’ll have to wait until that happens to actually post this.

The good news is that while the glitch is annoying, the tech person I spoke with was able to speak intelligently and even answered my questions politely with appropriate details. Now I just have to see how long it is going to take before the server restart occurs.

It's official, I've made it an entire year.

As requested, I’ve updated the photo albums with the pictures that I’ve been lax in posting. You can find new pictures in Fun Pictures, Family, Painting Day 2 (new) and Tattoo Fun (new). No captions yet, those should be up before Christmas.

And then I was going to write an update, until I realized that upgrading the Gallery software I use on the site was going to take me until after 1 am. Oh well, I guess the world will just have to wait a little longer… I’m going to sleep.

While clubbrian.net appears to be down, as long as http://www.redjenosu.com is active, you can still tune in to his Ultimate Rants at http://abms.redjenosu.com.

The comment function for this site is down, but I'm working on fixing it...

Update: I'm getting closer. You can comment and the comments will be queued for review. I'm still working on this

Update: Comment function restored (10/18).

Well, tonight has been taken up by figuring out the differences between MovableType versions 2.66 and 3.11. I think I like the look, it'll take working with it a bit longer before I know how I really feel about it. On the up side, I finally got all the files to rebuild with the new values that were missing by virtue of being "pre-upgrade".

Leave it to me to decide to upgrade my installation of MovableType to version 3.11 the day before SixApart releases version 3.12. I did manage to find a MAJOR glitch during this exercise. I created an extra journal so that I could see the new templates and default blog settings. Since I don’t need another blog, once I checked things out, I deleted the extra blog. The good news was that the new blog was correctly removed. The bad news was that Dominion’s blog was also killed at the same time. Luckily, none of the archive files were lost, so everything still exists, but I lost patience as I was trying to make it come back. (Sorry Dom, my patience is not infinite.)

Last night was spent split between two places. For the first time in quite a while, I spent the evening with Desufnoc and Cupcake. They’ve settled into their new apartment and oh, the nesting that occurring there… Given that they are expecting a baby in January, that makes complete sense, but seeing Desufnoc in such a domestic environment was new for me. (Sorry Desufnoc, but there was a time when we thought you’d never leave the frat house atmosphere.) Dinner was nice and the company was relaxed. Least anyone be confused and assume that Desufnoc’s hand was in the nesting, Cupcake’s eye for putting things together was obvious.

After excusing myself from the domestic bliss, I joined ShaeSin and was reminded that I’d introduced her to Pilates the day before at the gym. So before joining her to work with her on her blog set up, I dutifully stopped by and picked up something to drink at the store. I realized as I walked into the store that Sibling1 needs to grow up so we don’t need to make extra trips to the store for things she can’t buy yet. Anyway, four hours later, I’ve wrapped up most of the updates on Ranting Virgo’s blog and as it is after 2 AM, it is definitely time to go home.

So if anyone is wondering why I haven’t been posting much to my journal this week, I’ve been doing a lot of work on it, just not writing anything. Sometimes you just have to take care of the structure that supports everything, even if no one can see you doing it. The alternative is to ignore the passage of time and discover too late that the rock you once stood upon has become a single grain of sand.

Now I just need to clean my actual house…

I’ve decided that I will win the war against the bots and buttheads that have been trying to spam my journal comments. I briefly locked comments so that only comments by users with registered TypeKey IDs would automatically be displayed, but decided I wasn’t happy with that, since I’d have to keep approving comments to get them to display. This would also not solve the issue of keeping ShaeSin, Desufnoc and Dominion’s journals spam free, unless they or I approved comments on their journals as well. I’d already changed the settings to prevent any comment with more than 2 urls to require approval, which had cut down on a decent amount of spam, but they were STILL getting through. Now the settings will allow only one url in a comment. I’ve also updated things so that if someone wants to comment on an entry that is 90 days or older, that comment will require my approval to post. Feel free to post comments to any entry, just know some of them may take a few hours to be approved. (Yes, I’m a geek and usually online at least once in any given 12 hour period.)

I’ve made another very subtle change to both mine and ShaeSin’s journals, but I’m not going to tell you what it is. If you find it, let me know. I think they are pretty fun.

So I should be sleeping, but here I am making a new site banner and making tiny changes to my site navigation.

Like there was any wonder whether or not I'm a geek...

I’ve spent a decent amount of time this morning working on updating the comment spam blocker used here and on Ranting Virgo, Ultimate Rants and the NJS Journal. Hopefully it will be more effective now that I’ve programmed some new rules into the logic. If for some reason you get blocked by mistake, let me know and I’ll reevaluate the rule that caused the block.

Reading: The 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork
Watching: My Cousin Vinny
Playing: City of Heroes

(Click either of the pics to go to the Colorado Album.)

Also today: Updated MovableType and Gallery versions.

Don't mind me, I'm being a geek and playing with an updated site engine.

Please excuse the any glitches, I'm working on upgrading the MT code.

As if you couldn't tell, I'm in the middle of some format changes.

I took some time off from posting to work out some stuff, but now I'm back. Too bad I wanted to start posting about 2 weeks ago and the site decided to implode. The gallery isn't back up yet, but hopefully tonight.

Last night I ended up spending most of the evening doing maintenance on the site and getting the blogs up and running. I've started work on the gallery, but decided to go to bed, which means I'll hopefully finish them up tonight.

The trials to get things put back on the server is chronicled below for those who wonder where the site went during this time...

The gallery is back up and running. Shae & Co can post and comment again. Now to get some work done...

I'm working on a revamp of the site. I'm not sure if it would be considered version 2.0 or this as part 1 and that as part 2. Either way, I'm planning on leaving this part intact when I finish to keep it as history.

My musing is moving on to a new format. Because this journal has been a great source of reflection, insight and release, I've decided to lock it as it is so that I can look back on it from time to time. I hope people will want to take the short hop with me to the new journal and the next steps as I move forward.

Thanks for all the memories, they have been happy, sad and everything in between.

~ RedJen ~

Part 2 can be found at http://redjenosu.com/wp/