Tag Archive for 'Blog'

It’s been a while

Wow, I kind of haven’t been updating this at all. Strange, considering I couldn’t stop posting while school was in session. There’s not a lack of stuff to get irritated about, that’s for sure.

I do have a bit of good news, however. Washington state has abandoned the rather short-lived party ballot primary system, where voters would choose which party (Republican or Democrat) to vote for during the primary and only vote using that ballot. I don’t even know what the original reasoning for that method was, but it’s been dumped in favor of the new “top 2″ primary system. Now, voters can vote for whoever they want on the primary ballot, regardless of party preference. The top 2 vote-getters in each partisan position then go on to the actual election.

It’s a much nicer system because it allows people to vote for the people, not the party. It used to be that if you wanted to vote for a Republican governor in the primary, you’d also have to vote for Republican senators, representatives, attorney generals, etc. Now, you can vote for a Democrat governor, a Republican senator, and an independent attorney general all on the same ballot.

Of course, the choices haven’t gotten any better. The majority of the people running for governor this year are either complete nutcases (one guy wants to ban cars) or more concerned with attacking their opponents than telling people what they would do as governor (seriously, this one guy used his entire statement to rip into the incumbent; nothing in there about his positions on the issues). Ugh.

At any rate, I hope to start publishing more updates to the blog. I’ve let it go so long, I posted once in the entire month of July. I really need to start getting indignant more. I must be losing my touch.

Full time job = no time blog

For the first summer ever, I have managed to actually get a full-time job. I honestly don’t know what was going on the past couple summers when I tried applying to every business in my home town, but this year I’m working for the county’s parks and recreation department. Not my ideal job, but it’s steady income.

As a result of my new 40-hour week, I haven’t had much time to get on my blog and post stuff. This is unfortunate, but it’s happened before. Everyone hits a slump now and again. I figure I’m just too beat to get properly irritated at world events. Or maybe I’ve become jaded enough that I simply can’t get properly irritated? That would be disturbing.

For lack of anything better, here’s a video. It involves SCIENCE. Kind of.

YouTube Preview Image

This space for rent

Finally got the new Internet connection all hooked up. Definitely a lot nicer than the old satellite connection, but I’m kind of iffy about having Comcast as an ISP. Their strange stances on things like peer-to-peer and net neutrality make me worry. They may say on their website that they don’t throttle BitTorrent traffic (there are legitimate uses for it, you know), but I don’t really trust them.

Anyways, everything is going swimmingly with that, so I’m happy for now. So happy that I can’t get properly incensed about the topic I was planning to rant about, which makes this a bit of a useless post. Ah well.

Broken blog

As usual, my WordPress upgrade (to the much-hyped 2.5) gave me grief. Unfortunately, much of it was my fault. For some odd reason, my FTP client moved files on the server instead of copying them, so my backup was essentially useless (I copied the original blog directory to another directory). Thus, when I deleted the new directory when it got messed up, I deleted everything. Themes, plugins, even images. Can anyone say “stupid mistake”?

Luckily, any pictures I used on the site are on my computer, but that just means I’ll have to re-upload them and fix any posts using images (such as the most recent post before this). And on the bright side, I can start anew without the clutter of useless themes and plugins. On the downside, I don’t remember what all the useful plugins were…

And yes, Bagel, I know I could have avoided this by just having a blog on WordPress.com, but I’m too stubborn for that. I just wish I had made better backups…

UPDATE: All right, I’ve got a new theme going, but I’m still missing a lot of stuff. And I still feel stupid. Argh. At least WP 2.5 is nice. It’s a good thing, too, considering the trouble I went through.

How to easily upgrade WordPress

If you’re like me and run your own copy of WordPress that’s not actually hosted by WordPress.com, upgrading can be a little bit annoying, especially with the minor security fixes that come out every so often. Luckily, there’s a fairly easy way to do this, as Zack of All Trades illustrates. You can do this if you have access to an SSH or Telnet shell. Some hosts don’t offer it, but others do, so you’ll need to check with your web host to see if you can access your account via a shell client. It’s is not for the weak of heart.

I wouldn’t recommend this method for major upgrades, but I suppose it’d work out just fine. I’ve used it for the past few minor updates and it’s been great. Less time spent using an FTP client and more time spent…uh…writing, I suppose. Maybe. Sometimes.

May 2013
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