October 22, 2007

home

So much to write about ... and I'm just too tired.

List of things to discuss this week:

1. Rowling and Dumbledore


2. Travel and Airplanes


3. The Reunion


4. More stuff that I can't quite remember at this moment due to exhaustion (see #2)

Hopefully I'll start the discussions tomorrow ... oh, and of course, there's the Thinking Blogger tag from LibDrone as well. :)

It's going to be a busy week, methinks.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:15 PM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

October 3, 2007

Lamar High School ... 1987 Reunion

Lamar High School ... 20 Year Reunion ... Arlington, Texas

Okay, here's some updating on this. The price if you pay before 10/9 is $67 or $134 for a couple. This is good for both events (and, naturally, you can't pay for just one event).

Reunions by the Party People
Friday, October 19th, 2007 ... Ice Breaker Party ... J. Gilligan’s ... 8:00p.m. - Midnight
J Gilligans 400 East Abrams St. ... Arlington ... 817.274.8561
(Private party cash bar event)

Saturday, October 20th, 2007 ... Reunion Celebration ... (Casual Attire) ... Rangers Ballpark in Arlington ... 7:30p.m. - Midnight ... tex-mex buffet ... DJ ... dancing ... cash bar ... awards program (awards for freaking WHAT???)

More info? Check out http://www.alumniclass.com/lamarhstx/

There's a slew of people I have not been able to find that I would love to meet up with there. I've gotten in touch with Lori Goe and Annette Simonini ... but I'm still looking for:
Janet Kim (Kyungah) ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Brenda Heath
Kate McDonald
Shannon Heizer
Suzanne Gruchow (even tho you moved before going to Lamar!)
Veronica Cano
Susan Stetson
Anna Tan
Cindy Ritner ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Amy Alexander
Ashley Aguilar
Kristi Grimm
Alison Campbell
Paula Gill
Lisa Pawloski
Suzanne Scott
Jill Stewart
Jenny Britton
Tracy McGuire ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Lynn Adzigian ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Natalie Parrish ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached her :(
Russ Johnson ... on the lost list ... no invites have reached him ...I have heard briefly from him and hope he will be attending

And, of course, there are a slew of other folks that I'd like to catch up with again as well.

Really, I just posted this in the hopes that those people who haven't found out about the reunion can perhaps hit this info thru Google since the info's not all that easy to find.

And there are those of you who have contacted me, wanting to know who the heck Red Monkey is. If you followed through to my About Me page and through the rest of my site, you're still confused as you don't know who Robin MacRorie is. That wasn't the name I had back then.

Well, maybe you can ask around at the reunion and figure it out. :) A little mystery never hurt anyone.

Posted by Red Monkey at 11:08 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble

October 1, 2007

MT 4

If you're a MT kind of person ... don't upgrade yet!

Seems the good folks at SixApart do not have the bugs worked out of the new system yet. Not even close. I was happy enough with 3.2 with the exception of not being able to find a Captcha program to help rid me of my plague of spamments. I saw MT4 go beta and then, I swear I saw it go production. And it included a Captcha!

I upgraded. There was a day of screaming and fussing as I tried to get everything straightened out -- the bulk of the issues coming around the new ways to implement commenting. Apparently I copied/pasted something badly and it took another 24 hours for me to work through my screw-up. Typical.

Then I installed the captcha. For the life of me, I cannot find where the directions for this "plug-in" which comes with MT 4.x are. I know I had it working for a while.

Fast forward to Saturday, the day of the Purdue/Notre Damn game. I was ready to upload a new graphic and post. "Session Over, please log in again"

Okay. I surf with FireFox and it had probably been a day or two since I had actually done anything in MT. I sign in.

Welcome. We are ready to upgrade your database.

WTF? I did that weeks ago. This isn't like some automated upgrading to the next version of MT, is it? I look. Nope. Apparently, it just randomly decides that it needs to "upgrade" an already upgraded database from time to time. Some people have it happen really frequently. Okay, fine. I let it upgrade.

That evening a friend IMs me. Hey, I can't comment on your blog. The Captcha isn't there any more, but the blog wants the Captcha verification.

Shit.

I still haven't figured out what went wrong where. I've spent the last couple of days haunting the MT forums. Nothing. I've sent a bug report to MT. I've been searching thru Google. Nothing.

I STILL can't figure out WTF is wrong or how just "upgrading" the database could have broken this. Dammit. So, no comments AGAIN until I can figure out what the hell went wrong this time. And I'll be publishing a full report of the issue here ... just in case it happens again ... or to someone else.

If you are from MT or SixApart or have simply got some ideas on what the issue could be, please, please, please email me at en der (no space) AT that thundering coyote domain name that you see above (yeah, way up there in the address bar of your browser. yeah, that's it ... no "ing" and the coyote comes before the other word.) DOT com.

At this point I'm so ticked off I'm beginning to think I should swap over to WordPress ...
I love MT ... but this is seriously pissing me off. :(

UPDATE:
As I went to freaking hit publish ... the damn database says it wants upgrading again.

I may have to kill something soon.

Posted by Red Monkey at 2:49 PM | Comments (2) | Blog | Stumble

September 2, 2007

All Nighters

And I thought I was done with the all-nighters. Silly, silly mortal.

Comments should be working. The Captcha images are hard to read and REALLY ugly, I know. I'm going to make some new images as soon as I get a really good look at how the Captcha is set up and make sure that my tinkering isn't going to break things again.

I'm leaving my spam rules alone for the moment, so if you post an URL (other than the one in the URL field ... so if you post a "second" one in the comments field itself), then the comment will get sent to spam. I'm really really really hoping that this cuts down on the spam. After I got the freaking comments fixed ... within five minutes I had 6 more spamments. Unbelievable.

Well, I ought to get up for church in 4 hours ... dunno if i'll make it or not, but I'm finally signing off for now. (Oh, and I dunno if the little smiley icons will be back or not ... I'm tired of dinking around the templates for now.)

Posted by Red Monkey at 3:23 AM | Comments (3) | Blog | Stumble

September 1, 2007

HELP HELP HELP

ANYONE who knows anything about version 4 of Movable Type, particularly about comments ...

Here's the deal ... all the old posts have the comments section on them still. The form is still there, but if someone tries to leave a comment they get:
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

I haven't clue one where to start with that.

Two:
The newest entries don't even have the freaking comments form ON them, much less the comments count at the bottom of the post here on the main page.

Please, please, please, email at e n d e r AT this domain. (Yes, the word with thunder and coyote in it ... not anything with Red Monkey in it.)

I think if I ever get this to work, it's an awesome looking upgrade so far. But good lord, SixApart needs real tech writers to go thru and do the step by step instructions for upgrades, for upgrades with custom templates, for new installations. Cuz you've got like 900 documents which is great, but it's freaking impossible to find what we need.

Posted by Red Monkey at 6:58 PM | Comments (1) | Blog | Stumble

ARGH

Okay, comments still broken. I have NO idea what's going on with the template anymore.

Tomorrow (err, later today) I will probably go through and copy each old template, save it to the hard drive ... delete all templates and CSS ... and then attempt to use one of the MT styles just to see if that fixes the comments issue. If it does, then I know that it's not a permissions issue and it is a template issue. Hopefully that will help me track down the problem.

*sigh*

Seriously, I would rather wait an extra 6 months to a year for them to build an updater tool instead of having to do shit by hand like this. Dammit.

Posted by Red Monkey at 12:14 AM | Comments (0) | Blog | Stumble