CenterLeft.net

It’s been a busy couple weeks around here.  Summer is in full fling with all the associated projects and outings and work is fun, but keeping me on my toes.

In no particular order here’s what’s been happening:

• Ollie is getting bigger.  He’s just over 4 months now and stands taller than Sophie and his head is about twice the size of hers.  I’ll have to post some more pictures and videos soon.  We still don’t have any idea what type of dog he is, but we have really been enjoying him.
• This weekend the fish club got together for a home show and competition.  I volunteered to travel around with the group as a judge and we spent Saturday traveling all around the Seattle area.  It was a lot of fun to meet everyone in their homes and get to see all the tanks they’ve been working on for so long.  There was lots of amazing stuff out there.
• Beth and I finally had a weekend day off together.  We went for a great little hike.  The dogs were really pooped by the end.
• I’ve got a new boss at work.  So far he seems to be getting along well.
• The media PC died last week so we haven’t had the easy access to all our TV shows that we’re used too.  We ordered a new one and it’s scheduled to be delivered tomorrow.  I still can’t believe that the entire PC costs less than I paid for just the processor of the previous one.  That, and it’s going to be 4 or 5 times faster.
• Beth and I have bought our plane tickets to Europe.  I’ve got some training in the Czech Republic in August, and this time Beth is going to come along.  We’re going to add a week of vacation on to the end of it and spend some time traveling around Austria as well.

Well, that’s it for now.  Get out there and enjoy the sun!

I’m still fighting hackers here on the site.  It looks like I’ve gotten everything cleared up finally, but I guess I can only wait and see.  The last time I thought I was in the clear I was attacked again the very next day.

Fun weekend otherwise.  Beth’s Mum came up to visit and to check out the big fish auction put on by the Seattle Aquarium Society.  I took in a few things to sell, and mostly just hung out to watch what came up and bid on a few items now and then.  Barb took home a few great items and seemed to enjoy herself.

Exciting news for me too: I won one of the items from the raffle.  I’m playing around with setting up a new big tank eventually and now I get to spend a gift certificate on fish stuff at the Fish Tank People’s online store.  I don’t do any salt water tanks, but I’ve got my eye on a couple of the pumps that they sell.  So, that should work out just fine.

It’s been a good day.

It turns out I didn’t actually miss Carnival, just the first day, I finally got the front page of the site back up, and I helped develop a new service tool in class today.

Oh, I’ve been getting some nice comments on my YouTube video of the fish tank too.

Apparently upgrading Wordpress to 2.7.1 has totally hosed my front page.   I don’t know why nothing is showing up there.  I’ve poked at it a little bit, but obviously not enough to fix it yet.  I’ll probably need to just build an entirely new front page that doesn’t use the wordpress backend at all. Sigh…

But, I should have plenty of time to look into that next week.  I’m going to be back in Eindhoven for another week of training.  As always, that means a couple long nights where I can’t sleep.  So, I should have lots of time to rebuild the front page.

In more interesting news, Sophie (our puppy) is trying to learn how to stand on the back of the couch so she can get closer to the fish in the living room tank.  Some things are funny enough to just let them happen.

Note how nice the tank looks with the new plants in it. Thanks a lot to Eric from the GSAS for donating those to me.

This is a test.  You passed.

I always get into trouble when I try to get clever, and boy were things going smooth for me this weekend.

I’ve been doing some back end tweaking to the website this weekend.  As a result there were a few artifacts in some older posts that needed to be cleaned out.  I did a quick search of the internet and found a script that should fix everything for me.  Blissfully, I disregarded all the warnings that told me the script was not intended for my version of the website and would probably break everything for me.

Well, I did a quick test and everything seemed fine… it turns out I was wrong. The script worked great on all of the older posts, cleaning out everything that I had hoped it would.  Except, it made a complete hash of all of the new posts that I had added this weekend.

I’ve gone back to my last database backup to restore everything to a working version again.  But, of course, that backup was from a couple days ago.  So, everything is back up and working again, sans: me talking about what fun I had this weekend.

Oh well.  Such is life.

Even if it’s not written here anymore, I still had a really nice weekend.  I spent quite a bit of time playing with the motorcycle and it’s in great shape now. I changed my own oil for the first time, tightened the chain without the back wheel falling off, installed some amazing new heated hand grips, and started painting the luggage rack that Kirk built for me in the fall.

I can’t wait for spring.  It’ll be great when things warm up a bit again to get out and take a camping trip on the bike.  I finally have everything I need for it to be a comfortable trip and be able to cary everything I need.

I’ve found a new distraction for my time. Or rather an old distraction once again.

I’m a pirate! Yarr!

A couple years ago, while I was still in college, I started playing Puzzle Pirates. It’s a great game that you can spend a little or a lot of time playing. And in my case I spent a lot of time. It was so much fun that I got to the point where I had to give it up so that I could graduate.

It’s an addicting game to say the least, where you run around and do all the pirate like things that you should, but each activity is performed by playing little games and solving puzzles.

Even better though than just the games is that you can play the basic game for free.

It’s an online, multiplayer game, with all of the social aspects of that, but each person is performing an individual game and task that adds to the overall ability of the crew and boat that you’re sailing with.

At the end of the day, when you’ve made your fortunes pillaging the seas, you can come back to the islands and relax in your house. If you’ve got some more energy, there’s still money to be made working in or running shops and table games to play with other pirates at the Inn.

Spending all that money isn’t a problem either. There are lots of shops to order clothes, furniture, weapons, ships, and anything else you might want. You can even trade in that shack of yours for a huge mansion.

If you want to play, do me a favor and use this link: www.puzzlepirates.com It will give you a few extra bucks of game money for being referred by a player and it will also put you into the same ocean as me so that we can play together.

I just pulled this information out of the website access report from last month:

It seems that drag queens are a popular search topic out there on the web. Or at least my website is becoming a destination for it. I count 5 of the top 20 search results having to do with queens, including the number one result.

I looked into it a little closer, and wouldn’t you know, but I found two different posts on this site about drag shows I was in, and one whole picture gallery.

Things we’ll do for charity, eh?

Update: I’m a geek, and this is really funny: http://www.xkcd.com/c26.html

Another one of Kyle’s cartoons went up this weekend. They crack me up, stay tuned there are more to come. If you guys haven’t checked them out yet, I put up an index to make the navigation easier. I’ve been trying to put a new comic up every week, but sometimes I’m a little lax with the schedule. Sorry for that.

I’m settling in to work. I haven’t needed my work muscle in several months now, so it’s taking some getting used to. But, every day I come home less tired than the day before. It’s possible that not long from now I’ll come home more rested than when I left.

Finally got my bike back from the repair shop. Bloody hell, it took long enough though. It’s terribly frustrating to be waiting 10 months to get back out to ride. But, it’s even worse when you finally get your bike and it take 3 weeks for the shop to do a simple tune up and battery charge. But it’s done, and now I know better than to take my bike to that shop again. One of the problems with motorcycles getting more popular is that local mechanics are getting overwhelmed by the business. Though, I suppose that’s not the end of the world.