Category: Announcements

How I Spent My Island Vacation, Part 2: Thad Makes Banal Observations About Airport Security

Some musings, observations, and general thoughts:

  1. Who decided it was a good idea to tell people, "Oh, you're going to have to check this" after baggage check?
  2. Seriously, guys. It's jelly. What conceivable kind of danger can this jelly possibly pose?
  3. So the problem is the size of the container? So if I had, say, three smaller containers and split the jelly up into them -- the exact same matter, just in different containers -- you wouldn't have thrown it out?

Anyway. Thanks for making us so much safer, TSA.

...Then again, I guess my airport experience could have been a lot worse.

Nineteen Hundred Plus

Had some serious computer trouble last night, and it vanished as mysteriously as it came.

It has occurred to me that I know at least three couples who have gotten engaged, married, and divorced in the time since my last major hardware upgrade. And that was just a new video card.

If I had the dollars, I'd get me one o' them Mac Pro things the kids talk about. Triple-boot OSX, Windows, and some flavor of Linux. I'm thinking Kubuntu, since I've discovered I don't have the time to keep my packages up-to-date in Gentoo.

But man, I'll miss Gentoo.

All of that, of course, is academic at this point, as I do not have the dollars for a Mac Pro. Hopefully I can remedy that situation, but if my computer dies in the meantime, I guess I'll have to use Knoppix or my Mac Mini or something.

Escape from Crazytown

A thief comes during the night and steals 13 oxen.

Hello!

I have migrated my site to a new server!

Because it turns out that my previous hosting provider is a shining example of what I mentioned in my previous post about how all my friends are currently campaigning for the office of Mayor of Crazytown.

I would like to thank my previous hosting provider for three and a half years of hosting which was relatively free of capriciously removing the site and pretending it was an accident. And even before that, a redirect to the ol' BBS waaaaay back in '01. We had some good times, buddy, and I wish you all the best; take your ice cream cone and run with it.

On another topic, I would like to share some useful information with random people who have found this site with Google!

If you are in the process of migrating your site and don't want to ask for help from your hosting provider because your hosting provider is currently campaigning for the office of Mayor of Crazytown, and if you need to export your MySQL DB (say, for example, because it has all your blog data on it), here is the operative command:

mysqldump -u username -p dbname --single-transaction > foo.sql

That "--single-transaction" flag is key if you're getting the following error:

mysqldump: Got error: 1044: Access denied for user 'username'@'localhost' to database 'dbname' when using LOCK TABLES

Because what that generally means is you have read access for the DB, but you don't have permission to lock it.

Don't say I never gave you anything, random Googler.

(Also, now that I have migrated the site to a server I control, I can set the whole mysqldump thing up as a cron job. Whoo redundancy! Whoo redundancy!)

I hope that you, my loyal readers, as well as random Googlers, will continue to follow my very boring exploits as I continue to chronicle them -- this time on a new server.

Huzzah!

In which Thad makes oblique references to his personal life

There comes a time in every man's life when he must come to the sobering realization that the most normal person he knows is this gentleman:
Brad wearing a penis hat

It has recently come to my attention that every single person I know is currently campaigning for the position of Mayor of Crazytown. I wish them all the best of luck, but caution them that the incumbent is going to be very difficult to defeat.

I have further realized that Brad is doing a surprisingly poor job in his campaign for Mayor of Crazytown in comparison to everyone else I know.

Actually, it's not that surprising. He didn't do so well in his campaign for Mayor of Tempe, either.


Reading: Elric: Song of the Black Sword. I agreed to read it if Felipe would read Watchmen. So far he is more impressed than I am.

Bad News/Good News

An inauspicious beginning indeed: it's only mid-February and I'm having a nail removed from the second tire this year.

Though this is an improvement over the last time. Trying to get a tire fixed is trickier on New Year's Day than on a regular work day when you work nextdoor to Arrowhead Tire.

Progress

I had a productive afternoon.

I got a long-overdue oil change, a car wash, and bought a new pair of shades to replace the pair I left at the Mexican restaurant on Saturday night.

(I was due for a new pair anyway. I'd had those things for three years and they were all scratched and I was missing one of my spare lenses.)

I got to cross two things off my To-Do list.