Involution.com has been running on Wordpress for about a year-and-a-half now. One thing that I particularly like is the calendar index to all of my posts that’s actually provided by the Livecalendar plugin. This plugin seems to have been developed by different people at different times, and it mostly works, but had some issues in Internet Explorer for ages. Namely, the “loading” animated gif would display forever in Internet Explorer. Some clever punter (not the original author or maintainer as far as I can tell) actually managed to fix that snafu, and released a new version of the plugin called “1.9rc3″. Problem is there were still a couple of issues with it. Namely, the previous year button seemed to only work once, and if you published a page (not a post) on a given day, it was creating a post link for that day in the calendar. Posts and pages are different to Wordpress. So, the page thing was easy enough to fix as I just tacked on “AND post_type=’post’” into all of the Livecalendar queries. The previous year problem actually lived on Line 266 in livecalendar.js where previous year wasn’t being computer correctly. So, I give to the web community what I’m calling livecalendar-1.9rc4-hoyhoy. All of the fixes rolled in so you can now enjoy flawless calendar indexing goodness on your Wordpress site. Happy blogging.

One week ago, Sterrance, my Windows desktop computer refused to start. Touching the switch did not result in the comforting fan whirring and hard disk clatter that used to happen. The switch didn’t do anything now. In some ways, it was just like the mystery switch in my last apartment at Gables Grandview that performed no action that I could perceive in my own reality.

I found this problem quite peculiar since I built the computer to crazy specifications (solid gold ram sinks, spinners on the caster wheels, coffee can fan exhaust, NOS and massive VTEC stickers ever on every possible flat surface). My first assumption was that an electrical surge must have fried the power supply. This seemed rather implausible because the machine is plugged in to a UPS which is plugged in to a surge protector. Going through the motions, I earnestly took both spare power supplies that I have on hand and tried them both and got no love from Mr. G. While sitting on the floor with the case open, I noticed something rather queer. The LED on the motherboard and the IDE LED on the case stayed on whilst I was unplugging the power supplies. I started to become perplexed, and dare I say, a bit angry. So, I unplugged every possible Molex connector from the original power supply thinking that it must have been holding a charge in a capacitor somewhere. Even after that, the motherboard LED stayed on. The video card is sometimes troublesome and complains about its power adapter not being attached even though it is. Grasping at straws, I unplugged the video card. Still the LEDs shone like the twinkle in my dad’s eye on the day I was born.

Thinking I had somehow entered the twilight zone, I then physically unplugged the new and old power supplies from the wall. Still, the LEDs were lit up worse than a fraternity guy at a kegger. In my confusion, I somehow remembered that printed circuit boards hold some parasitic charge in their capacitors. Then, I shorted the “reset” jumper thinking it would clear any possible charge stored in the board. Still, the LEDs were glowing with the intensity of a neutron star. I was starting to get scared and irrational at this point, and I deleted all of the mp3s that comprised The Police’s “Ghost in the Machine” album on my iPod. Still, the LEDs were dutifully glowing like my glimmering life gem after I eat a whole pack of Hobnobs. As a last resort, I started unplugging USB peripherals, speakers, a USB Das keyboard, and finally an additional Model M PS/2 keyboard with marked letters on it that Rachel needed because she’s afraid to learn how to touch-type.

Eureka! It was the Model M PS/2 keyboard that was somehow injecting a current into the motherboard. So, as I went take the keyboard off the desk to examine it for the presence of gremlins or perhaps small trolls, I realized that the mouse portion of the cable was attached to my Linux machine. It was physically connected to two machines! The Model M PS/2 keyboard has a Trackpoint nipple nestled snugly between the G and H keys that I caress sometimes when I get lonely. To reiterate, the mouse cable for the keyboard was plugged in to the Linux machine that was on, and the keyboard cable was plugged in to my Windows machine which refused to boot. After disconnecting the extra cable and hitting the power switch, Sterrance booted-up like the clappers!

I realize now that it is a bad idea to have peripherals connected to two machines simultaneously unless they are designed for that purpose. I blame this oversight partially on the Electrical Engineering curriculum at Ohio University where it was never explicitly mentioned to _not_ do such a thing and on Rachel for not wanting to learn how to type on a keyboard with no letters.

I totally redesigned and refactored involution.com to use the Wordpress 2.1 system over the past two weeks. I basically jiggered all the existing content into the Wordpress database rather than continue with my own hybrid Wordpress v1 plus homegrown PHP system that I had been evolving for seven years or so. I dropped my own quotation engine and moved to a modified wp-quotes, ported my hoyhoy-digest archiving system to a new custom Wordpress plugin, and then upgraded to the latest livecalendar release candidate 1.9rc3 (and fixed a bug with it). This allowed me to get rid of my custom admin interface and use the Wordpress one for everything. Next, I wrote about 30 RedirectMatch rules to maintain the integrity of any incoming links to the site. Then, I installed the XSPF flash player so I could dynamically load mp3 files via any article or post. Finally, I turned off my MediaWiki install, and removed my custom PHP files from my old content management system, and restarted Apache.

This was the big update that I had been dreading for quite some time. I got the feeling that my site was fairly inconistent using three different CMS systems and about five different layouts for everything that has been produced since 1997. Now, I have a very clean site running on WP2 that maintains a constant appearance across all pages.

I just deleted my del.icio.us tag feeds from NetNewsWire tonight because clever spammers are injecting so much noise into them that they have become mostly ineffective. It’s sad to see another once useful tool destroyed by avarice.

On January 22nd, to appease my glimmering life gem, Rachel and I moved from Austin, TX to San Francisco so I could join forces with a new stealth mode start-up company. In December, a leprechaun operating a mangle outside of Mother Egan’s shot me a grin, and I realized it was time for me to take my wife and all the consumer goods that I owned for a nice vacation across the southwestern United States. Serendipitously, I got the job offer in San Francisco just after that and promptly sent my furniture and most everything else by way of All Star Moving. As the name implied, the movers were indeed all stars. Unfortunately, they got stuck in the ice storm for a day as did we. So, on Thursday, we learned of the All Star calamity, and realized that we’d be sans sofa bed until the Tuesday next. Rachel just said, “Fuck it, let’s go to Idaho!” So, we did, and then west to Oregon, and then back south to Klamath, California for a night. After that, we finally arrived in San Francisco on Monday, January 29th. The entire trip took seven days. It was mostly fun if you don’t count the flat tire outside of Junction, TX and the ice storm that closed down I-10. Since when did it snow in Tejas anyway? Also, I should note that said sofa bed wouldn’t fit through either door on the new place, so I had to pay two nice men $260 for 35 minutes work to remove a second bedroom window by way of crowbars, allow me to move the couch in, and then subsequently reinstall the window. (You can’t outsource crowbar window remover guys either!) As always, there’s way too many pictures on my Flickr account immortalizing the event and serving as a constant advertisement of my own importance.