A Random Pattern

Quick recap of our Labor Day weekend:

• Garage-sale Saturday morning, mildly successful if you ask me or a complete bomb if you ask Sara (but she did most of the prep work for it).
• Sunday, church was great, started a “Lost” series (yes, as in the TV show).
• Also Sunday, got the new dishwasher installed, and the garbage disposal working.  Yay!
• Monday – don’t remember much about Monday, but did clean up the garage some.  I think I probably wasted the rest of the day, that’d be my guess.  Oh yeah, I think I got addicted to an obscure web-comic and read through it’s entire 6-year history….

Oh, if you’re wondering where the pictures are, go to my other other website, where I put them up just because it’s so easy.

Why is it so easy?  It would be easiest to just show you, but let’s just say that I spent only 5 minutes putting the picture and post up, as well as fixing the homepage and main blog page.  All I did was select, type, drag the picture in where I wanted it, and clicked [Publish].  That’s it.  Finito.  You really should go to an Apple store and check out iWeb and iLife if you want a super-easy, no-web-knowledge-required, don’t-waste-my-time-I’m-not-a-geek way to share pictures and videos with family.  On the other hand, if you want any flexibility or control AT ALL, perhaps it’s better to look into your other options.  ;)  Just kidding, it’s not quite that bad.

blades of grass can stop the most powerful motor – if they just stick together.

My download link was down for probably several days.  I didn’t get too many complaints, so …

The download link is fixed now, and I think the theme is strong enough to remove the “this is still new, be wary” warning.

I also discovered that in the process of getting the theme to validate, I fixed one of the more severe IE display problems, so my subscribe widget is back at the top of the sidebar where I want it.  Yay!

The Rubric Theme page has been updated again.

Well, that was an interesting week.  I don’t know about you, but I am SOOOO GLAD the three-day weekend is finally here.  Sorry non-U.S. readers, but then again you get a ton more holidays than us anyways.

Wednesday was an interesting change of plans, and Thursday I went to Utah, fixed a system, and came back.  Let’s just say it was a long day.  :)  Thankfully it was a very successful trip.

Between Wed and Friday I probably spent upwards of 12 hours on the phone for business – that’s in addition to the flights to Utah and back (4 hours each) and several hours at a customer’s site.  So if I talked to you, and was a little short, sorry about that.

Now the question is “What to do with 3 days?!”  I’ve got a lot of things that need done around the house, and several things I’d like to work on with my website, not to mention a family that definitely needs some attention.  Plus it seems like it’s been awhile since I’ve had this much time to do stuff besides work. 

Anyways, pictures coming soon.  Have a good holiday weekend, or if you’re working Monday, well, I won’t be. 

I finally got the WordPress software (that I use to publish this website) installed on my local computer.  It’s in a nice sandbox, so I can turn it on whenever I want.  The issues I ran into were mostly permission-based errors, so I’m going to be learning more about setting and managing permissions.

Full write-up will come later.  The good news is, I can now test changes without subjecting you, my imaginary readers ;), to being the guinea-pigs!

It’s worth noting that command-line-use really makes things easy – if you already know what you’re doing!  If you don’t , welll…..

Work has gotten realllly busy.  I’ll be back blogging this weekend.  Posting may be a little light until then, but rest assured some interesting content is coming up.

Upcoming posts:

• Ubuntu: How-Tos, WordPress and XAMPP setup, and screencast software reviews
• Puzzles: final n.nfshost.com hints, then on to new puzzles.
• WordPress: neat plug-ins, more Rubric theme, how to get help when you need it
• Personal: Pictures, kitchen update, maybe some video
• Other: who knows?

Come back this weekend for great stuff! 

So I found what looked like some good instructions for setting up a WordPress (WP) sandbox on your local Ubuntu machine.  Unfortunately, the instructions I found are only good if you DON’T SCREW ANYTHING UP AT ALL.

That includes if, before you found the instructions, you had already tried some other instructions and sort of already maybe done some of the stuff (looks innocently away…)

I would provide helpful tips on how to recover here, but I haven’t quite figured it out yet myself.  What seems to be the key, though, is to get MySQL set up properly, then don’t mess with it and DEFINITELY don’t delete it and try to start over without fully cleaning up.

More to come once I figure out how to recover….

Seth reminds us why we get paid. This guy has quickly become one of my favorite bloggers in my RSS feed, even though the rest of my regular feeds are mostly very tech-heavy. Today he reminds us that the thorn in our side is the reason we get paid to do the job – puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

If you don’t think you deal with customers, remember that whoever you have to deliver results to is your customer. They may be internal (the manufacturing group, the sales group, the employees if you’re in HR), or they may be external, but either way they’re your customer. If you’ve got a difficult customer, well, that’s why you get paid the big bucks.

Google and Skype – interoperability a possibility?

Unfortunately, I share the concern of others that the wording is “explore”. I had hopes for a more aggressive position, but it’s too early in the relationship and the companies involved don’t want to ‘over-promise, under-deliver’.

Still, this means good things for all of us. For example, some of the IT folks in my company are quite hostile to Skype. I’m with them on this, as I don’t like all the resources it eats up, or other problems it causes. It’s not just my company that has a problem with this either.

On the other hand, I’m a big fan of Google Talk, and would like to see it used more. One really great way for it to grow is for it to inter-communicate with other IM clients / networks. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but think of it this way: I would like to use Google Talk instead of Gaim, Skype, etc. Unfortunately all my contacts are already on those other networks, so I either try to force them all to change (yeah right), run several clients (hello slow computer), or don’t get to use Google Talk because I don’t have friends on the network. If I could talk to the other networks through Google Talk, suddenly I can decide which client I prefer, and other people can choose something different that meets their needs, and we can still talk!

The other thing to note is that this announcement goes beyond the XMPP support Google already brought with GTalk’s introduction. Not only do they have a commitment to an open standard for IM (text chat), and not only are they helping define an open standard for voice / other interaction (Jingle), but now here’s another step towards real interoperability BETWEEN VOIP CLIENTS, WITHOUT THE ‘OLD’ PHONE NETWORK INVOLVED AT ALL.

Imagine a world where IM or VOIP is just like email or the telephone. It doesn’t matter if your friend uses Cingular or Verizon, you can still call her from your AT & T phone. It doesn’t matter if your business partner has an @comcast.com email, or an @mylastname.com email.

Speaking of which, along with my own domain, I have a new IM name: step@ransomedhome.com.  It’s mine, I own it, I can take it with me as long as I own my domain name.  So if you want to email or IM me, you can use the same contact information.  :)  See how great having an open IM network would be?!

Hopefully by the time you read this I will have uploaded the newly cleaned-up Rubric theme. Changes are minor:

• Vkaryl came to my rescue again and fixed the navigation issue on single post pages, which was due to a few missing styles in the stylesheet.
• extra images (not related to the theme currently) were removed.
• sidebar has been added to single post pages.

I’m really happy to have a widgetized Rubric theme.  There’s a lot of work to be done to get my blog set up exactly how I want it, but that’s part of the fun too (at least for a geek like me). 

What do you think? Do you like it? Is it too complicated? What information do you want easily available on the front page. I’m all ears.