Recently in blogging Category
(2) Director at work had his laptop crap out so I gave him mine. I'm trying to make due with an older laptop we used for security audits - it's old, slow, no bluetooth, one working USB, and not on the domain. I'm waiting for stuff to upgrade it.
Update: I imaged this flatiron today, added bluetooth, the domain, a new HDD, updates of a couple of types, various software needed for work...and I'm still working on it. Most of our laptops are being replaced, so I'll either be getting a new one soon, or a late-model hand-me-down.
Getting a lot of hits from Fort Huachuca, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center and the U.S. Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM)/9th Army Signal Command.
Hi Guys...
I saw this cartoon on the web and just about choked myself laughing. You've got to be a computer nerd to understand.
My home desktop has Crashed.
Normal Bootup Freezes
Safemode Bootup Freezes
ERD Commander Bootup Freezes
Installation Disk Bootup Freezes before it gets anywhere useful.
Even a bootable USB freezes.
It's looking like a complete rebuild.
Not tonight.
GenderAnalyzer - Determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman
77% Man. Must be those Guey M'Bonga jokes tipping my score.
Thanx Blob
...and typealyzer says I'm a Doer - that sounds about right.
Well it finally got unlocked and I pointed the DNS records for the-trainer.com away from NovaHosting to point at the DNS servers on 2mHost.
I then 'parked'* the old domain and redirected it to the new one.
Theoretically now, old links to the-trainer.com will eventually point to handgunowner.com. Takes a day or so to percolate thru the InterWeb.
*A parked domain is one where your registered domain name is resolved by the InterWeb to the DNS servers of an ISP but there are no services associated with it (like a site or email). The parked name can be redirected to point to a working website.
Update: That was quick...working.
Allied Armament Knob Creek Fastest Machine gun
He's a fan of SAA revolvers too. Guns and Music...what could be better. Here's some of his guns.
And some pics from a Gearhead/Rockabilly Concert he played in Asbury Park. Fashion. Tats. Tats. Tats. Tats.
the brimstones
By trainer on March 31, 2003 6:40 PM
It seems to me that we are missing something important in this coverage of this War in Iraq. Why would we expect mass surrender of the RG. They were never really engaged in the first Gulf War...they generally were destroyed in place, or beat it back to Baghdad.
From what I can see, the regular Iraqi forces have not put in an appearance in any organized way. Regular Divisions have surrendered or just gone home. Organized large-unit resistance is melting away.
...into organized small-unit resistance for the next 4 years.
Gun Stuff:
OK, it was a fight with the NICS check, but I finally got the SMLE MK1 III* to it's new home. The bore is amazingly clean and bright with sharp rifling. Apparently all metal parts, including what was under wood, was painted yellow a long while ago. The paint has faded to a dull brown. <i>A Cadet Rifle possibly?</i> What I thought was a patina of brown rust on the barrel turns out to be paint with a beautiful blue below.
Although it is a pain to take off, the paint protected the metal and there is a deep smooth blue under the paint. So far, no rust or even pitting that I can see.
As I remove paint, proofs and markings are coming to the surface. All the serial numbers match so far. 5 digits 18xxx with the suffix Z. It must have been renumbered, cuz I found a spot marked 2-228 with the 2-228 over struck with a 18xxx Z
I'm not sure where it was made yet as the only thing I've found is a Crown over GRI over crossed flags....hinting at British proofing at one time (the crossed flags are a British proofing mark). Another spot on the stock socket has No. 1 MKIII FR 40 struck in.( 1940?) As the paint comes off I hope to find more. I'm also going to need to buy a book on these. I've found several crowns, TTSH, 39, 98, NF, .303, and TONS stamped on the barrel. I also found a broad arrow -> which usually denotes British ownership.
A lot of work cleaning this old girl, but fun. She has been completely disassembled and all the small parts are soaking in thinner outside the back door...and I am scouring the Int3rw3b looking for information on markings.
OK, I'm going with Indian Ishapore manufacture (prior to independence) on this although I don't see any RFI (Rifle Factory Ishapore) markings. The broad arrow is in 3 places including the stock disk cut in the wood. The GRI stands for George Rex Imperiatus and was specific to SMLEs made in India.
The downtime with my ISP was the next-to-last straw.
The last straw was today when my ISP blanked out the blog when I went a bit over storage limits. I had to remove 2 years of archives to get back up.
I found a dedicated Movable Type ISP with 25 times the storage for 1/3 the money.
I registered www.handgunowner.com as well.
Sometime over the next month, I'll be moving the blog. I'll put a pointer up and keep trainer.com up for a while, but $90 a quarter for 60 megs wasn't doin' it for me. Now I'll have a site optimized for my blogging software, 1500 megs, for $24 a quarter.
That's the plan anyway...altho I'm sure I can fuck it up along the way.
That didn't take long. They lit up www.handgunowner.com within an hour. I copied the blog over there and it is showing up at www.handgunowner.com/blog.
It's not really working yet on the new site - it's just a replica of the old site, but it's a start
Apparently the upgrades at the ISP didn't work so well...seein' it took over 3 days to get the site back. He was complaining about a DOS (Denial of Service) attack that affected servers hosting upwards of 10,000 websites.
I call Bullshit. I fix stuff like this (and worse) for a living, and a complete rebuild starting from scratch wouldn't have taken that long.
Anyway....It isn't any faster either.
From my ISP who hosts Movable Type...
At our request, the last scheduled network upgrade for all servers and hosting
architecture has been postponed until this weekend starting late Friday evening
and ending well before noon on Saturday.
* Change Window Start Date: Friday, November 2, 2007 after 10 PM ET
* Change Window End Date: Saturday, November 3, 2007 before 12 PM ET
* Impact Type: All servers and services will be unavailable during this
change window
Cool
My ISP Comcast is increasing the size of webspace from 25MB to 1GB for each email address I have. I've got 5 email addresses that I really only use for the webspace, as graphics storage for the blog. Music and video I host from home using a router, IIS, and dynamic DNS. So I just went from 125MB (using up 75MB) to 5Gigs. Cool, better to have the video, et al, on Comcast rather than at home cuz their upload speed is faster.
My commercial site (where I host the basics of Movable Type) is 60MB. After 4 years of blogging I had to move 15MB of archives to my home server cuz I was running out of space. I have to host Movable Type there because the commercial site has Perl and SQL...which I don't have at home or at Comcast.
The site that hosts the-trainer.com has been throwing quota warnings at me so I removed individual 2003 and 2004 posts into long-term storage. Monthly categories are still there.
from Parker on a thread dis'ing Vista on Rachel Lukas
Actually, Vista uses ideas from:
Windows CE,
Windows ME,
and Windows NT.
They were getting ready to release it as:
Windows CEMENT - 'We made it really hard!'
It seems that I've got all of the bugs out of this...sorta at least.
Comment preview works now, and using Java for Sitemeter instead of HTML lets the pages rebuild now. It's still to be seen if the SiteMeter actually captures statistice, but at least it doesn't jam up the page. I'll find out in a minute if the Firefox blogging client works with it.
So far, so good.
It took a while.
I figured 'Hell, I'm a high-end techie, I don't need no stinkin' instructions'
I then destroyed the blog so bad I couldn't get back in to edit or fix it.
I reinstalled one of the 3.x versions to get access piece by piece using FTP.
I then followed the directions.
I now have Movable Type 4.0
Then it wouldn't rebuild until I took out SiteMeter....
So no site info for the time being....
Then when it finally did rebuild, it maxed out the available space on my Movable Type server because it archived not only individual entries, as I want, but also daily and weekly entries by default...about another 20 megs of archives I don't need.
So I got rid of them and found where these unwanted configs were buried in the program and got rid of them.
I'm also thinking of moving my archives to the local machine I use as a picture dump. That would save 30megs of space on the MovableType server.
Before I do that I've lots of other things to tweak. Archives are acting squirrelly anyway, I don't know how the comments will work, and I just need to spend some time playing with it.
Believe it or not, but this blog takes now up 55 megs on a server hosted by an ISP (and that doesn't include the 1.41 Gigs of music, pictures, et al, that can be accessed on a local server that I use as a data dump for the blog). More than 30 megs on the commercial server are archives. I only buy 60megs on his servers.
Something needs to be done, I reckon, but i'm already spending $85 a quarter to host this hobby. That's $85 a quarter I can't spend on ammo.
Now it lets you make comments, and apparently html tags work, and it previews...but the preview window is tiny and the comments post but appear to the commenter that they hang. Be afraid, be very afraid.
Update: I've gotten the comment preview screen to show something larger than a postage stamp, and I've put sitemeter back on altho it still throws errors when I rebuild the blog...I've got an email into the sitemeter people. We'll see how this goes. I also see that the Firefox blogging software isn't quite compatible.
Well the sitemeter tag is a serious problem. The individual entries won't update with new material, new pages won't appear on the blog, and the archives get frozen in place with no apparent updates. That tag has to go.
The Vagina Mono-Blogs?
Amy Alkon dismisses Ellen Goodman's "whining"
about male dominance of the political blogosphere, where old boy
presumably only links to other old boys and the supposedly progressive
netroots are white and male. "I don't want people reading my blog
because I'm a girl, but because they think I have something to say."
follow-up PBS program on the topic of women in the blogosphere - which
doesn't include any women bloggers. "What do I look like, a friggin'
lab rat who needs someone to speak for me?"
Let's see. On my sidebar I've got
eNough (French Ladies)
View From the Porch
The Ten Ring
The Liberty Belles
The 2nd Amendment Sisters
Hot Air
Michelle Malkin
Rachel Lukas
Fug Ugly
Baldilocks
Boston Maggie
A Swift Kick
Seems like the smooth-legs are pretty well represented on the Blogosphere to me.
And on that note...with meager appologies to the feminazis.
I mean really, really stupid.
Only moonbats could come up with something like this.
I am reminded of the classic movie 'Blazing Saddles' where the late Cleavon Little* as the gunfighter Bart holds himself hostage with a gun to his own head..."Hold it! Next man makes a move, the nigger gets it! "
*He died of colon cancer at the age of 53. What a waste of a great career.
...and I found the runner's-up on Ace's sidebar.
It is time to think about the "unthinkable."
The Bush Administration has both the inclination and the power to cancel the 2008 election.
As sure as God made little green apples, I think these people are sinking deeper into the morass of mental illness while we watch. It's like watching a field of soy beans growing before your eyes.
Alaa, a longtime Iraqi blogger who has shown evenhanded criticism of the US, his own Iraqi government, and the insurgents, has landed in Canada with his family. Of course he's an engineer, and engineers are known to be very intelligent, handsome, and all around good guys.
He's a bit surprised by Canadian opinions on Iraq.
I am encountering great misunderstanding of the situation in Iraq here in Canada. In a small way and as much as possible, I try to correct the misconceptions of people I happen to encounter, but I feel that a more serious effort is required. Perhaps when I settle down more firmly I can do more serious work to enlighten people about the real facts.
He's going to need to study up on how to talk Canukistan.
The Mesopotamian is excited and hopeful, but I hope he realizes he's going to need to learn some new words...like "brewski", "hoser", "eh!", etc.
Dress warm, hoser, eh!
Changes be a'comin', again.
I like the gray and the java tabs. The content area seems easy to read and easy on the eyes. I just need to think how to punch up the look a little bit.
When you follow certain blogs for years, you can rejoice or despair over the joys or jolts your e-friends are getting hit with.
Mike Hendrix from Cold Fury lost his young wife to a motorcycle accident this past Friday. I especially remember Mike changing his logo to add in lovely Christiana. This is so sad.
The Internet hosting company I use seems to be having some trouble.
Bummer....
Working on setting up Javascript Tabs for the sidebar.
Pretty cool. I'm pushing the envelope a bit to see what I can get away with. Things might look weird now and then.
Update:
OK, that's pretty cool. Keeps the sidebar nice and clean...altho I'll probably be tweaking what's under each of the tabs.
Not difficult at all either.
You get your necessaries from this site: http://www.barelyfitz.com/projects/tabber/
(1) you copy the tabber.js up to your server. In Movable type there is a 'js' directory under mt-static/ so that's where I pointed to it.
(2) you copy and paste the 'example.css' to the bottom of the stylesheet you are using for your site.
(3) Somewhere between (head) and (/head) on your site's main template you call the java script: Note the path is to where I put it...and the '< and >' are replaced with '( and )' so they would show up on this page.
(script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.the-trainer.com/mt/mt-static/js/tabber.js")
(script type="text/javascript")
(/script)
(4) You nest your content between the tabber tags: Note that the class 'tabber' has the individual content classes of 'tabbertab' nested inside it. You choose which content class to be the default that shows up when people attach to your site...and that's it.
(div class="tabber")
(div class="tabbertab tabbertabdefault" title="Email")
Content1
(/div)
(div class="tabbertab" title="Blogroll")
Content2
(/div)
(div class="tabbertab" title="Recent")
Content3
(/div)
(/div)
It looks like this:
Content1
Content2
Content3
(5) If you want something other than the default 'example.css' for the look of your tabs, you can go to this site and get different looks for your stylesheet.
http://css.maxdesign.com.au/listamatic/
The 'example.css' can always be tweaked also if you've got a bit of skill in this. I found I could fit 4 tabs on my side bar, and I'm sure there is a way to get more on there and still look good, but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Time to change the look of the blog.
I really like the look of this reactionary...he is a serious pro at weblog design though. It's got a pretty sweet look.
It would help, of course, if I wasn't somewhat color blind. Well, grey is a color too.
Interruptions are likely, colors will be psychotic, eventually I'll be satisfied....
Update 1: Ok, got it back to basics. Gotta love those style-sheets. Tweaking will commence, and I've got to think about a new banner. Of course I'm at work doing this all during and between conference calls. Next one at 3pm and the last should be at 3:45. Don't know if I'll get to it tonight - we are watching my 16 year old grand-daughter (like hawks)...New Hope PA yesterday, the boardwalk tonight, a movie probably tomorrow, picnic and fireworks the day after, and by then we'll have a plan for Thurs and Fri nights. As well as the fact I could be easily sent off to Foster-Wheeler to do a job; another 2 hour drive each way.
Update2: Fonts are something of a pain cuz at work I'm looking at them on a laptop. I'm going with Georgia with Verdana as a backup. Sizing and the look of the font can't be checked until I get home. Sorry if it sucks.
Update 3: I'll be working on the logo's until I get one that I want. This one is a temp to hold the space for a while.
Final Update: It looks like ass. I'll be tweaking away for a while.
