Monthly Archives: September 2007

NASCAR HotPass Lineup

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Those in the Chase for the Nextel Cup constitute the Hot Pass driver lineup for today’s running of the LifeLock 400 from Kansas Speedway. My little bride and I drove past the speedway a couple of years back; it’s a beautiful facility. I hope that my backside can grace one of the seats for a few hours of racin’ one of these years. Today, though, I have the teevee, and HotPass. And the lineup is:

795 – Martin Truex, Jr – #1
796 – Jeff Burton – #31
797 – Jeff Gordon – #24
798 – Denny Hamlin – #11
799 – Tony Stewart – #20

With 26 points separating the top six chasers, give that pigskin a break for a while this afternoon, and tune in, OK?

-k-
[stags]NASCAR,DirecTV,HotPass[/stags]

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Indulge Me

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I’m still pondering the fine points of WordPress 2.3 tagging. Or maybe I’ve not progressed to where I’m even entitled to contemplate the fine points.

If I have any regrets about my many years in information technology, it’s that I’m not as fluent in web apps, and the coding thereof, as I’d like. I can write some mean sysadmin related scripts, but a lot of PHP looks like line noise to me. And style sheets; man, I can take a beautiful theme, apply some of my artistic hacks, and wind up with something that looks like fingerpaint day at the pre-school.

Part of me wants to be the expert at everything, to be a sysadmin’s sysadmin, to have a blog that dazzles as much with its beauty as with its writing. I’ve got a leg up on the first one, and will chip away at the latter two. There will be bumps along the way; as my Dad would say “Stay in the buggy.”

-k-

[stags] PHP,sysadmin,wordpress[/stags]

Maybe for the Best

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I documented a couple of posts back, that my Red Hat training trip had been deferred until November. A couple of reasins for the decision were highlighted in that post.

As if to remove all doubt about the prudence of my decision to attend the class later, I woke up this morning with a sore, scratchy throat, the sneezes and sniffles, and the general malaise that accompanies a cold.

I’d rather be at home feeling sick than in Raleigh feeling sick.

So things work out in the end.

-k-

[stags]Raleigh, RedHat[/stags]

From the tbbs Mailbag, Personnel Files Edition

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From time to time, I share some funnies received via interweb mail-o-grams. There’s more than one grain of truth in this one:

HOW TO PROPERLY PLACE NEW EMPLOYEES

Put 400 bricks in a closed room. Put your new hires in the room and close the door. Leave them alone and come back after 6 hours.

Then analyze the situation:

1. If they are counting the bricks, put them in the Accounting Department.
2. If they are recounting them, put them in Auditing.
3. If they have messed up the whole place with the bricks, put them in Engineering.
4. If they are arranging the bricks in some strange order, put them in Planning.
5. If they are throwing the bricks at each other, put them in Operations.
6. If they are sleeping, put them in Security.
7. If they have broken the bricks into pieces, put them in Information Technology.
8. If they are sitting idle, put them in Human Resources.
9. If they say they have tried different combinations, & they are looking for more, yet not a brick has been moved, put them in Sales.
10. If they have already left for the day, put them in Estimating.
11. If they are staring out of the window, put them in Strategic Planning.
12. If they are talking to each other, and not a single brick has been moved, congratulate them and put them in Top Management.
13. Finally, if they have surrounded themselves with bricks in such a way that they can neither be seen nor heard, put them in Congress.

There should have been something about throwing bricks and actually hitting something, but that’s for another time.
-k-
[stags]humor[/stags]

Raleigh in November

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Sometimes plans turn on a dime. Mine took such a turn today; I’m not indispensable on the job site, but I feel obligated to stay and help my buds during the upcoming week. It wasn’t suggested by the higher-ups that I reschedule my class, but it seemed to me to be prudent.

So, I’ll be Raleigh bound in November, back to the Red Hat Mothership. With another month to bone up on things I’ll need to know for the RHCE exam.

And, in calling the LaQuinta to cancel my hotel for the upcoming week, I discovered that the confirmation number I had was not for me, and that the hotel had no record of my making a reservation for next week.

Probably a good thing all the way around. And I just made the November reservation myself, online.

-k-
[stags]work,RedHat,Raleigh[/stags]

Tagged

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Well, last night’s experiment was a qualified success. The Embedded Tag plugin can be made to coexist with Simple Tags; the prior post has functioning Technorati tags, and tbbs-local tags were dutifully added to the database and displayed.

Only two things concern me now; neither is the fault of the plugins, as near as I can tell:

  1. The tbbs-local tags do not appear in my Atom feed.
  2. The display of the tags on the site needs some cosmetic rearrangement1.

A very nice complement to the Embedded Tags plugin is the Tag Managing Thing, also from Christine from the Internet. It puts a “Tag” selection on the Management tab on the WP admin panel, and lets you delete, split, and merge tags.

So, all things considered, I’m a happy tag camper. I’ll post some nitty-gritty details tonight, time permitting.

-k-
[stags]tbbs,tags,wordpress[/stags]
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1 Wherein I’ll demonstrate my total ineptitude with appearance-related tweaking.

Taggin’

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In a continuing series of “Did this Work?” posts masquerading as content, I offer this one, whose sole purpose in blogdom is to test the efficacy of the Embedded Tag Thing plugin for WordPress 2.3.

Tags are a huge feature of WP 2.3, and I’m exploring. I already use the Simple Tags plugin for Technorati tags, and have determined that the two might not coexist well. So, I hacked up the former, and we’ll see how it goes.

-k-
[stags]tbbs,tags,geek[/stags]

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Goodbye SWMBO, Hello My Little Bride

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After almost two years of being referred to as SWMBO on this pixel torturing festival known as tbbs, SWMBO has come to the conclusion that being referred to as SWMBO makes her sound bitchy.

Henceforth, she shall be known as my little bride.

I’m sensitive like that.

-k-