Tag Archives: tbbs

Not Even a Power Outage Deters Me

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The power was out at tbbs WorldHQ when I got home from work tonight. We’ve been fortunate to have had few, and short outages in the 12+ years we’ve been in this house. Since we’re all-electric, I’d call it doubly fortunate. Tonight, MLB and I tried out the newly-opened Santini’s New York Style Deli around the corner while waiting for the ever vigilant Dominion Virginia linemen to restore service.

While we were sipping our beers, and waiting for her hot pastrami and my calzone1 to be delivered to our table, my cell phone rang, and the autobot voice of Dominion Virginia reassured me that our power had been restored. Turns out, according to the autobot voice, that the “foreign object in the wires”2 had been handled, and a several square block outage was over.

We ate leisurely, came home to a well-lit house. On firing up the laptop, I noticed that WordPress 2.7 is available. Hmm, I’m tired, really not in the mood, but WTF?.

Another painless, straightforward upgrade, and we’re flying WP 2.7.

With the lights on, too.

Thanks, WordPress!

-k-

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1 Both very good, by the way

2 I hope it was a squirrel; good riddance to another tree rat.

Christmas Header Graphic

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When ya’ got nothing to say, you metablog. But check out the beautiful new header graphic of the Kansas City Plaza, decked out it all its Christmas finery. The graphic is from John Ong, who made it available via Creative Commons licensing.

I’m grateful for all those with talents who are willing to share the fruits of their labor. I’m also thankful that my ham-fisted Gimp skills didn’t overly damage the beauty of John’s magnificent photo.

Thanks, John!

-k-

You can view the header graphic history of this old blog by clicking that “Headers” thingy up top.

We Interrupt this Upgrade, to Bring you an Upgrade

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I got home tonight, all a-tingle about the prospect of upgrading at least one of my home boxes to Fedora 10, the official version of which shipped today.

My last “yum update” of the Fedora 10 beta was underway, when I noticed that version 2.6.5 of WordPress was available. A quick ssh out to the tbbs site, and we’re now flying the WordPress 2.6.5 flag high and proud.

OK, then. Now for some Fedora goodness. Night geekage begets more night geekage.

And, the WP upgrade was the usual effortless affair.

-k-

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Happy Blog B’day, #3

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And how the internet time flies, not unlike the time in the non-digital world. Three years ago, this old blog went live on the series of tubes1.

As is the ritual at times like these, the statistics from the WP Dashboard at this juncture are:

You have 1,513 posts, 8 pages, contained within 2 categories and 265 tags. You have 747 total comments, 737 approved, 10 spam and 0 awaiting moderation.

I’ve enjoyed the ride, and the domain and hosting being paid into aught-nine sometime, y’all keep coming back for your daily dose of drollery. OK? We never close.

-k-

H/T for the graphics: foamcow, via the Flickr. Love the penguins!

And, for the platform and plumbing: WordPress, Akismet, Scribe Fire, and HostMySite. We’ll be doing more bidness in year 4!

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1 Not to be confused with the series of cubes, wherein the originator of that phrase will be doing 5 to 10, if there’s any justice at all.

Cloud Funnies

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I have my WordPress TagCloud widget set to display the most popular tags in a random order. By so doing, I realized that there was a possibility that certain tags could be placed side-by-side in ironic, cute, or possibly even ribald combinations.

While checking out the tbbs front page a while ago, I noticed these tag juxtapositions:

  • Unix cars
  • geek CountryMusic
  • Racing commute
  • Congress goofy
  • wordpress Eats Fedora
  • RIP Life

Those should cover the ironic and cute. The wordpress line may get a little rise on the ribald scale, if one is of a sufficiently twisted mind.

Maybe I have the makings of another series of posts, like my Punchlines series.

It’s handy to have fall back fodder for those times when I have nothing to say. Which is a lot of times.

-k-

Autumnal Header Graphic

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tbbs is graced by the photographic expertise of WSK_2005, aka Shawn Kinkade who got this beautiful shot of autumnal foliage at the Kansas City Zoo.

More importantly, Shawn made the work available under a Creative Commons license with the “free to remix” clause active.

I trust that my limited Gimp skills didn’t detract too much from the magnificence of the photo.

Thanks, Shawn!
-k-

Writing on the Wall

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On a whim, about a month or so ago, I installed the WP Wall plugin and widget. The widget sits in the right sidebar over there. From the plugin author’s site, WP Wall provides this:

Readers can add a quick comment about the blog as a whole, and the comment will appear in the sidebar immediately (without reloading the page).

There’s a “Guestbook” page tab up top there; the guestbook collects all the Wall writings. And today, the Wall got its first writing, from family friend and all-round good guy James, who asked a question for the ages:

“What the hell is this? ”

I’m sure James’ question is applicable to many things in the world today, and I’m equally sure I have no good answers. In the context in which it was asked, I hope I’ve served to enlighten.

-k-

Slickness is Slick

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As documented here, I activated the heretofore unnoticed Automatically discard spam comments on posts older than a month checkbox in the Akismet WordPress plugin.

A month or so in, and my spam trap went from ginormous1 to next to none. And I can much more easily find any false positives that make it into the spam trap2.

The only downside is that the Akismet Badge at the bottom doesn’t roll up the “spam trapped” numbers like it used to. It would be nice if the web mavens at Akismet would have a second number in the badge, an “auto flush” counter, for lack of a better term.

Even in the absence of that, this Akismet feature has been a win-win. Less spam that I even see, and comments are left open, so that anyone with something to say can still say it if they are so inclined.

Thanks, Akismet!

-k-

1 For a little five and dime blog like this.

2 There have been only a handful of those, in my entire history of using Akismet.

Sometimes, Things Work out Right

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tbbs-land was sans internet and land-line phones last week, starting on Wednesday, as our usually reliable Verizon FiOS service went dark. Our cellphones and Sprint Wireless Broadband card got a workout, so it wasn’t like we were totally off the grid.

Preferring to consult a proctologist named Dr. Hook than talk on the phone to Verizon Customer Service, I opened a repair request via the Verizon support website. MLB, not being averse to calling support lines, followed up with a phone call. On Thursday, someone from Verizon called, and walked me through some troubleshooting steps; take the battery out of the inside box, reset the power, and then he performed a line test. As eager as the Verizon tech was to help, the line test wasn’t successful, and he scheduled a technician for a house call last Saturday afternoon. After checking the system, he determined a cable between the house and the pedestal had been cut, replaced same, and we were back on the air.

I told him that there had been gardeners landscapers out back on Wednesday, and they could have severed the cable. I also mentioned that I’d never thought the cable had been buried deeply enough. His response was that it’s more economical for Verizon to replace cables when needed than to bury them deeper. Anyhow, we were dialing the phone, surfing the internets at FiOS speed, even though the cable is now above ground. Someone is supposed to be out here in a week or so, to commit it to another shallow grave. MLB will ride herd on them to make sure that happens.

After he left, I thought about Dominion Power, who provides our electrical service, on an all we care to pay for plan. When the power is out, Dominion is Johnny on the Spot to get us back and powered. This is because when the meter isn’t spinning, they aren’t getting any money from us. Contrast that with Verizon, with whom we have an all you can eat plan for phone and internet. When we’re off their grid, they’re still getting paid, and we have no service. The thought of that almost prompted me to call Verizon and ask for a credit for the days we had no service, but talking to Verizon billing is 10X the agony of calling support. Dr. Rusty Hook, if you will. So I let it go.

Tonight, there was a voice mail from Verizon. It said that my service had been restored, they were profoundly sorry that we’d been without service for such a long time, and that our next bill would reflect a credit for the days we were out of service. Right on! I’m sure that Verizon’s perception of how long we were out will be shorter than mine, but that’s OK. Remember Dr. Rusty Hook.

Sometimes, things just work out, and I’ll take whatever credit they provide.

-k-