We’re baa-aaack..
Posted by rae in family
at 12:30 pm on Sunday, 26 December 2004
at 12:30 pm on Sunday, 26 December 2004
Got back around 1:40am last night from a week-long vacation in the Dominican Republic.
Wow, what a change, from sunny beaches and humidity to the dry snow and ice of home.
You can see all of our pictures by clicking on Luisa to the right there, or visiting
2004-12-20-dominican.
Merry Christmas!
Comments have been disabled
Posted by rae in web site
at 1:18 pm on Wednesday, 15 December 2004
Due to a huge influx of comment spam, I have disabled comments on tnir.
This affects all blogs hosted on tnir, including Luisa’s and David’s.
If you try to post a ccomment, it will let you type it in, but when you click “post” it will give you some sort of “forbidden” error.
I should be able to do something about this (likely moving to WordPress) after Christmas.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
If you have your own blog, you can use
trackback pings
which will show up on my blog pages looking very similar to a comment.
The thing about trackback pings is that I can’t find anywhere in the MT config where you can set the length of the text for a trackback ping.
I would like to send the entire entry text rather than just an excerpt.
Ah well.
If someone could do a trackback ping-posting for this entry to show people what it looks like, that would be great. at 1:18 pm on Wednesday, 15 December 2004
Update:It seems that Harald is having the same problem. He referenced a site that goes on in some detail about the issue. So, it’s not just me. Hrm.
Targetted advertising
Posted by rae in the Net
at 9:59 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
at 9:59 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
I have to say I am impressed by
suprnova.org’s
advertising.
They always show me “local” ads, aimed at Canadian users.
But today it was an ad for the Toronto area!
Yes, I know it looks like I am suddenly putting advertising on my blog,
but actually, I was just shocked and wanted to share the ad with you, complete with link.
Of course, now this image is going to trail down over the entries below. Oh well.
comment spam ramping up for the holidays
Posted by rae in web site
at 9:21 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
I usually delete about 20 to 40 pieces of comment spam each morning from all the tnir-hosted Movable Type blogs.
Today it was 122.
So now I’m thinking I need to do *something* about it.
I could either upgrade to
Movable Type 3,
which I believe has comment moderation built-in, or move to
WordPress,
which has its own spam moderation tools (à la
Harald).
I’ve been wanting to move to WordPress for some time,
hwever I think Luisa will kill me if I spend time on switching my blog over to another system at this particular point in time.
So perhaps I will just upgrade Movable Type.
On the other hand, such an upgrade would have an impact on all the blogs on tnir that make use of Movable Type.
Hmmm, maybe I will just allow spam to accumulate for a few days while I am not around.
Hmm.
at 9:21 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
iTunes – MIA
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 8:27 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
Went to the iTunes Music Store last night, looking for music Luisa and I were talking about with the kids.
Stuff like Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.
It wasn’t there.
There were lots of other ‘Floyd albums, but not the top, number one album of my high school years.
Okay then, I decided to check for the other main topic of discussion on the way home from Thorold — “Tubular Bells”.
No there either.
So, Like Laura, I am a bit disappointed by the selection available.
Alas.
at 8:27 am on Monday, 13 December 2004
Babylon 5 movie?
Posted by rae in entertainment
at 1:26 pm on Thursday, 9 December 2004
at 1:26 pm on Thursday, 9 December 2004
Babylon 5
“The only thing I can say is that phase one of the new project is a go, hence the furious writing schedule at this end of things… I’ve been writing my little brains out. I wouldn’t go on about something in this way if it wasn’t a significant development.” “The loss of Richard Biggs kind of took the wind out of our sails and it’s taken a while for me to feel up to saying anything about B5. This has also had the effect of slowing up anything to do with B5:TMoS (which as some of you have guessed or inferred does indeed stand for The Memory of Shadows), because in the writing we/I never imagined he wouldn’t be here to be a part of it.”
Snow, snow, snow
Posted by rae in family
at 1:10 am on Tuesday, 7 December 2004
at 1:10 am on Tuesday, 7 December 2004
Our first big snow
I did
take some pictures and movies
though.
Click the small pic to the right to see a panorama of the front yard.
Domain changes..
Posted by rae in web site
at 4:43 pm on Sunday, 5 December 2004
As promised in
an earlier posting,
tnir.org is acting poorly today.
I finally managed to get it and gmone.org transferred from
register.com
to dotster.com,
and managed to screw up the settings on dotster (my fault!).
In the section where you say things like “rae.tnir.org is an alias for tnir.org” I managed to actually say “tnir.org is an alias for rae.tnir.org”.
Since “rae.tnir.org” doesn’t have an IP address set up for it, of course this means that tnir.org is FUBAR.
*sigh, I’ve fixed it, but it takes time for these changes to propogate.
Hopefully it will only acffect things this afternoon.
We shall see.
Until everything is sorted, you can use
rae.zorrodev.com,
as mentioned in that previous post.
But then, if you’re seeing this it’s not very helpful to point this out, is it? at 4:43 pm on Sunday, 5 December 2004
ReidNews radio show
I’ve been listening to Adam Curry’s “Daily Source Code” podcast for a couple of months now. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to do, and in fact, Iain and I tried to record an iChat voice conversation of this sort in October of 2003. You can listen to an AAC of the result (6 MB; let me know if you want mp3), but it’s mixed at best. I even hand-edited it to bring up the volume of Iain’s voice, but it wasn’t wildly successful. I recorded a “ReidNews” podcast (1.7 MB) recently, just before Luisa’s birthday. It was another experiment, using a microphone I had recently found. I wasn’t thrilled with the quality of that, either. However, after Luisa opened her presents, I tried one of them out with surprising results! I gave her the computer upgrade, and the boys gave her an mp3 player, the 256MB iRiver 790, which does voice recording. I tried it out and was happily surprised with how they came out: [1] (40k) [2] (66k). My ideal would be to record a conversation about interesting topics, edit it a bit (adding intro, music bits etc), and post the results. Let me know if you’re interested in trying this. One possibility is to use something llike iChat/AIM to voice chat, but *also* record locally at high quality. That would be a bit tough, since the live chat would have latency, while the high-quality mix would not, so a nip or tuck here and there might be neccessitated. The Skype team tried this with some success.Woo, we’re back!
Posted by rae in web site
at 5:29 pm on Friday, 3 December 2004
For some reason our DSL line decided to refuse my password.
I waited a bit, as these things often clear up in a few hours, but this went all days yesterday.
So this morning I tried to phone, without success (line always busy).
Finally, I got Luisa to send support email with my account name, specifying that I had recently renewed, so it might be an accounting error.
I tried off and on all day and it just came back up right now.
Well, it might have been any time in the last couple of hours since my last attempt.
Apologies to all who keep things on tnir and couldn’t access them.
at 5:29 pm on Friday, 3 December 2004