Month: November 2004

LazyWeb Request: Need Firefox 1.0 Help

Upgraded from Firefox .9 to 1.0 a couple days ago. After updating all my extensions and getting my skin up to date, things are running along nice and smooth.

But somebody out there has to be able to help me with this. When I used to click on external links (say a link in an e-mail message or a link in a document) it used to open a new Firefox window. Now it uses the same window, which I don’t want it to do because I’ll sometimes lose stuff I’m working on. Is there any way to make links coming from external sources open in a new window, or even a new tab?

November 16, 2004

How Does Your Network Rate?

Post your network diagram here, and have it rated. So far, as of this writing, these are the top large, small, and home networks.

November 16, 2004

Bend Has a Segway Dealer

I asked yesterday if Bend had a Segway dealer, after reading an article and seeing it on their site. Barney did some digging, and a story about the local dealership is now on Bend.com. And he said he didn’t kill himself riding it, so if Barney can do it, than anybody can (joking, Barn).

November 15, 2004

Bend Blogger Meetup & Symphony Concerts

Busy week this week for events. The McMenamins Old St. Francis School here is Bend is having their grand opening on Thursday, Nov. 18 (actually, it’s the 19th and 20th as well, and they’re actually doing a “soft launch” tomorrow). Some local bloggers are planning a meetup there on Thursday at 7:00PM. Jon, Simone, Shannon and Dane (assuming he’s productive and beats his deadlines) should all be there, but we’d love to have more locals!

I won’t be able to make it as I’m busy as heck with other obligations all week. I have rehearsals for three Central Oregon Symphony concerts this weekend. We’re playing a planetary series with Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 (“Jupiter”) and Holst’s The Planets suite. It’s going to be a dang good show. If anybody wants tickets, do let me know. The tickets are free, but they’re hard to come buy, but I can probably get ahold of some for you. And there’s free snacks, drinks, and munchies during intermission, so that’s never a bad thing, right? Just make sure that you say “Hi” (you’ll probably just barely see my head at the concert, as I’m a percussionist).

Coming up in a couple weeks is a concert I have with the Cascade Winds Symphonic Band. That’s going to be a great show with tons of great percussion and music, so stay tuned for more details on that one.

November 15, 2004

If You’re Going to Pirate Music…

…do you look like this guy while doing it? I doubt it.

November 15, 2004

People Is Dumb

How many head-butts does it take to break open a watermelon? Apparently 31. Idiots.

November 15, 2004

Cleaning House

Last night I went through and got rid of every remnant of the “utterlyboring.com/blog/archives/xxxxxx.php” addresses from this site’s archives, replacing them with their current, more useful (though sometimes longer) URLs. I had a pile (nearly 1300) statements like this in my .htaccess file for this site:

Redirect Permanent /blog/archives/001275.php http://utterlyboring.com/archives/2003/12/22/thing_may_break_for_a_bit.php

I’ve long since quit using the “/blog” subdirectory here, because I realized that I’m never really going to put anything else here other than the blog, so there’s no sense for subdirectories. (The original reason for the subdirectory was because this site was hosted under jakeortman.com, and I had my resume, portfolio, etc… on here, so subdirectories were needed.)

So I had those redirects in place since I did a massive rebuild nearly a year ago. Now I’m getting rid of those redirects now that there’s no remnants of them anywhere on my site, and if there are old bookmarks to them at this point, oh flippin’ well. The entries are old, and Google’s long since picked up the proper URLs, and now that I’ve gotten my 404 page to work with dynamic publishing (thanks to this article), I just hope people are smart enough to use a search form.

I also got rid of my RSS 1.0 feed, and made an .htaccess redirect to the RSS 2.0 feed (whose location has changed as well to www.utterlyboring.com/index.rss). If this buggers up your feed readers, let me know, but I have setup .htaccess redirects for all the various addresses (FeedDemon got the redirect, and immediately started reading from the new address, changing its settings — man, that’s slick). I just didn’t see the need for two RSS feeds and an Atom feed.

That gives me one less index template to rebuild upon posting, as well. So that makes it so that my RSS 2.0, Atom, Main Index, Main Archive, and Left Column Archive and Stats (up on the right column of this page) are the only index templates getting rebuilt on posting, and the individual entry’s page is getting built for that entry as well. Otherwise, everything else is getting built dynamically and cached with MT 3.0’s dynamic templates, making posting and rebuilds fly right along (much more so than before).

Long time readers of this site (and I’m talking REALLY long time readers) know that this site had a stage for a few months where there was no posting. While the archives here date back to Nov. 2002, I’ve been posting on this site for longer than that. The problem was that I had a problem with my server at my previous host combined with an early 2.x build of MovableType that I didn’t know how to use. Being an idiot, I didn’t back up, so I lost several months worth of posts, and I got too busy in my new job to do anything about it. I thought the entries were gone.

Then Barney and I were discussing the Web archive, and I thought to myself “Wait a minute, I betcha they have those old posts.” and sure enough, they did. Granted, I posted for a couple weeks then, but it was several posts a day. So expect those to be copied/pasted as entries into this system as time allows.

So expect more random crap to show up on this site on a future date. It’ll be dated, and some of the URLs won’t work, but I’ve put quite a bit into this site over the years, and there’s no sense on not having it all in one place.

November 15, 2004

Bend Has A Segway Dealer?

Tipped off by a Google Alert, I came across this story that said “Now, Segway is opening dealerships across the country — including a new one in Portland this week to boost the number to 67, including outlets that have already opened in Bend and Corvallis.” I thought to myself “We have a Segway dealership in Bend?” Sure enough, we do. It’s over in the Reed Market area, it looks like.

Looking up that address on Google, it appears that they sell Segways at Central Oregon Workensport. I might have to go down there and test drive one of these things, but I doubt they’ll sell too well here. Considering they run $3,000+ for the basic model, and Bend’s streets and sidewalks aren’t really well-designed for the machines, they’ll be lucky to make much money on them at all. And I’m sure they do really crappy in the snow and ice, meaning that you only have about three months of the year you can use it.

And on that above linked page, their phone number is in the 702 area code, which, last I checked, was Las Vegas, not Oregon.

Update on 11/15: Apparently East Safeway in Bend has them and is allowing you to test-drive them for 48 hours. I don’t think I could do it; It’s a $3,000 toy, and I know I’d break the thing and be forced to buy it.

November 14, 2004

No Wonder He’s Hiding

Osama’s penile implant is stuck in the “on” position.

Snapshots obtained by CIA operatives in Afghanistan show the terror kingpin looking sheepishly at a camera while covering his naughty bits with crossed hands, which the CIA source insists “is all for show because it’s a known fact that Osama has a teeny weenie and could have shielded himself with a pinkie.”

The source went on to note that Osama “is severely diabetic. According to our best intelligence, he got the implant in Saudi Arabia in November of 1999 to compensate for circulation problems that left him impotent at the height of his sizzling and well-publicized gay affair with Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein.”

November 14, 2004

Let’s Just Blame The African Americans

I’d never actually read Savage Love before, but it’s actually quite entertaining, and he gets some odd-ball letters. This one (and the response, both taken from here, bottom of the page) is absolutely priceless (if not a bit foul mouthed). Read on (oh, and thanks Barn for the link)…

(more…)

November 14, 2004