Category: Site Info

Update on 6/27: The Contest Is Over! Thanks to all those who played! Answers are below. Winners have been sent invites.

OK, I’ve got 10 Gmail Invites to get rid of. You want ’em? Here’s the deal. I have one of those Jeopardy desk calendars that has a bunch of questions on it. I always forget about the calendar, and am always behind several days on turning pages on it.

So here’s what I’m going to do: I’m going to run a trivia contest using questions from that calendar. Answers are to be submitted via e-mail to utterlyboring [at] gmail [dot] com.

Questions (or answers, since this is Jeopardy) are below. The category for the answers are in bold preceding the question. You get a point for answering a question right, and a bonus point if you link to this post on your blog (let me know via your answer e-mail if you’d linked, or send a TrackBack ping to this post).

The Deadline For Submissions is Sunday 6/27 @ Noon Pacific Time. Remember that all “answers” must be in the form of a question, or you won’t get the point. The winner will get three invites, second place gets two, and the other five to go to three, four, five, six and seventh place.

These are either Double or Final Jeopardy answers, so they’re not too easy (though you could probably find them on Google).

Update: If there’s a tie, I will send around a tie-breaker question — or 10 :-).

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My nightly e-mails of headlines for this site haven’t been going out the last few nights after I tried upgrading to Dada 2.8.13. It didn’t work well at all, butchering the installs I had not only on this site but another one as well. I’ve reverted back to 2.8.12, and everything works fine. Go figure. So feel free to sign up on the mailing list to get headlines from this site sent your direction every night.

Just a heads up that I’ll probably be installing the Movable Type 3.0 beta on this site within the next few days so if things start going weird, you’ll know why :-). I, unfortunately, wasn’t in the first (closed) round of testing (like they said I was going to be — I never got a confirmation email back) but I did get the email for this round and will be downloading it later today.

Forgot to mention this yesterday as I got too busy, but Barney, the occasional copy editor and frequent link contributor of this site and full-time reporter over at Bend.com turned 48 yesterday. So feel free to e-mail him at barney[funny “a” sign]bend.com, and wish him a happy b-day!

My host moved their servers to a better datacenter last night, and it didn’t go as smoothly as planned, so the site is just now back up this morning. Everything should be working fine, but if you see anything that’s not working quite right, let me know.

If you want to get your Yahoo! NCAA Pick ’em picks in, you’ve got 30 minutes to do so. And if you sign up, feel free to join my group. Group ID: “92718”. Password: “ub”, and we can see who’s good at randomly guessing and pretending to know what they’re doing (I know it’s probably not me).

Update: Too late to get the pick ’ems in, but if you’ve already done it, feel free to join my group and see who gets bragging rights :-).

OK, DNS issues resolved, and now I’ve got my own server with root access, and things are running smooth (hopefully). I’m going to be manually putting in a few of the comments that were posted on the old site, but if you’re reading this, than the transfer worked.

Still need to work out a few bugs with my Dada install, as that never likes transferring properly, but otherwise, things are working dandy, and I love having root access 🙂

Update: Mailing list working again, writing up a goodbye letter to previous host as we speak. Regular blogging to continue as soon as I get a free few minutes and can clean my inbox out.

Update on 3/9: In case your curious as to the full reason why I left my previous host, here is a post on their forums. But so far, the site loads quicker and things run better. We’ll just have to see how things go. I’ve got my Dada mail installed and working right, but haven’t gotten the scheduler back up and running yet, so that’s on the to-do list for today (thanks to Bailey for helping me set that up).

Just a quick announcement. I’m going to be moving this site, as well as several others, to my new host and server this weekend. More than likely, I won’t be posting much at all until I made the move to the new server, hopefully on Sunday. I’ll keep you posted.

OK, this site is starting to push the limit of what my shared host can do, and they’re requiring me to move to a dedicated server, starting at $150/month — which I can’t afford. And I was going to go with these guys, but in the week I last checked on them, most of their VPS accounts are gone. Lovely…

I’ve got an e-mail into the folks at Dinix (which is run by former execs at my current host) to see what they have to say, and I plan on tweaking the templates and turning off anything unnecessary for this site as soon as possible to lessen the CPU load on the server (it really doesn’t help that MovableType is a bit of a processor hog).

In the meantime, does anybody have a dedicated box just sitting somewhere that could host this site until I can afford a dedicated box? Or does somebody have a crap-load of money they’d like to donate? Hopefully I won’t have to take this site down, but if I can’t round up SOMETHING soon, then it might have to come down while I figure out something.

I’ll keep you posted.

Update on 3/4: Talked to my Web host, as well as the folks at the potential new host. The new host is going to get more VPS servers today, and will e-mail me when they get some.

But for the folks in the comments who were asking for raw stats, here were my Webalizer stats for last month:

Hits: 2368587

Files: 1368094

Pages: 65380

Visits: 22917

KB: 10988373

So my bandwidth isn’t excessively high, it’s my hits, claims my host. Yes, 2-mill is a good pile of hits, but most of that is little small graphics on each page, as well as external calls to various files. In other words, all things considered, it could be a lot worse. And a lot of folks were linking to my images directly, causing me to implement link protection (though it doesn’t work all that great sometimes). But every time an image gets blocked, it still sends a hit through to the logs, and a hit gets counted, despite the fact that only a minimal amount of HTTP headers is getting sent.

They said it wasn’t a particular script or anything that caused them to decide to move me, and they couldn’t really tell me the exact reason for the move, other than the hits issue. Regardless, I’m still planning on doing some tweaks to this template, hopefully speed things up a bit, make rebuilds and comments faster, etc… . I’ve already made PHP includes out of most of my stuff (there are very few MT include tags, if any, on this site, and I’m using MT tags as little as possible), and I’m using the MySQL-version of MT. I’m going to make fewer entries show up on the front page, as well as tweaking my archive options, and probably remove the random quote thingy for now. I’m probably going to tweak my front page a bit to cater towards the shorter entries I generally post, but we’ll have to see how that will work.

Hell, maybe I’ll just revert back to the default MT templates, and start using a kick-ass stylesheet, and maybe that will help things along.

But I will keep everybody here posted as to what’s going on.

Update again: I’ve redone the template, and removed a lot of the extra crap. No more stats bit, no more random quote, replaced or got rid of EVERY graphic file on the page, other than the logo, moved some stuff around, got rid of weekly archives, so things should go fine for now. I’ll update my helpdesk ticket to see if this will keep them at bay for a while until I can get things moved.