Category: Site Info

There Just Needs To Be An Extra 12 Hours In A Day

Or I just need to quit sleeping…

I have at least a dozen people who all want me to do computer work for them, and unfortunately I don’t have enough free time to do it. I totally wish I could help you all right now, but I have a day job that obviously has to come first. All of you, I’ll get to you eventually, I promise.

Priority #1 for me right now is to get everybody from my previous mailing list software into FeedBurner (there’s a new sign up form on the right of the page). Unfortunately, they don’t have an import function, so I’m forced to manually renter them one-by-one. I’m about two-thirds done. Update: All done — all folks on the list should’ve received a message to confirm they wanted to sign up. You can also use the sign up on the right side of the page.

Priority #2 will come tomorrow night when I take over the Web hosting for Jack Bog. We’re going to move his popular blog to a dedicated server tomorrow, and I want to make sure it goes perfect (and I’ve been planning and setting up for this for a while so it’s also occupied a bunch of my time). Update on 8/18: After the transfer last night, we had some odd ball Perl issues with MT. After a late night, we got them all resolved, and Jack’s site is flying nice and smooth now.

Priority #3 will be to take care of my in-laws computer, which keeps randomly freezing up. It’s not heat related as I let CPU-Burn in run for about eight hours with no issues at all, so I still have some work to do on that. Update: Think I may have this resolved after uninstalling a bunch of unneeded software. But I need to stress it to make sure.

And then Simone, Cheryl, a couple coworkers and a few other folks all need their computers upgraded, fixed, or what not. Just need to find the time to do it all, and actually see my kids (which are far more important than anything on the above list).

And these are all just free-time priorities, not actual work-day priorities, which are a whole other issue entirely.

I just need to quit sleeping … but we’ll try that some other time, so good night.

August 16, 2007

Mailing List Borked

I have had a Dada Mail-powered mailing here for quite a while. But apparently it stopped sending over a month ago, and I haven’t the slightest idea why other than some ugly Perl error that I really don’t have deal with right now.

Since I’m sick of troubleshooting Perl, I’m going to be moving all the subscribers I currently have (about 200 300 or so) over to FeedBurner’s e-mail blast system (since I’m already using them for my RSS feeds with good luck). It’s not as pretty as the messages I have been sending out, but I just don’t have time to deal with troubleshooting more stuff right now.

So those of you on my mailing list, expect mailings to return soon, just in a different format.

Edit: There were more people on my list than I thought.

August 15, 2007

Major BendBlogs.com Cleanup

MySpace’s dead RSS feeds caused me to remove the MySpace blogs from the front page on BendBlogs.com. A few small sites picked up the news of the dead RSS feeds, and MySpace must have gotten wind of it and fixed the feeds. So I’ve spent the last few hours going through all the old deprecated blogs I had in there, all the old MySpace blogs that were sitting in there, and everything else that I had in there, deleted or deprecated ones that haven’t been updated in a long time, have gone dead, or folks who have moved, and put back up everything else. There are now 200 fees listed there, and they’re not total crap. Enjoy.

Update the next day: Fixed “Enjoy” to actually go to bendblogs.com and not enjoy.com. I should know better than to blog late at night.

July 17, 2007

Change Of RSS Feed Address

Just an FYI: My RSS feed address has changed. I’m going to start taking advantage of some of FeedBurner services that they’re giving away since Google bought ’em. I’m combining these two feeds:

  • http://utterlyboring.com/index.rss (my RSS feed)
  • http://utterlyboring.com/index.atom (my ATOM feed)

Into one new feed URL: http://feeds.utterlyboring.com/utterlyboring. I’ve updated my auto-discovery feeds, and redirected the above URLs to the new URLs, so it should all be fairly transparent. But if you’re having trouble, use the new URL.

Questions/problems, comment here.

July 8, 2007

Welcome Oregonian Readers

I’m getting more traffic today than usual, and according to my server logs, it’s from people searching for this, based on this Oregonian article (which was on the front page of today’s Sunday edition) about the Portland Barbie dolls. Anybody who knows anything about Central Oregon might be interested in this more local variant. But stick around, visit my advertisers, and feel free to sign up to my nightly updates.

Secondly, welcome Source Weekly readers. And despite their use of quotation marks around my name because they think I’m using a pseudonym, my name is indeed Jake.

June 17, 2007

It’s A Common Misspelling, Sadly

Which is why I’ve registered udderlyboring.com and pointed it here. I thought about putting up some ridiculous picture of a cow with bit of text about how to spell properly. Then I realized I really cant spel wurth a dam aynway, so why bother?

June 17, 2007

Are Your Comments Posting Slow In MovableType?

I hadn’t seen this on my site, but I don’t post comments myself all that often and my readers have a tendency to not let me know about these things. That being said, if you are noticing slow comments when you post on a MovableType-powered site, this could be the issue (and it’s a pretty simple fix).

May 20, 2007

goldenglove7624, Where Are You?

Before announcing the tournament winner’s last week, I made it clear that if the first place guy couldn’t claim a prize or declined a prize, it would go onto second place, and if they declined, it’d go to third place, etc… . Scott, the winner of the mess, declined the Jake’s Diner certificate as well as the basic will preparation because he lived in Indiana (everything else is on the way to him right now). The certificate then went to Chris, who got second, but since he is a lawyer already, he declined the will preparation, so it’s going to third place goldenglove7624. I’ve e-mailed your Yahoo account, goldenglove, but have no idea if you actually check that (I check mine about once a month). If you’re reading this, please comment here, reply to my e-mail, or post your public e-mail address on the tournament page so we can get this squared away (and next year, we’ll be a bit better organized on this kind of thing if folks want to be eligible for prizes).

April 10, 2007

Florida Wins, and Scott’s Mad Dribblerz Wins The ’07 Pick ‘Em

Sorry I’m a bit late on this — was tearing apart a friend’s laptop last night and didn’t get online after the game. But Florida won the championship, which means that Scott’s Mad Dribblerz is our 2007 Tourney Pick ‘Em winner. Below is the final scoring talley:

  1. Scott’s Mad Dribblerz: 158
  2. Rusty from Portland: 153
  3. goldenglove7624: 151
  4. bend no more: 146
  5. bojack: 141
  6. #1 bracket: 141
  7. casual picks: 134
  8. shots hot: 132
  9. GO GATORS!!: 131
  10. PLU_STATS_231_2: 130
  11. Coz’s Bracket: 119
  12. monkeyinabox: 116
  13. whiteybarkley: 114
  14. Repeating Greatness: 114
  15. Reigning Dud: 107
  16. jaylee: 106
  17. MN Shivs: 99
  18. Bowser: 97
  19. jenB_goDucks!: 95
  20. Tasmanian Devils: 94
  21. Briar Patch Project: 86
  22. PAIZANO’S PIZZA: 85
  23. I can’t think of a name: 83
  24. steph: 83
  25. Canadian Bacon: 79
  26. Jake’s ’07 Pick ’em: 79
  27. kandray’s bracket: 75
  28. HEELSTAR: 70
  29. shlid: 48
  30. Bretigny: 42

Thanks to everybody who participated, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

If you have a hankering, I’ve posted an Excel spreadsheet of the day-by-day scoring here so you can see how your scores moved around (if anybody wants to turn that data into a pretty graph, by all means go ahead and I’ll host and post it here — my Excel-fu is not very strong with graphs, just with raw data).

Scott, if you’ll post something in the Yahoo! group’s message board or make your e-mail address public in the member area (so I know it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you), I’ll get in touch about your prizes, and give your e-mail to the folks who promised prizes to the winner (and anything you don’t want, Rusty has already said he’d take).

Secondly, Rusty, the bitter second-place guy (joking, Rusty), asked about second and third place prizes. I honestly didn’t think I’d get the turn out for this like we did, so next year I’ll get on the ball with prizes and see what we can round up.

Thanks again to Lyle at Jake’s Diner here in Bend for throwing in some grub into the pool, Paizono’s Pizza in Baker City for throwing in a trucker hat, and Brad (last year’s winner) for throwing in the basic will.

April 3, 2007

Having Trouble Getting My Daily Posts Via E-mail?

If you’d been having trouble getting my daily update e-mails, there’s a very good chance it was because it was getting dumped into your spam folder because of some old code I had in there that was getting blacklisted because of who it linked to. I’ve since cleaned up that code, so hopefully that should smooth out the delivery a bit (I still can’t promise it’ll go through all the time, especially with AOL accounts, but I’m at least trying).

Thanks to Ken at Breaking Windows for sending me his SpamAssassin log that helped me find the problem.

April 1, 2007