Comments (0) 
I updated to a whole new database and a whole new WordPress installation. The restore didn’t go 100% perfectly, so if you’re reading old posts you’ll see odd characters here and there. But I don’t think I’ll go back and fix all that. 
If you wanted to subscribe to my RSS feed and had problems, I’m happy to report that the RSS Feed icon at the top of the page is working properly now.
The more I work with WordPress the more I think I ought to set up shop as a detective.Â
I’m having trouble with my RSS feed…Â will get it fixed ASAP.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.Years ago, I was low person on the totem pole on Team Toshiba. We were a group of intrepid souls who did tech support for Toshiba America in their CompuServe Forum. Since I had neither the time, the money nor
the inclination to be a cutting-edge tech geek, my role was to find answers for people like me who were still slogging along two operating systems behind and five generations of computers ago.
I was then, as I am now, a firm advocate of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” While my Team members were avidly pursuing Microsoft’s latest questionable goodies, I toodled merrily along with what worked.
And maybe because those guys were constantly tearing their hair out trying to get stuff to work, while I suggested “Gee, you know, if you went back to Windows for Workgroups…” I took a good deal of heat now and again. Most of it was good-natured. Some…  not so much.
One of the real techno-weenies called me Mesozoic Marte. I don’t think he meant it kindly. But I thought it was funny and adopted the name quite readily. I even have a picture of me, standing next to a bronze Triceratops at the LA Natural History Museum, and I’d post it here if it didn’t show me 50 pounds heavier than I am today. I’m Mesozoic but I’m also somewhat vain, what can I say.Â
Why did I get to talking about this? Well, because I haven’t changed my ways. I tend to stick with what works until either there’s some program I really really really want that won’t run under the operating system that I have, or the operating system itself gets too cranky to deal with. Such was the situation this past week when I finally gave up on Windows 2000 and installed XP Pro.
All did not go well.
Despite all kinds of articles claiming that XP Pro will happily upgrade over Win2K, it didn’t, quite. I had extremely annoying problems with my DVD burner that no amount of helpful advice would clear up. Everything else worked, as far as I could tell, but the fact that the DVD drive was brain dead was a major problem, because I had stuff backed up on data DVDs that I couldn’t restore. Aaaargh.
Well, to make a long and frustrating story short, late this afternoon, I finally threw in the towel, whipped out my Acronis bootable disk, wiped the stupid hard drive clean and started all over from the beginning.
And of course, once you do that, you’ really only HAVE begun. Now I get to reinstall all my software. Thank goodness for Foxmarks so at least I got all my bookmarks back post haste.
I bet this provides me with material for upcoming posts for a good long time.
photo credit: prad2609
I think maybe I’m ready to peddle myself as a WordPress guru. Well, a guru in training, at any rate. The weird problems I have plowed through in the past couple years of WP blogging have been… educational.
A few days ago, I was getting “500 internal server” errors on this blog and my tattoo blog. The tattoo blog proved to be a relatively easy fix (the .htaccess file was messed up). But this one… wouldn’t fix no matter what I tried. So I called my web host’s tech support.
The helpful tech I talked with agreed that the problem was likely the .htaccess file here, too, and said he’d fix it. I thanked him, he fixed it, everything worked fine. Phew. Thought that was the end of it.
Today, trying to add this blog to TwitterFeed, I discovered that (a) in copying over the sig from my tattoo blog I had stupidly not changed the feed link and (b) the RSS link in the banner didn’t work. Fixing the sig was no problem, after I quit whapping myself on the head, but I was out of my league on the RSS link issue.
So this time my first line of approach was to post a message in the WordPress support forums, which are without a doubt THE best source for WordPress answers. Especially for off-the-wall problems like this. It seems like no matter what the problem might be, someone there has the answer that works.
Which was the case this time–within a very short time span I got help. And it turned out to be a host problem once again, not anything within WP. And thus nothing I could fix. So I called the host again.
They said they’d run some diagnostics on the site and email me the results. I have not yet gotten the email, but everything appears to be working just fine now. My blogs back themselves up automatically once a day, but I think I’d better go run another backup now.
photo credit: The Flooz
Apologies to anyone who wanted to subscribe to my feed! Bad enough I copied over the address of my other blog into my sig, but I see now that the RSS link in the banner doesn’t work either.
Wow, what a load of stupid all in one site! Most of it my fault, too.
The RSS link in the sig now works properly and I’m trying to figure out how to fix the one in the banner. Sorry about that, Chief!
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.So, I got the new screen installed in the pod OK. But after I put everything back together, the battery wouldn’t charge up.
I figured the old battery had probably died, and bought a new one.
New one wouldn’t charge either.
So I did a closer inspection and discovered that the plastic connector that attaches the battery to the motherboard had come completely loose. Sigh.
I don’t think any home repair person can micro-solder like that. I know I sure can’t. So I guess now I put the pod up for sale “for parts or repair” and mention the nice bright new screen it’s got.
photo credit: coalandice
It’s been a year or so since I discovered how insanely easy iPods are to fix.
Tonight I replaced the cracked screen in my video Pod. A fiddly job but surprisingly easy. I bought the new screen from an organization that recycles the usable parts from otherwise non-working iPods. So I saved quite a bit of money and helped the environment too.
eBay merchants FTW.
photo credit: Chris Devers
I am never particularly eager to embrace new technology. However, having been lent a new computer running Vista Ultimate, I have ventured timidly into the latest iteration of Mr. Bill’s Brand.
Vista’s not as annoying as I thought it would be, but that’s largely due to my immediately dumping all the shiny-shiny stuff and optimizing for best performance rather than best appearance. I also took back the classic menus and folder view. After that, I just cruised right along.
It won’t let me create user accounts, though, no matter what I try. Doesn’t surprise me, given that this came from a corporation that imaged it to their own specs, but it’s annoying. But given how many other ways it could have annoyed me a lot more, that’s not so bad.
And tonight I figured that having Vista would actually be a good thing, for the first time ever. Netflix won’t let me watch streaming video on my usual computer, because I run Windows 2000 on it and refuse to change that until the day it no longer does what I want it to do. But the Netflix viewer will run on Vista, so I decided to try that out.
Well, there’s a hitch in the gitalong–it only works with IE and I only use IE when I’ve got no choice. But I suppose experimenting with streaming video is worth it. So I fired up the little blue E, installed the viewer…
….and now I can watch my favorite episode of “McCloud,” which was one of my favorite shows. “The Night New York Turned Blue.” Oh, the sacrifices I make for seeing Dennis Weaver and JD Cannon ride again.
photo credit: Digital Sextant.
So, the battery on my trusty Palm Zire 31 is slowly giving up the ghost.
I bought a new battery for it before I took it apart. If I’d taken it apart first I would have seen that the battery leads are soldered in. While I certainly have the skills to unsolder and resolder a battery, what I don’t have is any inclination to do it.
So I guess it is time for me to think seriously about replacing the Zire before the battery bites the dust for good (I get about 30 minutes out of it now). I want to stick with Palm, both for ease of use and for ease of data transfer. I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles (as is evidenced by my long-time satisfaction with the Zire 31 and the fact that the Palm Centro is the only smartphone that has ever gotten a second look from me). I’m sure there are PDA features that I don’t now have that I will love when I get them, but truthfully other than a larger screen I can’t think of any right now.
And, of course, I have the family budget to consider. As always.
So what should I be looking at?
Cross-posted with my LiveJournal to try to capture a wider audience.
Hope you'll recommend my posts via your favorite social media. Just don't copy the material as your own.
Panorama Theme by 
Themocracy
