Letters From Home

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

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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!

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

photo credit: mtsofan

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So, I’m still fiddling around with Vista.

It is nowhere near as annoying as I feared it would be, but it’s just another iteration of Microsoft’s “You are too stupid to figure anything out for yourself” mind-set, and therefore falls all over itself trying to protect the user from ever having to oh, actually think.

I’ve shut off as many of those annoyances as I can, but I still haven’t been able to create new user accounts that work. I ran into a problem with Office 2000 (not enough memory, my ass) but found a workaround. Adobe 8 didn’t want to install itself right away, but Vista sent it out for updates and then it worked fine.

I have had no problems with installing anything so far, either from my own disks or downloaded. Of course, I haven’t had time to put it to any really extensive tests.

I can’t see any reason why anyone would want to run right out and buy this, but then again I never figured out why so many suck uh, people wanted to stand in line for Windows 95, either.

photo credit: ₣ңєя ™

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I also upgraded this journal to the latest edition of WordPress, updated all my plugins and removed some of the ones I’m not using.  That, at least, went well.  But if you spot any glitches, please let me know.  I’m definitely getting better at this with practice. 

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I finally got all the computer mayhem straightened out, but it sure did cause me a giant case of the wim-wams there for a while.

And I learned a couple new things, like how to get rid of unwanted passwords, and how to force a reluctant computer to boot from the proper hard drive.  I also learned that a Western Digital hard drive won’t work in an external enclosure but a Seagate drive will.  And I got Acronis TrueImage working, with a little help from their tech support, and it does indeed clone drives perfectly.

Oh, and I learned that the lawnmower noise my computer was making was not the hard drive after all but one of the fans, probably in the power supply.  Can we all say DUH!!! together, now?

So that “resolution” gets things back on more or less an even keel at least for the moment.

The other resolution is that I’m not messing with that stuff EVER again.  My son will get a new computer eventually and transferring his stuff from one to the other is going to be entirely in his hands.

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It all seemed so easy.

I was going to clone the contents of my son’s hard drive to a new, larger hard drive, and then set him up with a newer computer. I have software that will deal with that. Or so I thought.

I got Maxtor MaxBlast with my newest hard drive, and it offered to let me upgrade to Acronis TrueImage at an attractive price. So I took them up on that. Unfortunately, I can’t install TrueImage because it’s an upgrade copy and it keeps asking me for the serial number of the previous version, and MaxBlast has no serial number. I emailed Acronis about this two days ago and have only got their form “we got your email” reply.

I tried using the MaxBlast software on the computer I was trying to refurbish, but it says it won’t run without a Maxtor or Seagate drive present. Um… there were three drives in the computer at the time–a WD, a Maxtor, and a Seagate. *BZZZT!*

It was all moot anyway, because my son’s original hard drive refused to be moved. If I tried it in the other computer it promptly lost its mind and I got all kinds of scary looking “missing boot device” messages on the Blue Screen of Death.

So I gave up and put everything back together in his room… and that’s when the fun started.

All of a sudden Windows 2000 was asking for a logon password when it never had before. My son didn’t remember his password. Logging in as Administrator did no good. So, OK, I’ll try running the Windows 2000 CD and see if I can repair the installation.

Uh…. now the BIOS wants a password too? Aiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeee!!! Sure am glad my son had long since left for work.

In the end, I took my own advice and learned a LOT of new things today. Like how to reset a CMOS password, which is something I already knew how to do in theory but had never tried. Till tonight. And how to get past a Windows password, too, although I haven’t actually done that yet. Oh my, the internet is my friend.

I think, all in all, I’m going to just let things be for the moment and tackle the rest of that project tomorrow. I love fiddling with computers but I’m not about to push my luck.

photo credit: Stoichiometry

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