Category Archives: Site News

Still on Earth

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No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the planet! I’ve just been busy. Busy and tired. That tends to lead to blogging silence. That and the fact there hasn’t been much going on really, at least nothing that can’t be posted about using 140 characters or less. LOL!

To answer the emails I have been getting asking “OMG! You aren’t going to stop blogging are you?!?!” No. I can’t imagine that happening. In fact, it isn’t happening. I have several posts I am working on right now sitting in draft mode. What I haven’t had is the energy or time to sit down and finish them. Writing screeds of many words takes time, and I just have some other things taking up my time right now. Mostly … art. My art brain and writing brain are entirely separate beasts, and it’s difficult for me to switch gears between them. Right now, I am still all about the art.

But I thought I should make a post to quell some people’s fears I was giving up on blogging. I’m not. I’m not even taking an official break (like I used to a long time ago). I’m just busy and into some other things right now. But never fear, fall is here and soon enough it will be entirely too nasty for me to be outside taking reference photos and too gloomy for me to spend all day in the kitchen making art, and where will I be then? Sitting at my computer griping about the weather, complaining about my knitting projects (yeah, knitting season is here!), and ranting about politics. I promise!

Now to go clean up the kitchen, because it’s got that insane artist’s studio look going on, and in a few hours, it’s going to need to be a working kitchen again!

Maybe later I’ll post some food porn. It’s stacking up on my camera, and I know you all love the food porn.

Fail Fail Fail!

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My Tweets have not been getting posted to my blog every morning as they have been and are supposed to be. In the grand scale of things, this shouldn’t be as annoying as it is to me, but damn … it’s really annoying me!

I’m certain the problem is caused primarily by the fact that Twitter is undergoing some big changes in format (not that I personally have seen this New Twitter yet), but yesterday I upgraded by Twitter plugin, jumped through hoops with Twitter and my blog, and then had to wait to see if at 5 am this morning my stupid Tweets posted to my blog. Well, they didn’t. Argh!

I have reset everything yet again, and now I have to wait until 7 am to see if it worked. If not, I guess I’ll see if it will make a post every time I Tweet. I’m betting none of it will work, at least not until my Twitter account has been updated to the New Twitter. No, I am not in an optimistic mood this morning.

Not that my Tweets are so hell-fire important, but since I’ve been busy and not writing posts as much as usual, I have been Tweeting more than usual (since I can do that from anywhere with a cell phone tower), so it’d be nice if they would post to my blog as intended. Mostly though, I just can’t stand it when things which have worked perfectly for years suddenly just stop working. It’s especially annoying when this happens when I am having a migraine, because I just don’t have the brain power to sort out the problem nor the desire to sit and stare at a bright computer screen.

I’m going to go make a cup of coffee. When I get back, yesterday’s Tweets better have posted to my blog! Or else!!!

UPDATE: Oh, groovy! I post this post and then notice my Tweets are sitting there waiting to publish at 10 am. What the hell with the 10 am?! I specifically have it set to post at 5 am!!! Well, at least they plan on posting and now all I have to do is figure out what’s up with the apparent time difference between what time I am telling it to call Twitter and get the info and when it actually does. Double argh!

FYI!

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In case you didn’t know, and it’s entirely possibly you didn’t, Lin and I were on vacation last week … thus the silence at the blog and almost everywhere else. Didn’t want to report my exact location and my not being home to the entire universe, you know what I mean? LOL!

We’re home now, and as soon as I don’t ache over every inch of my body from a cross-country road trip, boy … do I have things to tell you about and photos to post! Vacation was a BLAST, but it’s good to be home (and back on the internet). Can’t wait to share!

Spam? Sorry!

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I finally got around to going to Gmail to check my mail today and was informed by Google that my Google account had been disabled for TOS violations. Yes, I was a bit surprised by that, seeing as I send out about two emails a week, if that many, and I give no web site, human, or anything else any sort of access to my Gmail account.

In order to get my account back, I had to hand over my cell phone number to Google, which I have to say, I did not want to do. That was the ONLY option available for verifying it was my account. I either had to let them send me a text message or a voice mail to my cell phone. This actually annoyed me more than having my account disabled for who knows what reason. As tight as I am with my Gmail account, I am a thousand times tighter with my cell phone number, which Google now has its hands on. Booooooo.

Once I finally got back into my account, there were about a hundred “delivery failed” notices for emails I did not send. Spam for some online Canadian pharmacy … sent to everyone in my address book. Wonderful! That’s just what I needed, and I am sure anyone who’s email server didn’t block the offending email needed it too! ARGH! This wasn’t how I’d planned to spend my Sunday evening.

I don’t know how someone got the contents of my Gmail address book. Like I said, I don’t share it with any web sites that want it (including not at all with Facebook), and if someone somehow managed to figure out my password, they deserve some kudos. My passwords aren’t guessable, aren’t words, and tend to be LONG. Additionally, my password recovery question is one even my husband or Mom couldn’t answer. So I am at somewhat of a loss to determine how my address book was used to send out spam emails. From my point of view, it sort of feels like a breakdown of security on Google’s side of things.

Anyway … if you received a spam email from my Gmail account, it wasn’t me, but I’m sorry. I can’t tell if any actually got accepted by anyone’s email program, but looking through the delivery failure notices, it doesn’t look like any got through to anyone who might be reading this or keeping up with me in any other way. I don’t have all that many addresses in my address book, and it looks like every last one of them failed to be sent. All the same, if you did get one, I am sorry. No idea how it happened, no idea how to keep it from happening again. I guess we just move on, yes?

If anyone reading this did, in fact, GET one of these emails and still has it sitting in their spam box or trash bin, could you forward it to me? Might help me figure out what happened or at least from whence the emails were originally sent, and I would like to know.

And I am still not at all happy about having to give Google my cell phone number. Not happy at all.

Earth to Posterous!

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I’d like to know how it is that Posterous is just now getting around to receiving and posting every photo post I have made since Friday. That was a little annoying to clean up, seeing as I had already posted them other ways, having given up on them ever getting to or being posted by Posterous. But who to blame? My phone service or Posterous?!

Grrr.

Argh!

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I’ve been experiencing issues with my web site hosting today, which is why you haven’t been seeing any new posts. Not that there’s been much to talk about anyway. I’m sure the problem will be sorted out shortly, and then maybe I can spend some time babbling.

Incompatibility Detected

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Well, what do you know? The daily digest of my Tweets finally posted on my blog again. I only spent most of Sunday afternoon banging my head against my desk trying to solve some kind of weird PHP plugin incompatibility that started the day I upgraded the plugin. It had been causing the daily digest of my Tweets to not post to my blog. Heaven forbid anyone miss out on reading my Tweets.

I finally became so frustrated when the fix everyone said was working for them did not work for me, I downgraded the plugin to an older version. Of course, I couldn’t remember which one I had upgraded from, but I knew it was a pretty large version number leap. I picked one at random that stated the daily digest option had been removed from experimental status (it’s back in experimental status with the newest version). This has apparently solved my problem.

This is why I refuse to upgrade the plugin that crossposts my blog to Livejournal, for fear of some fatal error throwing a kink into the Just Orb Broadcasting System. The thought of having to crosspost manually like I used to do it makes me think about jumping in front of a bus. I’ll be testing the upgrade in my sandbox site before I just willy-nilly start hitting “upgrade automatically” buttons.

I only wish I hadn’t wasted most of a Sunday trying to fix the problem on the newest version. But I do get into problems, especially when I know it’s one that can be solved. This one will be solved by greater PHP minds than mine. I could have used the time more wisely continuing to clean up the templates for the site and contemplating a site redesign. Or, you know, coming up with more interesting things to post on my blog than plugin incompatibility woes.

Now that I have spent too much time working myself into a terribly grumpy mood by fighting a nasty clog in the bathroom sink (I have yet to win that war) and spent too much time sitting here waxing woeful over geeky web site stuff, I do believe I should go to bed. I have to buy a new plunger tomorrow … and some Dr Pepper.