I was rummaging in archives for a client, and came upon this test I’d made for a new script I’d installed for ‘em in 2002. I post it here as a kind of warning: Beware the Whimsical Geek.

This is a test of the Non-Emergency Broadcast System
October 28, 2002 7:50 pm PT

Does the script work? Like Schroedinger, when I press the button, and the waveform collapses, I know only that it worked or did not work, and the universe that contained the alternative path is closed to me. If it’s all the same to the Universe, I’d like to take the path where it works, please.
-the techdonkey

I had a look at my site the other day, and thought… well, now, *that’s* out of date!

In a fit of electronic housekeeping, I’m in the process of swapping everything over to a Wordpress backend. Things may very well be all fuckered in places. Sorry, eh?

http://elainemiller.com

Here for the skinny:
http://techdonkey.com/sections/server-status-and-news/

I geek, therefore I am. Low-tech, easy to use. You gotta do some editing to make it match your own database on your own domain.

Use if database backup convenience is more important to you than rock-hard security.

I stuck it up over here:
http://techdonkey.com/techy-tidbits/do-it-yourself-mysql-database-backup-upper

In correcting a server problem, my upstream providers hosed our email capabilities. No sending, no recieving. It’s still not resolved, and I’m still working on it with them. If you emailed me today, I didn’t get it. If you email me right now, I won’t get it. If you’re a client of mine, you share my troubles.

This address works: elaine *at* techdonkey *dot* com.
Please send everything there until we can figure it. If you’re having SMTP troubles, there’s a webform at the site below.

If you’re a client, reach me through the support site, http://techdonkey.com

More as it happens.

-Elaine

My puter went to the big scrap heap in the sky this morning, after a goodly number of false alarms as I frantically tried to complete my backups. (sigh)

After a day of pulling out every old box and bit of hardware in my house, I was able to get a slightly antiquated laptop running with a copy of Ubuntu Linux (thanks, Ubuntu folks, you’ve saved my bacon many times.) So here I am on the internet, and communicating happily.

I need a new desktop machine for my win-doze business applications! Anyone got any leads to a good, cheap 3 Ghz+ puter? I have all the bits, just need motherboard and box, I suspect.

RIP, old faithful, over-worked, overclocked computer….

So, I have this livejournal account that I don’t do anything with. (With which I do nothing?) And I’m a Wordpress fanatic. And this gent created a nifty plugin that teaches wordpress how to post into a livejournal account. So I added the plugin, and it didn’t work. And it didn’t work. And it didn’t work. But I’ve kicked it enough times that it now works. And lo, it is now crossposting merrily.

This is the most perfectly redundant link, since everything here (on my elainemiller.com blog) is there (at livejournal), and vice versa. (Except for the “friends only” posts. They are only here, and only if you log in.) http://elainemiller.livejournal.com/

Geek. Yes.

I have a couple of production boards running phpBB2, which is a lovely set of software.

But now the geniuses behind that app have come up with phpBB3, and it’s making me all tingly.

This is an alpha version, which means — it’s not for the fainthearted, because it could get into a pitbull-like scrap with my database at any time. But the user interface is beeyootiful and the options are all a grrl could ask. Well, at least, mostly all a grrl could ask.

Drop in and register and post something so I can have some troubles to shoot? I gotta make sure this is viable software before I inflict it upon my paying customers.

http://www.elainemiller.com/phpBB3/

Last year I put up a mailman discussion list and page for the folks who were trying to get the 25th anniversary Dykes on Bikes Pride Parade thing going, and it seemed to help folks get together and gather for the festivities.

It’s motorcycle weather again!

I went back, updated the page, added a gallery of all last year’s hot dykes on bykes… and now all youse local-to-Vancouver dykes might wanna hop on the list, and trade ridin’ invites, or flirts… or y’all might wanna just look at pictures.

http://bykedykes.vancouverleather.com/

-Elaine

NOTE:
If You were once on the list, it got hosed in the recent crash, please re-join!

Well, it’s old blogging software. I mean, familiar software. I mean, it’s the latest version of WordPress. Heh.

Lemme explain. Once upon a million years ago, I blogged with Blogger. Quickly, I swapped to using server-side includes and blogging in a text file. Then I swapped to Greymatter, which was nice but which dead-ended in early development, then I swapped to Movable Type. I still use an old version of MT for back-end content-management on various parts of my site, like the writing archives — but it just wasn’t as cool as WordPress.

Now, after several years of installing WordPress for my clients, and recommending WordPress left and right, I’ve finally replaced my MT blog with a WordPress one, imported all the old stuff, and turned comments on after they’d been off for so long.

So go comment on some stuff, why don’t ya?

At time of writing, I’m not quite done fixing it up, so please forgive the bobbles.

Everything crashed at once, making me the Least Happy Camper.

First my personal hard drive developed the Click of Death, and expired on the spot, hosing 21 days of work (Yes, I know. I generally back up much more often but I was so dang busy doing custom webwork and graphics for people. Yes, I see the irony too, thanks.)

I got my home computer running with a new HD and re-installed OS and applications (now where did I put that driver disk?) … and was breathing a sigh of relief that a great deal of my work was safe on my server…

I was just about to start downloading my (now sole copies of) files from the various websites I’d been working on, when my remotely hosted server crashed in a spectacular fashion, hosing not just itself, but also its supposedly “secure” “redundant” backups.

See here:
http://techdonkey.com/sections/server-status-and-news/
Yes, my crazy life. Gad.

Not for the faint of heart… this is a current pic of my keyboard, showing both the wear it has sustained over the past few years, and the pointy things that caused it.

This is me geeking right out, folks, so feel free to skip ahead unless file retrieval makes you tingle.

So I burned a bunch of large files onto a DVD, using Nero. Nero reported that all was well, and when I checked the DVD, the files seemed to be there. Then I deleted them off my harddrive.

The next time I popped that DVD into the drive, though, it showed as blank, with a 0 size. Damn.

A closer look at the DVD with file recovery software indicated that the filenames indeed existed, but I still couldn’t pull them off.

So I scritched my head for a moment or nine, and here’s what I tried:

I opened Nero again, and told it to copy the DVD for me. Instead of burning the copied image to media, I saved it to my HD as an image file. Nero uses a file extension of *.NRG, which is pretty well the same as .ISO, so I renamed the file to image.iso, and then used WinRAR to treat it like an archive file, opened it up, and woo! there were all my files.

I extracted them safely to my hard drive, and will now live happily ever after.

And if Google has brought you here because you’re experiencing the same problem, I hope it works for you as well.

So I cleaned my keyboard with alcohol swabs, and it had this to say:

00000000011111250+63
.*/*-7410*/8596+320.-+3
/ `u89i0o-p[=qawfrdgtasdfrgtuhjikolp;szgbvhjnmk,lftrgyuijokpl;aqftrg
yuijokplwftrgyoklp;ftrijkol1234567890-]0]\]\]\]\’]\’=]\’]\\
[;'./-l;,./-opkl, -=p[l;,. [];’./[;'./-0okl,m 0jkmn 98hjbn 76tgfvc54refdxcwqsaxz 1q`12q `1q`12q `1q2aw `2q1esZAZxZZxc vaZxcvbnm ,./ jkm,.0-op;./='/]\

I finally figured out a use for Internet Explorer.

When you do a fresh install of Windows, it’s how to get to the Mozilla download site to download Firefox.

Who would thunk that IE would be useful for anything? Huh….