csquared.org

I'm a member of Electronic Arts' online gaming community, Club Pogo. Generally speaking, it's a nice place to kill some time.

I've been on a chess kick lately, playing dozens of games over the past couple of weeks. So, I head over to chess this morning, and "sit down" at a table. My opponent started a rated game, but refused to move because of the fact I'm a Club Pogo member.

Unfortunately, if I were to leave, it would count as a loss and my "Unfinished Rated Games" tally would go up. By the same token, it would count as a win for this goof-ball.

Now, that would normally not be a big deal -- it's just a game, right? Well, normally, I'd agree, but the whole principle of it annoys the hell out of me.

Completely apropos of nothing, I noticed I've been neglecting the site since... November of last year. I really need to post more often.

I listen to music at work. A lot. With my handy-dandy 20GB Rio Karma, I can drown out my cube neighbors with the soothing sounds of Project Pitchfork, Sisters of Mercy, and Funker Vogt. When I heard about [Yahoo! Music], I thought this would be an ideal way to fill up my Rio on the cheap. They had stuff I purchased on __vinyl__ for God's sake! Since the Rio supported my Napster DRM downloads, I ass-u-me'd that it would work for Yahoo! Music as well. Au contraire, mon frere. The DRM that Yahoo! uses is exceptionally limited. You can't burn, sync, or otherwise manipulate your downloads. I don't have a problem with ''renting'' music, but dammit, I shouldn't be forced to shell out a couple of hundred bucks to purchase a new audio jukebox that supports it. My poor wife is equally hosed. Without jumping through hoops, we can't burn a CD with the ~~crap~~ country and pop goodness she prefers. In the event you __do__ want to do these things, you need to shell out an additional $0.79 per track. I fully appreciate the problems file swapping poses to the music industry, but until there's a better way to allow honest individuals to listen to music however, whenever, and wherever they want, I'll pass.

One of the truly cool things about blogging is that you can help someone out just by knocking out a quick description of the problem, how you solved it, then blogging it.

Sometimes people you've helped don't take the time to say, "Not only have I read your entry on X, it helped me out. Thanks."

Ron Miller helped me out with a particularly annoying issue between RoboForm and Firefox 1.06, but he didn't realize it.

For that, thanks Ron.

I've been investigating options to maintain ciulla.org via a content management system. Most of them have been overkill for maintaining the few static pages I have laying around.

Then it occured to me that I could use WordPress to maintain the static stuff.

So, I read the instructions on the WordPress Codex. Several times. And I changed my options, moved the files, then updated the permalink structure. Several times. I even deleted .htaccess. Several times.

All to no avail.

Whoever decided this was a good idea needs to be flayed...

Since I installed Spam Karma 2 (SK2), I've been an absolute fiend about checking to see if any spam has been harvested. Before, I'd get about 20 "please moderate such and such comment" emails a week... Sometimes more.

It's been so effective, I have to write about something else, I suppose...

So, here's what I've been doing for the past couple of days (besides working, of course):

• Working on a CSS-only (read: non-table) version of my resume
• Looking for a very lite content mangement system for the site's static content
• Fixing overheating issues on the other computers laying around the house and playing family System Administrator
• Playing around with a second-hand copy of SuSE Professional 9.1