Techy

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Merging SpacyTracie.com

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and am pretty sure I’m going to merge all the posts at SpacyTracie.com with this blog.

This blog has been in existence in one form or another since 1997 (before “blog” was an everyday word) and has always been a smorgasbord of our lives, our kids, Jack, me, etc.

I created SpacyTracie.com just over four years ago thinking that I would be ranting a lot about my diabetes. I didn’t want to clutter things up here with my rants and raves about having diabetes, my weight issues, etc. But Diabetes has just become a part of my life and I no longer find many things to rant about or post about. Even if I did, I’ve come to realize that putting my thoughts and feelings about it here is fine and not really off topic. This blog is about Jack and I, as well as our family. After all it’s “JacknTracie.com” right?

I’ve been thinking about it a good long while, but haven’t gotten around to it because I knew merging the blog would be a pretty daunting task.

Today I updated our wordpress and discovered they made it super simple to import every post, comment, picture, and even the categories and tags right into this blog with just a few clicks of a button. How cool is that?

So soon, when I have the time to update the theme here, spacytracie and jackntracie will become one blog. And should be updated a LOT more often since wondering which blog to post on will be no longer be an issue.

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Spring break wordpress update

I updated my wordpress late last night to 2.5 and so far so good. One of the smoothest upgrades I’ve done in a long time. I was worried how it would go considering my head was still a bit fuzzy and I overdid it for Cody’s birthday, but it only took about 10 minutes. It was a big update with an admin interface overhaul. It’s taken me a bit to get used to that aspect but so far I like what I see. If you notice anything amiss, please do contact me!

This week starts the kids’ spring break from school. I so wish I could start it healthy and chipper. Instead I’m already cranky and headachy wishing they’d keep the noise down. (I can’t believe how this cold lingers.) Cody got this lights and gears building set as well as an electronic word game. And my mom got him a spiderman utility belt that shoots stuff. Who knew how loud this stuff was going to be? When he and his brother are playing with it all at the same time, it’s like having loud air tools going off inside the house. Me + sick + work + loud noise = grumpy! Lets hope tomorrow is better because it may not look so good on me if my kids go back to school telling their friends and teachers, “my spring break sucked because we spent the whole break duct taped to the wall”.

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I'd like to post but…

sick This was me Sunday night and most of yesterday. I’d love to post an update that doesn’t include green smilies but since I have to update WordPress for yet another security issue, I’ll be doing that instead.

[tags]being sick sucks,green smiley face,wordpress update[/tags]

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Randomly random bullets

  • I love my new computer. I never came back to post last weekend about it. I meant to but I was too busy playing with the fastness and uberness that is this computer. Jack beat me to it anyway. His version of how this all went together is mostly accurate. Except the part about my having a lot of stuff. I have one corner in the house with my stuff: My desk, my computer, and the stuff that goes on it. That’s IT. HE on the other hand has a garage full of his junk tools and computer stuff, an entire walk-in closet, PLUS his desk full of his crap stuff. How can he complain about my little corner of the house??
  • I love my new desk too. Here’s a picture of my old desk as it looked in our old house. It was perfect for that house. Here’s the desk I just got over the weekend. Imagine the old one in the this corner covering up most of the window. It sucked. I like my new one much better especially since I can hide my diabetes paraphernalia in the little glass covered sections.
  • A couple months ago the people behind us put their house up for sale. This was awesome because they annoyed us. They had a drum set they let their kids bang on incessantly and very badly. The kids taunted our dogs which made them bark like lunatics and they would talk Cody into pitching his toys over the fence to them. I seriously considered living my dream of getting into real estate flipping right then and there just so I could buy their house and make them move out faster. They are gone now but the house is still up for sale. I wonder why kind of new neighbors we’ll get?
  • I’m seriously behind on laundry and really should be doing that instead of posting this.
  • Technorati sucks. Is there a Technorati for Dummies site somewhere? They index my posts just fine by not my tags. Ever. It stopped about six months ago. Yet, still I try and still I wait for their (seemingly non-existent) support department to get back to me. I know I’m not the only one with this problem… Maybe I should give up on them.
  • Tomorrow is February 1st. How is it even possible that it’s a month into 2008 already?

[tags]technorati sucks,laundry sucks,bad neighbors suck,my computer and desk rock[/tags] (lol) 🙂

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Last time on old computer (for real)

I lied yesterday when I said the next post I write will be from my new computer. This one is being written on my old one still. I also lied that Abdio hosed my search assistant. It hosed a LOT of things… not just the search assistant. I had to reinstall the damn thing to get stuff to work. How can anyone write software that breaks your computer when you uninstall it?? Shouldn’t that be illegal?

And…. who knew it would take us ALL day to find a new desk? I just got a new desk last year.. and it was perfect in our old house. It is not working out well in this house. It takes up too much room and it’s impossible to work around. (It’s a nifty corner desk that I’ll post a picture of later.)

Lets see, we started at Office Depot. Nada. Office Max? Nope. Well, maybe… there was one.. but… no. We decided to head across the river into Portland to check out Ikea. It was on the way to pick up my new computer parts anyway and neither of us had been there before.

While Ikea is an amazing store, their computer desks were just too retro for my tastes. We gave up and got my computer parts, then decided to try… I’m not sure I can even say the word… *takes deep breath* Wal*Mart. Of course they had nothing. Whew! We tried Fred Meyers… nada. So I settled on the one I saw at Office Max. By this time I’d seen every desk known to man (in our price range at least… I don’t need anything fancy and expensive and would much rather put my money into the computer than the desk) and suddenly the one at Office Max seemed just right.

Jack has had the patience of a saint today. What should have been a quick trip turned into an all day ordeal. And I’m sure it wasn’t fun for him. (Except the 20 minutes he got to talk techy stuff with the guys at the computer store). If I had one these corsets I could show him a bit of appreciation later. On second thought, that might be scary.

[tags]computer desks, computer parts, new computers[/tags]

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It's not even my birthday

Yesterday I needed to be able to edit a document for work. It was a PDF document and I didn’t have a PDF editor. I downloaded one that I found via Google search and promptly hated it. So I uninstalled it.

The program was Abdio PDF Editor. This piece of crap program screwed up my computer when I uninstalled it. It took with it my search assistant when I uninstalled it. This meant the search function on my computer failed to work until Jack disabled the search assistant. To ensure it was that program, I reinstalled it and guess what? Search worked. I uninstalled it again… (using the custom uninstall option with Jack checking every file to ensure it was only claiming to uninstall its own files) but no luck.. It took my search assistant again. BOOOOO!

There’s a few other minor issues with my computer. It’s been years since I’ve upgraded it (except the video card). I was supposed to upgrade it almost a year ago when we sold our house. In fact the money for it is still in the bank. We just never got around to it and there was always a higher priority. Tomorrow we’re getting the parts and hopefully the next time I post it will be from my shiny new computer!

P.S. My birthday is next month. *hint hint* 🙂 I was looking at watches since none of mine are functional at the moment. Look at this Chopard ladybug watch. Cute in concept… but I wouldn’t wear it.

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Fixed the ie6 issue

I finally fixed the IE6 issue only to be faced with a new issue. Adding new categories is broken. That happened after a recent update to WordPress. It’s fine on my other blog though so I don’t know if it’s a theme issue or what’s going on. 😦 It can be really frustrating dealing with all these little miscellaneous issues to keep a blog going. It feels like I’ve aged 20 years and should be looking into assisted living software with the amount of time I’ve spent fixing this stuff. If anyone knows anything about the category issue after updating to WordPress 2.3.2, feel free to contact me. I sure would appreciate it. 🙂

[tags]category issue, wordpress categories, wordpress update, wordpress 2.3.2[/tags]

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Blame the absence on IE6

It’s come to my attention this new theme looks like total crap in IE6. (Have I mentioned how much I HATE internet explorer????) Every time I get a theme I love that I can tweak, it totally looks like crap in IE. So that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been posting. My blog is broken and looks like kaka and I can’t figure it out. This is not the first time this has happened and it just frustrates me. Why do themes have to be hacked to bits to get IE to play nice? Oh that’s right.. because IE sucks as much as living with diabetes does and doesn’t play by the rules.

Actually, that’s not the only thing keeping me away. My hours at my job went from part time to full time. I’m working full time again!! So I don’t have as much time to work on silly things like dealing with the suckfest that is IE. I did try fixing the theme again after work tonight but I still can’t figure it out. Next step (tomorrow) is to reload it from scratch and start over. (Pssst. Firefox rules!)

Tonight is hopefully going to be a repeat from last week: quiet, fire, in front of the TV. Especially since just today I found out that we’ve been watching our favorite TV shows on the wrong channels. We got our HDTV last spring and never knew that in order to get HD through our cable box we have to switch which set of channels we watch. For example, if we want to watch channel 12, we need to tune to channel 712, channel 6 is 706, channel 2 is 702, etc. There’s many networks that still don’t broadcast in HD but I’m glad to know there are several who do. And here I thought the expensive HDMI cables we bought were worthless. Nope. It was just operator error.

[tags]ie sucks, internet explorer sucks, hdtv, wordpress themes[/tags]

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Cleaning up my rss reader

RSS Feed Icon Once I discovered the joy that is my RSS reader, I went a bit overboard. I subscribed to everyone I already had bookmarked, then hit that little orange RSS button wherever I saw it on sites I found even slightly interesting. I now find myself a bit overwhelmed and can’t keep up with everything.

I went on a cleaning spree and got rid of a bunch of my subscriptions. First, with the exception of online newspapers, anyone that offered only offered partial excerpts feeds were ditched. This cut down on a lot of my subscriptions. I then scrapped sites that had no new content for weeks or months, and I scrapped sites that were becoming too spammy.

I will never understand why people only offer excerpts. It’s been shown on many different pro-blogging sites that offering only excerpts will not guarantee more traffic to your site. If the average person is like me they will find partial feeds as frustrating as Christmas shopping for The Guy Who Has Everything. (Do you think he’d like these silver cufflinks?)

Think about it.. sites that only offered this were the FIRST to go out of my reader. I don’t care how wonderful your updates / posts are, the reason I choose to read your blog / web site through a reader is to save myself some time. What is really sad about this is a few of these sites I used to visit regularly via my bookmarks before I discovered how to use a reader. Now, I likely won’t be back to your site. So you’ve lost a reader AND a visitor.

I have found that I visit sites more often — especially if I want to leave a comment — if they offer the full post feed. If you’re only offering your RSS subscribers partial excerpt feeds, you’re selling yourself short. Don’t believe me? Read: 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe from Your Blog. Look at what’s in the top three.

[tags]rss, feed reader, feeds, partial feeds, full feeds, subscribers, rss subscribers[/tags]