Blogging

1st Annual Beerbecue

rmiles7721March 17, 200720Blogging, Parenting/Family, Travel

I have sent this email to several people already, if you haven’t gotten it either I don’t have your email address or just plain forgot. It’s not personal. If you email or call me after reading this well then maybe it will be personal 🙂

Since I schedule all of my vacations a year in advance it is difficult for me to get together with folks at the various blogmeets, so we are having a big ass barbecue and party on March 31st. We’ll get started at or around 4 PM on that Saturday. There are a few extra beds, and there are hotels and motels in the area. If you are interested in coming, either call me or shoot me an email at rmiles7721 at gmail dot com or rm_blogger at yahoo dot com.

If I know you personally or have met you then you are invited, if not then you are probably invited anyway unless you are some sort of weird stalker in which case we will cut you up and bury you in the back yard with various cats and squirrels and former employees of mine.

The location is at my house in Temple Georgia. Bring your favorite side dish and/or alcohol or bring nothing at all it doesn’t matter. We’ll be doing burgers, dogs, and beer so if there is something in particular that you want that doesn’t fit that list you need to bring it.

The Weekend is Upon Us

rmiles7721March 17, 2007Blogging, Entertainment, Parenting/Family

I actually have managed to get the weekend off for a change. The Boy has to work in the morning, so I will more than likely have to be back up about 6:30 or around then to take him in and then hopefully I can go back to bed for awhile. I am having trouble getting to sleep. Considering that I have been up for about 20 hours now I am surprised. The wife may just end up having to take him in the morning.

Pappilon just ended. That was really good. I will most definitely do as I said earlier and rent it. I would like to see it again at least once. There are some parts that I missed, particularly at the beginning that I want to see.

The Battle of the Blogs is almost over. SWG is only four votes behind the leader, so if you haven’t had the chance to vote for him head on over to Leesa’s Stories and vote. Then hang out for awhile.

Blocked

rmiles7721March 15, 2007Blogging

I need to do some posts and just can’t get my head around it tonight. I didn’t get very much sleep last night due to work and I am bone tired.

The started calling me about 10 PM or so. I had scheduled a company to come in a clean the hood (exhaust fan) around 10 PM or so, and even wrote it on the schedule so that they could see. The called me anyway because they are to stupid to read the schedule. Then they called me around midnight, and again at 1 AM. Most of the stuff in my store is on GFI circuits, and any kind of moisture whatsoever will throw the breaker. I guess that according to code the exhaust fan has to be included in this, so my exhaust fan was out from 10 PM last night until about 9 this morning. We spent the great majority of the day cleaning it up. Anyway, when the fan goes out, for instance when there’s no power, we prop open the front and back doors and deal with it.

The first call I told them to check the switch and make sure it was on, and then check the breaker. About 45 minutes later they called to tell me it wasn’t working and asked what to do. I told them to prop the doors open and keep working. The finally called again, the last one at 1 AM. I explained what was wrong and that there was nothing to be done except to just keep on working.

The restaurant looked like crap when I got there, as if having the fan off was something that would keep them from actually performing their jobs. I sent them home and we cleaned it up. Our damn construction guys are too cheap to fix something like this, so the maintenance man rewired everything for me this morning so that it wouldn’t happen again.

I also had a waffle party to do today for the day care right down the street for me. The have pre-k classes there as well, so we did two pre-k classes, and then RePete’s class. The kids had a ball. Waffles and OJ and coloring pages for all. I was a nice distraction from work for a couple of hours.

The meeting wasn’t too terribly bad today. I managed to get out of there shortly before 5 PM and here I am. Pretty tired but none the worse for wear I suppose.

I really need to find some people with half a brain to work my night shift.

Gravatar

rmiles7721March 13, 2007Blogging, Technology

Does anyone know much about Gravatar? There’s not shit for help files at their site, and some of them show up here in the comments, but some don’t, in particular mine.

I downloaded a WordPress plugin to use mybloglog icons in the comments and have been trying to hack around that to use it with Movabletype, but I have been unsuccessful so far. I did notice over at their blog (which is at typepad.com) they ARE using them, so I know it has to be possible.

Over all I suppose it’s no big deal, but I would like to get one of the two working properly, and mybloglog seems to be getting a lot more use than Gravatar now anyway.


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Trackbacks

rmiles7721March 13, 2007Blogging, Technology

For some reason several people have had issues when pinging my site. This is an issues particularly since I participate in open trackbacks posts. Looking through a couple of forums I found a couple of settings to tweak that might solve the issue and I mainly wanted someplace to ‘write’ them down in case I need to tweak them later. The error that people have been getting is ‘failed: HTTP error: 403 Throttled’

I found this posting on a forum discussing MT

The configuration settings that control MT’s trackback ping throttling are in your mt-config.cgi / mt.cfg file. There are three settings that affect trackback ping throttling:

OneHourMaxPings – The maximum number of pings that a weblog can receive in one hour. If this setting is not present, MT uses a default of 10 for this setting.

OneDayMaxPings – The maximum number of pings that a weblog can receive in one “day” (with one “day” being determined by the ThrottleSeconds setting below). If this setting is not present, MT uses a default of 50 for this setting.

ThrottleSeconds – This setting is the minimum number of seconds between comments from a single IP address. MT also uses this setting when deciding whether to throttle trackback pings with the OneDayMaxPings setting, with one “day” being (4000 * ThrottleSeconds -1) seconds. If this setting is not present, MT uses a default of 20 for this setting. With the default of 20 seconds, one “day” for the OneDayMaxPings setting is a little over 22 hours (80,000 seconds).

I have added the first two settings into my config file, so hopefully that will take care of the situation.


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Just a geek

rmiles7721March 12, 20076Blogging, Entertainment

I don’t guess this is really a meme in the sense, but I ran across this list over at Elisson’s who got it from Modulator, who in turn picked it up at Pharyngula. It’s “The Most Significant Science Fiction & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years.”

I don’t know exactly how significant some of them are, but there are some really good reads in the list. Books I’ve read are bold, return favorites are red, and one’s I have never heard of are struck out.

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
 2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
 5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
 9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
 10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
 18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
 19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
 20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
 26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone*, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Personally I would have had Alan Dean Foster among the list. Timescape was OK, but certainly shouldn’t be in this list. The Sillmarillion was boring as hell the first time I read it (I was about 13), but I am very interested in history, and it made more sense as an adult. I find it hard to believe that I have never heard of eleven of them. If I saw the covers I would probably recognize them, and probably have at least two or three upstairs with the rest of he books.


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Slow Day…at Least at Home

rmiles7721March 11, 2007Blogging

I had a fairly long day at work today. Don’t really have much to post about here. Lots of DRAMA with all capitals. Waitresses boyfriends hitting on other waitresses, people coming in late (one of my pet peeves), general bullshit like that.

Payday is Sunday for my people at work. The ones that work graveyard shift Saturday usually get paid before they leave Sunday morning. I have had a lot of issues with getting hung on Sunday nights, so last week I told them all that if they were off Saturday but working Sunday, they would start getting paid at the end of their Sunday shift, meaning 7 AM Monday morning. Sure enough, both of the people that are working tonight showed up this afternoon looking to get paid and I sent their asses back out the door and told them that I would either be there for shift change tonight or pay them when they got off.

They finally got there tonight, twenty minutes late. One of the waitresses called me a couple of minutes ago wanting to know if I was coming up to pay here. She sounded distraught when I told her that I would be there before she gets off work in the morning. What the fuck is up with that? I have about the crappiest 3rd shift working that I have ever had. I have managed to hire a couple of people to start on Wednesday, one of which used to work for me in another store, and the other one is new, but he is in his fifties, so at least I will have a bit more adult presence in there. That’s been part of the problem the last couple of months, mainly young people with bad attitudes. I still need to hire a couple more people, and I plan to have them hired and trained before I start my vacation on the 25th.

It looks like my boss is going to be staying with the company after all, so that is a good thing. The evil you know is always better than the one you don’t.

Odiogo and Podcasts

rmiles7721March 7, 2007Blogging, Technology

This is pretty cool. Not nearly as cool as my brother reading his book, but I am much lazier and prefer a computer to read the crap I have posted. I signed up for Odiogo’s free Podiocast service which turns all of my blogposts into mp3 podcasts. Here’s the post that I did earlier on ‘More about Couey‘.

Very weird. Now I am going to have to search through my site for the post with the most profanity just to listen to it and see if they bleep my ass. That might be difficult as there are so many to choose from. I curse even more than I post, although I have really been trying hard at work to keep my language clean, so that seems to have rolled over into my home life, at least until I get pissed off and then the stream of foul invectives issues out. Just can’t help it.

Here’s some links if you want to subscribe:

And here is the main page to get to them.

Have I told you how much I like cool gizmos and gadgets? This is much better than my audio-cast, but I will probably keep that link up. I have only used it twice but if I am without computer or iPaq I can post that from my cell phone.


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Gravatar

rmiles7721March 6, 2007Blogging, Technology

I noticed in some of my comments today that some people’s gravatar icons show up, but mine does not. I double check the email address and it matches. Weird. Anyone else using Gravatar on an MT blog?

I also noticed that there is a wordpress plugin for mybloglog that does the same thing. I need to look at it and see how it is implemented. I think that might be too much for my meager perl skills to handle though.

Up Too Soon…

rmiles7721March 6, 2007Blogging, Parenting/Family

Seems like I just went to bed. Actually I was up about 3 AM and went back to bed about an hour ago. I sure didn’t want to get back out of bed again. Being home most of the day yesterday interrupted my routine. I’ve got three more days before I get a day off but I am ready for it now.

Today will be another fairly long day, as I have a bunch of stuff that should have been done yesterday to do. I still don’t know what kind of organizational changes they will be making over the next few weeks, but I do know it’s coming, so that is pretty stressful. Between that and desperately needing my vacation I just want to stay in bed for a few more hours.

Pete has softball practice tonight at 5:30 so I know that I will manage to get out of there before it is too terribly late, no matter what else I manage to get finished today.

I’m not making too much sense this morning (and it’s a good thing I have spellcheck) so I am going to quit while I am ahead but don’t forget to head over to the Battle of the Blogs today and cast your vote.