Shadowscope

I so didn’t want to drag my sorry ass out of bed this morning. Have you heard the old saying If You’re Gonna Play, You’ve Gotta Pay? I am paying the piper this morning. Not that I got trashed or anything. I had a grand total of one beer last night. I don’t do any kind of serious drinking on work nights. No, I am just tired as hell. I was up at the usual time yesterday and ended up getting in from Atlanta shortly after midnight, going to be a little closer to one, so I have pretty much been up for two days now with a four hour nap in between.

Had a pretty darn good time though. A couple of the usual suspects showed up to observe Velociman pass through town like the migration of a rare bird, even Kelley and Key drove down. I had the opportunity to also meet John Cox as well. New blood. Good conversation, good beer, although Key had some sort of pink martini combination that I would definitely have to shy away from. It would be much too easy to slurp those down.

The drive was somewhat interesting for me as well. Driving in to Atlanta I went across the top end and cut up Roswell Rd and then down Windsor Parkway. What’s interesting is the fact that there are some really beautiful houses down Windsor Parkway. The last time I drove down that road was 25 years ago. At that time the area between Peachtree Dunwoody and Brookhaven was affectionately knows as Nick St or Nicklebag Alley. You get the general idea. Slums, plenty of houses falling in. Pull up at a couple of certain stop signs and four or five black guys would run out to the car if your window was down and try to sell you a nickle bag, which of course was $5 at that time. Woe to the unwary traveler who was not familiar with the area. When you pull up at a stop sign and have several black kids run at your car from all directions the first reaction most normal people have is either to hit the gas and get the fuck out, or roll up the windows and lock the doors so quick that your head would spin. I suppose every locale has it’s own Nick St, or at least they used to. I don’t know anymore, maybe it’s hidden a bit better now.

Anyway, all of the falling in tenements have been replaced with small fortresses and tiny mansions more akin to the Brookhaven area. There are still a few of the houses that were there two decades ago, but most of them are gone.

Heading home I took the fastest route, straight down Druid Hills to 85 South and out I-20 west. The problem with driving home late at night when I am already tired, in addition to my night vision sucking so bad is the fact that after having lived in West Georgia for 18 years I find I am scared of traffic. I grew up in Atlanta. It was nothing to run across five lanes of traffic to catch a bus, or drive doing 90 MPH around the Atlanta International Speedway, officially known as I-285. If you’re not doing at least 75 you are slowing down traffic. And those fuckers don’t just drive fast either. They swerve around all of the other cars bobbing in and out of lanes so close to each other it would make Don Garlit proud. Even though I spent three years commuting from out here to Norcross every day until 2003 I am not used to it anymore. I white-knuckled it the entire way out of Atlanta.

Working on my second cup off coffee now and I am starting to wake up a bit in the time it has taken me to write this and correct the typos. Spelling only folks, the grammar will just be fucked forever. Forgive me but no amount of schooling can take away from 40 years of redneck living particularly when the last 21 has been working at my particular choice of careers.

I had originally planned on staying home last night and pumping out about fifteen or twenty paid posts and twice that of normal stuff and then do my paperwork for the meeting this afternoon, but that rare bird of prey Shit Mummage Man was calling and sometimes the call of relaxation and good company just cannot be ignored.

It’s now about six, so I have to hop int he shower and head my happy ass off to boss people around again. It’s also meeting day for the retarded folks that I work with. I shall return, but a bit later today unless I get some good pics between now and then.

Yesterday sucked much more than I thought it would. 90% of it was my attitude I am sure but it ended up being just one of those fucking days. My cook never showed up and it was pretty busy so I was pretty much chained to one store yesterday. It did have the side benefit of making sure that I saved a bit of money yesterday which is a good thing, but I damn sure wasn’t happy about it. I ended up not getting out of there until Five O’ Clock or somewhere around there.

I was staffed the rest of the day but I spent several hours trying to find help for my other two stores as they were both hung on the evening shift. One of them got covered and was able to go home, but the other manager ended up having to work a double. Considering how much out of line he is with expenditures he needed to work a double anyway.

Now that I am starting to wake up I can’t really remember any of the reasons as to why I had such a bad day. Sometimes life is just funny like that I suppose. It sure did seem like everything was crappy yesterday, but now none of it seems particularly important.

As I said in the last post I am in the process of upgrading to Movabletype 4 Beta 7. If this thing gets posted prior to 6AM then I suppose the upgrade went fine. I was looking through the change log and it looks like they got one of my problems fixed.

54585: Pages can not be published dynamically
FIXED: Page could not be correctly published dynamically (some conditional tags may worked wrongly). The bug has been fixed.

That’s a good deal and it’s one of the issues that I was having. Hopefully some of the other little nagging bugs have been fixed as well.

I am pretty much all over the place this morning, but don’t really have anything of import to post, just rambling. Some days I am just not in the mood to post and it seems as though I have to force myself to sit down and write. Today is one of those. Of course I may end up posting even more tonight when all is said and done.

Last night I posted about the hits that I am getting for people looking for Deathly Hallows Spoilers. Apparently I am currently #12 for the google search “Deathly Hallows Spoilers“. Not that it matters a whole heck of a lot but the extra traffic is nice because some of those folks hang around to see what the site is about and then come back again. The rest of them go to Harvey’s Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Spoiler page or they click on one of the Google ads

Received an email yesterday that I just now read. It’s from Odiogo and apparently somebody saw my post about integrating Odiogo into Movabletype and have some code up for it now. I’ve looked through it and don’t know how well it will work with MT 4 but I will try and implement it this afternoon if I get home at a decent time.

Hopefully this upgrade will finish uploading in the next few minutes. I have been typing this as my FTP client uploads because I have to CHMOD a few files as soon as it finishes, before I can start getting ready for work, otherwise the site will be broken until I get home. Can’t have that can we 🙂

I use an offline editor to write up most of my blog entries, thus the fact that I can write this while it’s running. I have tried the online one, and it’s great for adding stuff like google ads or other bits of code that would get changed around a bit inside my editor, but for the most part I dislike the online editor in MT or with Blogger for that matter. I much prefer a text editor that will connect and upload when I am ready for it. It makes it much easier for me to write several posts and then publish them when I want. I don’t guess it makes much difference either way but this is what I am most comfortable with.

It’s all done now and so far everything seems to be working OK. Have to get ready for work…

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