Sometime life is so ironic. I was planning to visit my folks this weekend but my cat kookie decided it would be best for me to stay home and deal with his infected eye. Instead of getting better after visiting the vet on Wednesday, the poor feline's eye was only getting cloudier on Saturday. The vet gave me additional instructions. Meaning more frequent applications of eye irrigation and eye ointment.
Now both of my feline roommates are very well behaved and docile animals. This however matters little when the animal does not understand that the "treatment" going to benefit him. His only though it "God gave me claws, you are not putting that stuff on my eye!"..
I have found that the only method I can deal with the furry spastic fearful ball of fur is to toss the poor little bugger into a military laundry bag. The draw string allows just enough cloth to bunch up around his neck so that he can't get those claws into me and ruin another set of pants but not tight tnough to choke him or bind his neck. He is actually adapting well to this new 5 time per day ritual. He hasn't hissed and growled since Saturday now.
Enough on the kittie for now. I am pleased to say that his eye is actually clearing up and looks completely normal at the time of this draft. Since the regime of pet care was going to keep me close to home and I had a long weekend I thought I would take advantage of the situation. I had been putting off some server side stuff for far too long. I decided it was time to upgrade my Movable Type and revamp The Lumpcast Home Page.
The upgrade itself went well and was not even close to the reason I had put it off so long. Lumpy has been using Movable Type since version 1.something. The avoidance was because I needed to do some serious learning about how the newer versions used templates. This personal home page has had a good bit of template hacking done to it over the years. The long and the short is that my old modifications do not play very nice with 4.0 or 4.1.
That being said, I still had no idea where to start. I though it might be best to scrap out the lumpcast blog and start over with default templates and styles. I will not bore you with the details but things went well until...It took me a few hours with the documentation and examining various templates before I could even safely get started. The first thing I did of course was, just in case, FTP copied my entire web site. Then I was ready to begin. I figured out the three colum lay out and liked the look of the minimalist grey style sheet so much that I did not modify it at all. Then I decided to capitalize on the widgets. I began creating them like crazy and then arrive until...
My XP machine suddenly decided to reboot. Yeah as in it just shut off and started back up again. No problem I thought, I use notepad++ and save sessions like crazy. I also ooggle the session manager of firefox in such situations. Good nothing was dorked on my end. The cruel hand of Fate was still going to smack my backside though. Some how every single widget on my server was now a three loop iteration of the archives! The goddess then went for the head shot when I realized that every time I re-published the site, I lost my style sheet.
I was not happy. It was, however, not for naught. I save everything. I did have to repeat all the modifications I did the previous three hours though but I did manage to get it up and running. Let me know what you think of it.
The next logical step was to actually produce a podcast. Off to Pod Safe Music Network I went. I was in the mood for something jazzy/bluesy. I was also in one of my particularly selective moods. I spent a few hours sampling songs but found easily found enough material.
Despite every possible sound setting on my Ubuntu machine, I could not get Audacity to record my USB headset. This is really odd since I have used the same set on the same PC before. The only difference is that I upgraded to the newer version of Ubuntu Studio. By the time I coped out on using the ubuntu box and switched to the old dependable ME machine, I had lost my voice because my sinuses had acted up. Oh well the show notes are done and my voice will come back.
