I’ve been putting off upgrading all the local WordPress installations, and other than brief breaks for food, showering, and laundry, I’ve done nothing but upgrade WordPress installations for the last 12-plus hours. The sad thing is, I’ve still got about 15% of what’s left on the box to upgrade.

To be fair, it’s not a straight WP upgrade. I have a blend of plugins that I like to use, a way of keeping WP installs neat and orderly that I like, and also some general cruft cleanup that I’m doing with this. I also had found a couple installs that had egregiously escaped upgrade for a couple cycles now.

I thought I’d be done by 5:00 p.m. or so tonight. Then I thought I’d be done by dark. Now, I’m just going to quit before midnight and pick up tomorrow. I could go for a while longer, but I better not do that.

NASA’s initial plans for manned missions to the Moon and Mars have been leaked to the Orlando Sentinel. Doing this with two rockets is an interesting approach, but … I like it.

Well, another hurdle done. I scored high enough today to ensure a qualifying score to get into graduate school, no matter when my written essay comes back scored.

Not a bad use of my morning, if only as a recognition that my verbal skills were absolutely killed by my time in engineering school. I aced the quantitative part, which I wasn’t expecting to do. I’d hoped to ace the verbal, and I didn’t. Believe it or not, I was actually kinda mad at the verbal score. Oh well.

Back to work.

I’ve noticed that, over the last couple of weeks, I’ve caught comment spam outbreaks before they start by watching the same spammers try to hit my referral logs. I use Referrer Karma to keep my referral logs from becoming spam pits, which saves me from having to remove things manually. I’ve been finding, though, that I can seed my spam blacklist with just the base domain.tld being spammed, to good effect. I can additionally seed Spam Karma 2’s IP blacklist with the IPs used to attempt referral spamming, which helps matters as well.

I guess that my advice is to watch referral logs and see what URLs are being spammed today—with my sites, those are the URLs that’ll be attempting comment spam come tomorrow.

I may go have to sleep in my guest room tonight. I woke up an hour or so ago, thought something was weird, and looked up …

… to see that the board that secures my ceiling fan to the apex of the ceiling had come loose, meaning that the fan is hanging only by the electrical cord. [I'd take photos, but I don't want to turn the lights on the fan on and energize that circuit.] I hopped up in a panic, ran across the room, and turned off the fan.

As the fan spun down, I looked up at the board. Now, I don’t have a normal box connection that you see with fans to the ceiling because the fan is connected right in the apex of a steep ceiling that matches the pitch of the roof at that part of the house—there’s no “flat” for the connection. The builder had used a board, secured to the ceiling, to make the connection to the box.

The board was secured with … nails.

Yeah, that was real bright. Let’s use a fastening method that relies solely on compression of the surrounding material to provide a frictional and normal force to hold it in place, and then put a strong gravitational force in opposition to it … and then mount a rotating device to it.

Most anything that rotates, over time, does not do so uniformly. That wobble would have the effect of tugging side-to-side on that board, slowly but surely, on a daily basis.

I’d noticed that the fan was running a little roughly, but most ceiling fans do. NEVER IN MY LIFE would I dream that the builder was an idiot and used SIMPLE, COMMON NAILS to secure such a connection, when clearly screws or lag bolts were necessary.

What in the name of Norm Abram is going on here?!

The bad part is that sleeping without my fan on makes it stuffy and still in there. That, plus fear that the fan will fall even farther, is making it hard for me to sleep.

I start the GRE in seven hours.

GAH!

Three years ago, I joked about doing the Blogathon. This year, I’m not joking. I’ll be supporting Blood:Water Mission, which is seeking to bring HIV-free blood and clean drinking water to Africa.

I jokingly suggested this the other day on the Rumor Forum, and then … I just felt like I shouldn’t be joking about it. I fired an email off to Derek, and he told me that he’d support me. Derek’s been working with Blood:Water and raising money for them out on tour for some time now.

I would appreciate your support for Blood:Water, whether you donate through the Blogathon campaign that I’ve set up or directly on your own. If you do feel like you want to support me in this, do so with a link, some fun IMs while I spend next Saturday on a posting spree, and whatever other ways you can think of.

At least 48 posts in 24 hours? I can probably pull off 60. I’ll start my research this weekend so that I have some links at the ready for my perusal and postage when next Saturday rolls around.

As most of you know, I live in Alabama. My heart goes out to the family of Natalee Holloway. But I’m quite tired of all the missing folks that the television news networks choose to air being pretty white females, usually from middle- or upper-class families. It’s not just the pretty people with media savvy that should have their face shown up on the TV screen.

[Heck, shouldn't there be a network all about missing folks? Homebodies would totally eat that up, and the advertisers would probably pay for it. There's a niche there!]

Anyhow: Latoyia Figueroa is missing from West Philadelphia, best known as the home of the fictional Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Philadelphia Webloggers are trying to get her visibility up. As Scott McNulty notes, that Webloggers are trying to help get media attention to an issue is not the item of interest herehttp://blankbaby.typepad.com/blankbaby/2005/07/help_find_latoy.html—Webloggers do that all the time. It’s that Latoyia Figueroa is missing, and that her case needs as much attention and care as any other missing person’s case.

I’m not entirely sure what the outcome of lending a few small voices will be, but … it can’t hurt. Lend yours, if you feel so led.

Ed’s Birthday at Hooters (1 of 6)

Originally uploaded by gfmorris.

Today’s my boss’s birthday, so we took him to Hooters to embarrass him. It was his wife’s idea [as it is every year], because Ed likes the food but not the atmosphere. [He's just a restrained kinda guy.]

The boss’s wife—whom I’ve known longer than I’ve known my boss—brought balloons so everyone would know it was his birthday. As a result, the ladies of Hooters sang to him. I have photographic proof.

[Ed.: Huh. This posting-from-Flickr's kinda nifty, although it does crappy markup.]

On Monday, Lara and I went to Beauregard’s for dinner. I paid—I grab the check any chance I can, right Rick? ;)—and when the server came back to our table, she had two RFCU debit cards in her hand. I looked up, smiled, and gave her my last name so that she could not be confused. She handed me the bill, I signed it, and I pocketed the card without looking at it.

This morning, I went to the ATM on my way to work. I put my card in, entered my PIN, and … “Invalid PIN”. The heck? Well, my old PIN was one digit off of one of the street addresses of my old residences [and no, I'm not telling :)], and so I thought, “Maybe I did put it in wrong.” I re-entered the correct PIN and, “Invalid PIN”. I retrieved the card, which read … something other than my name.

YIKES! My mind raced back to the last time I’d used the card, and I instantly remembered the card transaction.

After lunch, I went to RFCU to go report the issue, hand over the other lady’s card, and check to make sure that my card hadn’t been used since then. It hadn’t, but then a confused look came over the [exceedingly cute and wedding-band-less] account representative’s face. She called Card Services, and … turns out that my card had been one of the ones possibly compromised a few weeks back in the big scare out in Arizona. I was told to check my mail for my new card, and that my old one would just be closed out immediately. I went through the teller line, got the cash I’d tried to get this morning, and went back to the office.

When I got back to the office, I went through the pile of mail in the seat of my truck that I had only given a once-over previously, and … there sat an envelope from the credit union with my new card.

Once again, I am far luckier than I deserve to be …

In order to fully understand the depth of my psychosis, I’ve put every episode of Law & Order into my local install of Tasks and marked off everything that I know I’ve watched.

There’s something strangely satisfying in that. And yes, I’m a geek.

Michael Heileman seems to think that it must be frustrating to work in the space program and send someone else to orbit. As an employee of a NASA contractor, I wholeheartedly disagree … and if you’d been sitting in the room where I was, watching the launch on a really grainy TV [over-the-air signal + TV as old as I am + metal building = not being able to read the countdown clock :lol:], you’d have understood. We held a lot of breath this morning.

There was no big celebration, either. No high fives, no happy dances. Just a feeling of satisfaction, and then a desire to get back to work.

It’s a damn shame, though, that we in the contractor community don’t stop, take a breath, and watch every launch and landing as a team. We really should. I have my corrective action for our next status meeting.

Me: “No. They haven’t cut the engines off yet.”

Misty: “Oh, I thought you would’ve been doing a dance yet.”

“I don’t dance until they’re really and truly up there.”

But they’re really and truly up there.

God speed, Discovery. Tell Sergei and John howdy.

We’re back.

Locals: You know who you are. Don’t you ever put up a billboard to try to get me a date. I will first torch the billboard, then I will take really drastic actions.

Was ESPN.com absolutely borked for anyone else today around 2:00 p.m. Central Daylight Time?

[Okay, so I wanted a cheap excuse to kick the tires on my Flickr account.]

For those of you who’ve been scarfing down my copies of Malcolm Gladwell-ian goodness, you may be interested in this interview with him by Powell’s.

I think the most interesting bit of the interview, for me, was this:

I don’t know if in my lifetime I will witness a social transformation as inexplicable and as dramatic as that. We took a city that was obsessed with crime, and in three years we removed crime and the obsession with it. People do not talk about crime anymore in middle class New York. Even in areas that were once deemed to be completely overwhelmed with crime, the fabric of everyday life has changed in ways that would blow you away. And that happened in three years. It’s extraordinary. It’s our version of the Berlin Wall falling. I still have not gotten over it.

I’ve been watching a lot of Law & Order, and I’ve noticed that, too. The show has had to evolve in what crime it covers it and how New Yorkers are portrayed as the city’s changed. Just go watch some show from the first three seasons and be thrown into the way-back machine.

Who has what book? I just know it ain’t at my house. [I just want the goodness to spread. I'm fine if they don't come back to my possession for a year or so.]

[HT to Brendon Bushman.]

With a little digging—it’s nice when your community has its own Web site—I did find out that trash pickup is Monday and Thursday. My pile literally just went in the truck. Dunno why I’ve seen irregularities in that, though. At least my system isn’t as Byzantine as Grant’s.

Now, if I could only figure out why I’ve yet to get a water bill, I’d be golden.

It ain’t as hot here as it was in, say, Chicago—sorry, Mark!—but it’s darn hot here. I was at Wal*Mart at 2130, and the thermometer at the closest bank read 89F. Now, it’s dropped 12F in the last 90 minutes or so—the cloud cover finally broke—but still … phew.

July hasn’t been that hot. I’m afraid that August is going to make up for it. In any way … time to get these bones to bed. You may commence telling me how it’s hotter where you are in the comments.

You know you’re hockey-addled when you’re watching regular-season games from February between two NCAA teams [UMich and Sparty] that you don’t even begin to care about.

LET’S PLAY HOCKEY!

Oh, and it’s still ten weeks from the start of UAH’s hockey season. :twitch:

I like most of the NHL’s new rules changes, save the stupid shoot-out thing. Ties are a part of hockey, like pitchers hitting in the NL. But it’s all good.

Yay for tag-up offsides and no two-line passes!

All these years, I’d hoped that WordPress would start versioning like Mozilla did: point releases, with major milestones getting a first-digit change. Instead, WP went from 0.72 to [I believe] 1.0, then to 1.2 [with a couple minor revs], then to 1.5 [with all the silly revs since then].

Now, Mozilla will version like WordPress. Why not just generate version numbers with a random number generator, and only accept the random result if it’s higher than the last number you had? John Wilson could code up such a script in 35 seconds, and Gareth Watts could have a version outputting for all SourceForge projects in a half-day, tops.

Le sigh.

Alex and Scott have grown FeedLounge to the point where they have inducted a third wave of alpha users. From the first wave, I welcome you. [Especially Stephen.]

For everyone who’s never used a Web-based aggregator before, I’ve got to talk about polling for a second. No shared aggregator is ever going to be able to poll feeds as often as you’d like them polled. Any shared-services aggregator is going to poll no more often than every thirty minutes, as that seems to be the industry standard that everyone’s come to in terms of how often a feed should be polled by a single resource.

Now, FeedLounge is set up to use an algorithm for its polling schedule that, in my mind, does the job:

• We take the average time between posts for each feed and update the feed at twice that interval. If a feed has a new item every 8 hours, we update the feed every 4 hours. New feeds are updated every 4 hours until the average posting time is determined.
• No feed is updated more often than every 30 minutes.
• No feed is updated less frequently than every 48 hours.

To my way of thinking, that scales better than the way that, presently, BlogLines chooses to update their feeds, polling hourly. Feeds that are updated more frequently—say, Gizmodo—will show new items to you more often. For those high-volume feeds, you’ll actually be fresher than Bloglines.

For feeds that post far less frequently—like, say, GFMorris.com—the polling may only happen every 48 hours. Does this mean that you won’t always be on the bleeding edge with these feed sources? Yes. But when you consider the bandwidth we’re saving FeedLounge is saving, not only on their part but on the part of the independent content producers, we’re doing everyone a favor.

While this might be a letdown for some of you, especially those of you coming from a client-side aggregator where you’re used to feeds being polled on demand, it’s a design decision that simply must be made. Alex and Scott, however, have made a number of other design decisions that are really exciting and just as intelligent as their feed-polling algorithm. Those are the features that I think that you’ll really enjoy.

Any system is going to have tradeoffs and boundary cases. It’s my hope—because I want to see FeedLounge succeed—that you’ll understand and appreciate those tradeoffs and enjoy the service for what it is and what it can become. I know that I’m a very happy FeedLounger; I’ve been using it for six weeks, and I can’t even begin to remember what my old feed-reading workflow was.

If you’ve looked at my Audioscrobbler output, you’ll see that I’ve had Sufjan Stevens’s Illinois on just about constantly since I got it.

And every time that something like “The Seer’s Tower” comes on and I get halfway through it and think, “Man, this is such a great song, but it’s so depressing-sounding, and … I’m trying to work here … and …”—”Decatur, or Round of Applause for Your Step Mother!” follows it, and … life is good again.

Sufjan definitely has his hook buried deeply in my cheek with this one. It’s really hard for me to describe it, because I’m still in the process of absorbing it all.

I was doing some SQL cleanup this morning, and I probably shouldn’t have been. :sigh: Anyhow, I seem to have broken the site for Web consumption, but if you’re aggregating, you see the content.

I’m working on it.

I really hate comptuers.

Update: I fixed it. I’m an idiot.

Looks like we’ll launch Tuesday. Maybe.

I always knew bad grounding and bonding practices were gonna bite us at some point …

You know, I really do wish that I could get a feel for the trash pickup here. I’m pretty sure that PJ told me Mondays and Thursdays, and in watch other folks’ habits, that seems to be the way it works, but … it just doesn’t seem like it happens those days. Last week, folks—including me!—had stuff out on Monday morning. Pickups didn’t happen until Thursday.

This week, people set stuff out on Monday. [I, however, suffered from a critical confluence of the dumbass and oversleeping, and failed to get my stuff to the curb before it'd already been picked up.] Things seemed to disappear during the day. That would probably make it pickup time again today, but … man. I think I heard the truck run at 0600, which it’s never seemed to do before.

I’ll get this rhythm at some point. Maybe. I’m not real good with rhythm—if you’ve ever seen me “dance”, you know that this is so true. [And speaking of rhythms, my sleep rhythm is screwy because ... well, it's me. That, and I took melatonin last night, but I didn't take it until 2330 or so, which means I'm still way sluggish, even though I've been awake and sitting here at the computer for 45 minutes.]

Feh. Time to go spasmodically start my day.