I have uploaded and activated my Now Playing plugin for WordPress. I didn’t finish it completely, but it’s good enough for now. I will update it once the rest of the features are finished. I was originally going to remove the daily play history archive, but I’ve decided put it back in because the new server has no problem at all with the page load speed. See it here.
Swine Flu
November 5th, 2009No, I don’t have it, at least not that I know of. It’s possible that I have caught it sometime this year, but it’s just like a regular flu, so it’s hard to tell. I’m really surprised by the panic and hysteria surrounding this virus. It’s no worse than a regular flu — it’s just a new strain, so less people are immune to it. The real danger is for those who never have the flu, since they don’t have any sort of immunity to flu viruses, and they don’t know how to deal with them. I don’t have to worry about that. 
It’s really amazing how people are waiting in line for hours for the vaccine. The media really did a good job on them. Of course, the pharmaceutical companies are big time advertisers for them, so that’s not really surprising…
Now, instead of spending hours in line waiting for the vaccine, people should be doing their research and reading the truth about the vaccine and the swine flu itself. The vaccine doesn’t work. No flu vaccine ever has been effective against any strain of flu, and they’ve been making them for decades. Not to mention that contents of the vaccines are more likely to cause harm than good. The irony is that people are afraid of the mercury in compact fluorescent light bulbs, for example, but they get mercury injected right into their bodies with these vaccines.
Beavers and Books
October 30th, 2009I took a nap last night. That’s something that I’ve done a lot of this week — I’ve been so tired — and when I got back my desk, everything was fine… but not for long. After just few minutes, the internet connection became dead. Although it was still connected, nothing was getting through. I then disconnected manually, tried to reconnect, but it wouldn’t let me connect again for about 5 hours. So I was forced to go without the internet for 5 hours. That was fun.
So, I guess the Bell beavers built a dam with the wires again. It was down from 11:45 PM or so, until 4:45AM. This happens from time to time, although I try not to think about it because I really hate it. It’s worse to have the whole connection down than to have the routing issues I’ve had not so long ago; at least then I was able to go to some sites in the meantime.
I realized that I still haven’t read most of the books I got about a year ago, so I will have to try to read them soon. I have been reading a few things I found on the Project Gutenberg website, though. It feels more natural to me to read on a computer screen than to fight with the pages of a book.
Windows 7 – Part 2
October 25th, 2009Well, I did in fact finish the installation of Windows 7 this time. And everything went smoothly, for the most part. The only problem was that after it was finished with the upgrade, the Toshiba Upgrade Assistant didn’t reappear before I restarted the computer a few times. After that, it worked again and installed all but one of the drivers and program updates. The JMicron card reader driver failed to install, and there was no way to retry or do anything to correct that. I can probably find the driver and install it manually, but I don’t really need it anyway.
So, in the end, I do like Windows 7 better than Vista, but it took a while to do the upgrade. No problems with Windows 7 itself, so far so good. 
Windows 7
October 25th, 2009I got Windows 7 yesterday. I had preordered it from Amazon.ca during the upgrade promotion they had during the summer. I got it for the new notebook that came with Windows Vista. I tried installing it early this morning, by using the Toshiba Upgrade Assistant — which seemed like a very helpful utility — but it didn’t go quite as well as I had expected. One major problem was that it took all the time I had set aside for the upgrade just to download the drivers and software updates that it suggested to download for Windows 7 before the upgrade. Very slow download speed from those servers. I understand that it might have been quite busy and that slowed down the downloads, but it was not during peak hours. I would guess that it took about 3 or 4 hours to download the files, which could have been only about 30 minutes at a more normal speed. And then when it was finally finished downloading, it suggested to uninstall some programs, which in the end corrupted the DVD-RAM drive’s driver, rendering it unusable. So I had to get it working again before I could install Windows 7, but it was about 6:30AM by the time I got it working again and able to read the Windows 7 disc, so I decided to go to bed.
I will finish the installation in the morning, if I don’t run into more problems. Stay tuned for part 2 of this adventure.
Happenings
October 23rd, 2009Well, the new server is working out well. I decided to clean up a lot of the old site’s pages, by deleting them, so the now playing section will give out 404 errors for now. I’m working on a replacement for it at the moment, and it should be finished in a few days. I got tired of all the bots attacking it, and it doesn’t follow the new site design anyway. The new now playing section will be a WordPress plugin, so that will look better. Yep, I figured out how to make one of those myself. And it will be just like a regular numbered WordPress page, so it should keep the attack bots away, because they usually are looking for the words “playing” or “nowplaying” in the file name.
WordPress had another update this week. I was starting to wonder when the next one would be, since it had been longer than usual. And now all but one of the spam comments have been in Russian since the server switch, and there have been plenty of them this week. Strange.
Other than that, things have been a bit difficult for me this week in terms of my health. I was very depressed on Tuesday, then I really didn’t feel well on Wednesday (nausea), and I slept through most of Thursday. And all this on top of having cold symptoms almost every day. Yep, I still catch a cold pretty much every week. 
Good as Dead
October 21st, 2009I received Grady’s new album, Good as Dead, today from Amazon.ca. I have to say that it’s quite good, but my favorite Grady album will probably remain “A Cup of Cold Poison”.
Good as Dead album cover
Server Upgrade
October 20th, 2009I decided to replace the hard drive in the web server. It went okay at first, but the drive disappeared after I cloned the old drive to it. Oddly enough, the BIOS wasn’t able to handle the size of the drive. I was pretty sure that I had updated it for 48-bit LBA, but that was many years ago. I found a newer Beta BIOS from 2002 — which is the last one made for that motherboard. I wonder why they didn’t make the final version of it in 7 years… After that was done, the drive wouldn’t let the machine boot. Blue screens every time. It seemed to be working better before the update.
I managed to get the machine to boot after removing the drive, booting without it, then reinstalling it. It booted after that. Now I’m not sure if I can trust that drive, it seems unstable.
So, the solution was to set up Apache, MySQL, etc. on Meteor, and now it’s the web server. Everything transferred smoothly, almost as if nothing happened, even after a major upgrade to the MySQL server. It took some reconfiguring, but it was worth it. The speed difference is amazing. 
New CDs
October 10th, 2009I received some new CDs yesterday from Amazon.ca.
CDs:
- Vancouver – Matthew Good
- Born on the First of July – Chixdiggit!
- Hints Allegations and Things Left Unsaid – Collective Soul
Other than that, everything has pretty much been the same as usual, although I became depressed at times, and more so than usual.
Quiet
October 1st, 2009Things have been quieter this week. There was much less Spam this week. So that’s good, but it does, however, leave me without any scams to make fun of.
I worked a bit on my stories, finally making some progress, and I also played guitar and bass, as usual.
One strange thing happened. ICQ disconnected everyone, including me, at exactly midnight today, October 1st. Literally, just as the clock struck twelve. Very strange. The outage only lasted a few minutes, though.
I got a couple of new DVDs:
- The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
- The French Connection