calepwhoward.com

My long lost ThinkPad t40 has finally been replaced by a refurbished t60. My friends at woot.com offered refurbished t60s with a docking station for the low price of $219 so I happily ordered one up. It arrived Friday and, after spending some time on the configuration, now dual boots Windoze XP SP3 and Ubuntu 11. I’m still installing a pile of XP updates so after that completes I’ll get Windoze 7 running and all will be right with the world again. I might even be able to forgive Zeek! now.

In my previous post I created a numbered (for you HTML types that would be an ordered) list of the tracks in my new spinning playlist. Unfortunately the ordered list HAD NO NUMBERS! By poking through the stylesheet I discovered that the stylesheet author had set the list style for items in an ordered list to NONE. I’ve updated the stylesheet (look at the previous post and you’ll now see numbers for the items in the numbered list – no way this accomplishment should be at all noteworthy). I’m sure I’ll find something in another post that now looks like total crap but until that time let me reiterate – wtf?

The media server build was rudely interrupted by ever-changing hardware standards. IDE has given way to ATA which has given way to SATA and I have foolishly followed along, buying new hard drives and controller cards to hammer in to my obsolete hardware. But my hard drive swap plans were derailed by the fact that I bought a modern hard drive that didn’t have a molex power plug on it. See this and you’ll understand why I genuinely hate computers. I can’t spin up my big-ass SATA hard drive because I need a $3.50 power adapter. Did I mention I hate computers?

Media storage has been the worst part of all the computer swapping I do. Each computer swap has created new challenges for me when it comes time to migrate my audio and video library from the old to the new. And in the case of Zeek! killing my beloved T40 the migration was even more complex because I had to transplant the hard drive into another machine to recover all the files that had changed between backups. So here I am again settling in to a new machine knowing that the computer swap will occur again in a few months when I complete my MBA and hand in the Baker-supplied laptop (no way I’m going to pay $450 for a two year old laptop!). So what to do? Reconfigure my media server to use a few idle SATA hard drives. Of course all this is easier said than done.

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It appeared that everyone stopped visiting my site in conjunction with the tansfer to godaddy.com. While I was saddened by the loss of visitors I also realize I haven’t been at all disciplined about updating the site. I know when I transferred the site that I configured everything properly and I thought I was simply no longer getting any visitors. After further investigation it turns out that the Google Analytics plug-in I installed had mysteriously disappeared. How do I know I installed it? Because when I reinstalled it my settings magically reappeared within the plug-in. Regardless I am now seeing visitor traffic! Have I mentioned that I hate computers?

This domain name was up for renewal and I just couldn’t bring myself to pay $35 to renew it with the previous registrar so I transferred it to godaddy for the odd sum of $7.19. After initiating the transfer I got a call from godaddy (from a real person) thanking me for the business and, of course, trying to sell me more services. All I got from my previous registrar was an e-mail offer to stay with them at a one-time renewal rate of $14.99. While that’s certainly better than $35 it wasn’t better than godaddy’s price (pretty amazing that I could do that math, huh?) so I deleted their e-mail. So, if you’re cheap and need to renew your domain name, you might give godaddy a try.

Sunday Zeek! killed my beloved t40. I was having my morning coffee when Dash decided to see why I wasn’t paying attention to him. I started petting him, which apparently upset Zeek! so he jumped up and knocked my coffee over onto my t40. It immediately shut down, never to reboot again. Fortunately my most recent backup was only a few day old so I didn’t lose much information. That was a great computer. R.I.P.

As I mentioned in an earlier post I set up google analytics on this site to get more familiar with the tool for my *real* job. They have a really cool feature that shows geographically where traffic comes from. While that in and of itself is cool I wanted to know why someone in Finland or Australia would be coming to my site. Well, I spent a little time with google analytics and discovered that I can see what keywords brought visitors to my site. So now I know the following:

• people in Finland want to know about my Kona Paddy Wagon’s fenders
• people in Australia want to know about my Miyata Valley Runner utility bike
• people in Oregon want help selecting the best grocery bag panniers

Google Analytics is a powerful tool. If you run a web site, add this and see why people come to your site.

My web host provides basic utilization information and I have been able to see, generally speaking, the activity on this site. But a couple of weeks ago I started running Google Analytics on another site with which I’m involved and it is AWESOME so GA is now running on this site.

While I’ve only had GA running on this site for a couple of days I can already see what’s bringing people to the site, how many visitors are actually stopping by, what they’re viewing, and a whole mess of other information. The Dashboard gives me a high-level view of all the activity occurring on the site and allows me to drill down on several categories of information. I’m not trying to increase visitors, sell advertising, or anything like that so for me the results largely don’t matter but for business site owners there’s no way this isn’t about the most meaningful set of web tools available.

Check it out!

Fedora’s already gone. While it was easy to install I could not get my Orinico Gold wifi card to activate. Unlike Ubuntu and the Ubuntu derivative Linux Mint, it saw the card during install and didn’t bark at me about “restricted drivers.” But in spite of the driver being installed I could not activate or configure the card, and more importantly, I could not find any answers on their forum. While Ubuntu has some warts at least it allows me to use my wifi card to connect.

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I’ve just completed a quick evaluation of several Linux distributions and have selected a successor to Ubuntu. The candidates were:

• LinuxMint 4.0
• Blag 70000
• Fedora 8

And the winner is…

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You would think after the Ubuntu 7.10 debacle I would learn my lesson about upgrading software. I updated WordPress this morning and now the search function is broken. I guess my Christmas present is chasing bugs. Merry Humbug.

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OK – a bit of research tells me that one of the plugins I’m running is breaking the site. Turns out the Event Calendar plugin isn’t compatible with the new version of WordPress so it is currently disabled. YaY for the WordPress forum!