Whatever

Going Postal

In more ways than one. I brought the style of the Post Office Galleries in line with the rest of the site. No need to visit them as there is nothing new there. Hard to believe that it has been about a year since I took any Post Office pictures. I stopped because the site that was the impetus for the pictures never even included any of the 15 pictures I sent them. Wasn’t just me, they never did do any updating at all. I kept at it, but have now run out of day trip Post Offices. Any others would require a more serious commitment. Maybe sometime in the future…

The Mozilla bug that causes partial page loading rears it’s ugly head in the PO Galleries in spite of my making sure the images have size numbers. (It probably isn’t a bug, so much as my ham-fisted coding, but whatever.)

But if you didn’t take yesterday’s hint, go visit the Miata Gallery as I did add 4 new pictures.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 60

Now What?

I finished making the Miata Gallery look like the rest of the site today. For whatever reason when sequentially running thru the large images in Mozilla it will load like half the image and stop. Hit refresh and it displays the whole page, but very annoying.

<UPDATE>
I think I fixed the Mozilla problem. I added the height and width attributes to all the images.
</UPDATE>

Next step, the Post Office Gallery(s).

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 59

My Funny Valentine

“Only” averaged 75 slices of Spam a day over the weekend. There were even a couple of virus infected ones on Friday. In honor of Valentine’s Day here are some of the love themed messages I received:

swap girls that are loose tonight from Weberlgfpq@elite.net

wedgecrummy@madtui.com promises Get a wild date

Not to be outdone aikgtwwpzb@astrosfan.net says meet your sexy dreamdate today

No matter who or what you are there is someone out there for you:
Fat girl needs to talk to someone from Woodsonmhoi@einsundeins.de
Fat boy needs to talk to a girl from Phillipsjzo@emirates.net.ae
Skinny boy needs to talk to someone from Arredondoaaxe@ioc.net

Whatever you weigh, it is still a good idea to Become a stud in bed according to BonitaRyanOxdd@P.com

Tokyo Taxi

Got the Japanese front license plate mounted this evening. A friend at work made up a mount out of 1/8 aluminum and bent it according to my fancy-schmancy AutoCAD drawing. According to Tim, he doesn’t do holes or windows, so I spent my lunchtime drilling the 4 mounting holes and the 2 plate mounting holes (both in the bracket and the plate.)

Tonight when I got home I painted the bare aluminum with some flat black paint that I last used to cover up the stock muffler, which for whatever reason, was plainly visible in the rear view of the car.

Although there are four holes in the mount, there are only three used to bolt it to the car. Because I didn’t want to have to disassemble nearly the entire front underbody plastic cladding to have unfettered access to the mounting points, I managed to only get two bolts in. After once again dropping the 3rd bolt on the third attempt, I gave up. Believe me when I say that 2 is more than sufficient to hold this little license plate and it’s bracket to the car. The things I took out were there to tie down the car to the deck of the ship that brought it over from Japan, one bolt would probably be enough…

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 17

33-04

That is the random number that was generated for my Japanese license plate. It has got a little squiggly in front and my class vehicle is 04, whatever they mean. I made a cardboard mock-up of the bracket tonight. Tomorrow I’ll see what I can do to have it made up.

The plate came via UPS yesterday, but writing about it was knocked off the front page by the exciting garage door spring incident. Total bill from Aiken Door Repair and Service to fix it today was $90.97. Cable $6, Spring $15, Pulley $3.50, Tax 1.47 and Labor $65. When the cable snapped and the spring contracted violently it got kind of mangled when it hit the backstop, so it needed to be replaced. The pulley bearing was worn out and they refused to say if it wobbling was the definitive cause of the cable rubbing and then breaking, but it could have been.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 16

Converting a Pivot Weblog to Movable Type

Last May I converted two of my blogs from Movable Type to Pivot, mostly because I was severing from frequent database crashes. I was stuck using the flat Berkley DB because of my web host and I thought a different blogging system would might help. Plus I like a challenge every once and a while. I had over two years worth of entries that I exported and easily imported into Pivot.

While mostly happy with Pivot, there a couple of things I didn’t like. The main one was I could never get a spell checker to work right when posting and boy do I need a spell checker. MT had so many more people developing applications for it and I longed for some of their plug-ins. Plus I now had a new web host that did allow MySQL DBs. It was time to change back to MT. Unfortunately this is not any way to easily export your Pivot entries in a form that Movable Type can import.

I searched the Pivot support forum with no luck. There were a few folks asking the same question, but no one had an answer. Here comes that challenge thing again, so I read the Movable Type manual for importing and I read their import file format pages which led to a series of steps that allowed me to convert my pivot weblog into one of Movable Type.

This procedure worked for me, your mileage may vary. It was fairly time consuming, I converted two separate instances of simple Pivot weblogs into one MT blog and it took most every waking hour of a full weekend.

Good luck.

Forced Night Off

Did you miss me? I missed you?

About 3:30 yesterday afternoon mr-miata.net disappeared off the face internet. Not only me, but everyone connected with me on whatever server that failed. The web site of my hosting service was long gone. When that happens I flash back to the ThatHostingCompany fiasco of April 2002. I can just feel it in my bones that they have gone under and taken my internet life with them. After several hours of absolutely nothing, by 7:00:00 pm I knew they were working on coming up from the depths. The hosting web site was back up, I still had no web sites, but I could see the files when I FTP’d in. This morning when I got up everything was back to normal. Whew.