Funny how these things run in cycles. Lately, almost all my link sharing and personal updates have been on Facebook, but I still give this as my home page. I don’t know if I should bow to actuality or start updating again here.

I recently hit the 3-year mark at Penobscot Community Health Care. I’m not sure, but I think that makes this my longest-held job, and definitely longest continuously-held job.

I’ve been playing in the Brewer Hometown Band for the past couple of years: last summer, I had the opportunity to conduct them, and last fall, I soloed in Clair W. Johnson’s “Autumn Caprice“.

Ael’s taken up trombone at school, and played in the Brewer Middle School Jazz Band as they won second place in their division statewide this year.

Hey, all (if anyone’s actually still reading this). Sorry I haven’t been updating lately: when I’ve had something to say, it’s typically been easier to comment on Twitter than to come up with a full post here. Also, I made the mistake of trying to keep things sane in a discussion about naming of Ireland-related articles over at Wikipedia — big mistake. :-)

Incidentally, I just upgraded to 2.8 final and re-enabled Redirection. Hope I didn’t break anything…

Categories were broken earlier, so I updated to the latest nightly build (11096) — now I’m having call-time pass-by-reference errors. Maybe it’s time to stop using the nightly builds and stick with the stable ones.

Edit: changed the theme to see if that would help. I can navigate by category now, at least, but I can’t change the (non-existent) title of this post.

Edit:Ok, it lied on me. The title did change.

Yesterday, I was getting internal errors after updating the blog, so I rolled back the changes — only to continue the errors. Today, it’s working fine.

<Barbarino>I’m so confused…</Barbarino>

Edit: for the record, I just updated to revision 10988, and it’s working fine.

Edit^2: but Redirection is still broken.

Sorry about not realizing the blog was down — I need to check consistently after I update to the latest bleeding-edge version. It appears there was an error in the Redirection plugin — disabling it brought the blog back so I could figure out what to do about it.

Update: I tried reinstalling the current version, 2.1.13, and got the error back, so if you’re seeing the same thing, wait for the next version.

I wasn’t keeping track of when the domain renewal was due, and it caught me between paydays. All fixed now, fortunately…

I found a wonderful Perl script to back up the databases behind my sites every night over at WorldCommunity.com. It’s been faithfully mailing me the files every night for a week now: I had been wondering what I was going to do with all that Google Apps mail space. :-)

When checking my email today, I saw that Dreamhost had billed my account for a year of hosting. Only problem was, my account didn’t expire until November.

Once I finally fought my way onto their site, I found that 11/12th of their customers were also trying to get there, as somebody had typoed the year while running their highly-reliable billing program.

I have removed my debit card info from their system: if the bank had actually put the charge through, which they somehow missed doing (?), I would have been in a fair world of hurt, as I live paycheck to paycheck. They are apologizing profusely — I’m waiting to see what they do to remedy things for people who miss mortgage payments and suchlike stuff because of this. I love the service I’ve been getting from them, but this is much more than a “whoops” moment.

Edit: I didn’t really express before what I thought of their professionalism in handling this. They didn’t hide behind “somebody screwed up” — the person who made the mistake came out and explained in detail how he came to that point. He also explained how they were going to change things so that it didn’t happen again, and managed to retain his sense of humor throughout. What other company would have quoted the line from their previous blog post about “we have new digs, so if you see your hosting bill mysteriously triple…”? Many commenters complained about the humorous pictures and the jokes: in retrospect (though not while I was in a financial panic), I think that’s an indication of more professionalism, not less.

Compare this to the typical response from Microsoft, for example. When M$ screws up, how long does it take them to admit it? And then to fix it? Admittedly, this isn’t fixed yet, but my account was credited back within about 12 hours.

It turned out that Sitemeter had “partnered” with another company to put tracking cookies on sites using their counter. Since that wasn’t part of the deal when I signed up with them, I’ll be using something else in the future.

One of the things I was looking forward to when moving webhosts was Apache’s mod_rewrite module, which just allowed me to flip from using URLs with the post number in them to ones with the date and post title in them. Much more convenient. :-)

So far, everything’s been pretty smooth. I’m currently working on switching my main site from FrontPage to Drupal. I found a nice theme for it: I just have to finish moving the content over, and cleaning up non-working code. :-)