A Dixie Carpetbagger

QUARANTINE AREA – CONTAGIOUS DISEASE

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So, it’s my spring break, and it’s finally sunny here.  Too bad I’m sick.  The 1-2-3 punch of ear infection – sinus infection – allergies has left me a coughing, hacking derelict. If it wasn’t for the decongestant cough syrup, I’d be in bed.  Heck, I think I’ll go back to bed anyway.  As soon as I catch up on my blog reading.

Finally, the evil Big Gun Companies are sending out those wheelbarrows full of cash!  Maybe I’ll get mine soon– I’ve been shilling spreading the word for a while now…

Imagine what you could buy with all that money… like a few items off the dollar menu at your local McWhata King, or half a book of stamps.

(H/T Uncle)

For fun, and so I can editorialize.  (Hey, I blog, it’s what I do…)

“25 wssm upper”  You’ve given me three words, I’ll give you three:  ABANDON ALL HOPE.  An upper in .25 WSSM costs almost as much (or more) as one in .450 Bushmaster.  Also, hope you like Olympic Arms… because I don’t think anybody else makes uppers in this caliber.

“is charlie crist a carpetbagger”  No.  While he is from the North, the carpetbaggers came to the South for good reasons.

“damnation alley shower scene”  Err… shower scene?  Not that I know of, and isn’t the cast almost all gu… oh.

“6.8 spc for hunting black bear”  Not unless you like going mano-a-ursa with an angry black bear.

“sellier & bellot lcp”  S&B ammo works very well in a LCP.  So far, besides Winchester and Speer , S&B is all my LCP has gone through.

“insomnia is fun”  For the first 24 hours.  The nest 24?  Not so much.

“p-64 for self defence”  Rates right around the same place as a LCP– 9×18 fits between .380 ACP and 9×19 in power.  In short, a little more power than a .380 ACP, buts still more concealable than most 9mm pistols.

Okay, I finally am catching up on everything.

The (not so) long version is that my PC got a very nasty infection.  Multiple Trojans, multiple viruses… core Windows components (task manager and the login manager to name a few) became unstable, and I had to do some serious work on the machine.  New hard drive,  new video card,  stepped up to Windows 7, and threw in some more memory.

The upside?  Machine acts almost new again.  The downside?  Not only am I having to play catch-up, I’m having to learn how to use a new operating system… and Windows 7 is more like Mac OS X than Windows XP.  (Want proof? Here’s a screenshot.) I halfway expect my DVD drive to eject if I drag its icon into the trash.  Everything is there… it’s just… different.  Even Paint and Solitaire are different.

So, expect the writing to pick up.  However, I did lose my bookmarks file during the whole crash-a-rama on the old machine, so I lost 6 months of bookmarks.  Note to self: backup more often.

I’m still alive.  Just encountered a bit of a virus problem.  Ended up just upgrading– it was time, and I want to slag the hard drive that the infection was on.  Literally.

Observations:

Windows 7 is awesome.  Installed in less than 30 minutes, very user friendly, and secure.  But it does cost an arm and a leg.  Also, 64 bit OSes (in spite of all their flaws) are here to stay.

Onboard sound has become viable.  The sound on my Gigabyte motherboard is better than the Audigy 2 that I just yanked.  7.1 vs. 5.1, better clarity, and it’s pushing a stronger signal.

Creative can go take a run at a galloping goose.  In the past 4 1/2 years, I’ve worked on my PC over a dozen times, and every single time, the Audigy has worked its way loose, and refused to seat without hard pressure.  Which I why I now am using the onboard sound.

While the Radeon HD 5770 is shorter than the old 7800 GTX, it’s wider.  Wide enough that it’s in the second PCI-E x16 slot… the memory slots are in the way of the first PCI-E slot.  Awesome performance, but the fans at speed are… well, it reminds me of a jet engine.

It’s now snowing.  In the Florida Panhandle.  I have food and water, spare propane, and I have chosen which of my housemates I will eat if the canned ham doesn’t hold out until spring next week.  Our Sheriff even called an let us know that we needed to make our peace, because most of us won’t make it.  If this place goes silent, you know that even cannibalism wasn’t enough.

Our only hope now is that Al Gore repents– otherwise, we’re doomed.

(Yes, this is entirely sarcastic.  Except for the phone call, he actually did call and say that nobody needed to be on the roads.  And that we needed to stock up on food.  Which would require us to drive to the store.)

… never name a post after a movie again.  Seriously.  The 300 post is now getting 90% of the spam.

I’m still around.  I’ve just been stuck in my house, with tons of classwork to do… mostly SQL work.

On the plus side, I now understand this comic.

Every other region has blog meets.  Why not the South/Southeast?

Too spread out, or what?  Not enough bloggers in the area?  (Heck, it seems like if you threw a rock in Indiana or the Midwest, you’d hit a gun blogger…)

Found out why WordPress had been acting so screwy.  Apparently, the 2.9 upgrade messed with an old portion of the code… that handled timekeeping and scheduling.  Combine this with the fact that Wordpress assigns each scheduled post a unique cronjob…

So, in essence, every scheduled post has a timer that looks at the UNIX time, counts down to zero, and then publishes the post.  Unless you just piddled with the timekeeping code, in which case, each timer never reaches zero.  This means that the timer goes away (having passed the time it was set to execute), leaving a post with a publish date set to FUTURE.

The plugin I added takes care of this two ways.  It fixes the code, so that the timer actually executes, and it has a SQL query that looks for posts with a status of “scheduled/missed schedule” and a post time that has passed, and then posts them.  Belt and suspenders.