/dev/zero

Playing around with iTunes, I visited the web site and saw a “free download”. I decided, what the heck? and clicked on it. It’s free; I might find a new artist I like.
I’d never actually used the iTunes “store” before, so I had to fill out all the new account info (even though I had an account with Apple already, it seems.)
Part of completeing account set up is to give credit card info. OK, Apple is fairly reputable and I might want to buy something from them at some point. Problem is I only have 2 credit cards and their both debit cards: Paypal and my BofA check card. The Paypal account has a zero balance and the BofA card was canceled (see 220).
Well, the Paypal card is still valid, even if I can’t actually charge anything to it right now, and I don’t intend to actually buy anything this visit, so I put that one in.
It keeps giving me an error that the security code (the 3 digit number on the back of the card) is wrong. I tried several times (the code entered is what’s printed on the card. i double checked all the other numbers, my billing address, etc. All correct.) It still insisted the security code is wrong.
So I tried the BofA card. Not surprisingly it didn’t work, but oddly the same error message: bad security code.
I logged into Paypal to check my account and low and behold, there’s a half dozen attempts by apple.com to charge $1.00, all refused of course. The attempt to charge $1.00 to the card to verify it isn’t surprising. It’s a common enough verification technique. The part that’s annoying is that no where on Apple’s page does it tell you they’re going to do this! Not only do they charge you $1.00 to “verify” your credit card and not tell you, they give you a bogus response when it doesn’t work. It SHOULD tell you your card has been denied.
Stupid, stupid design, even dumber documentation.
Oh, and because I can’t give them a working credit card, I can’t complete registration to download a FREE music file. Stupid.

Does anyone know how to get the “detect music” feature of Zempt to work with iTunes?
I had the plugin for Media Player installed, but never quite got it to work right.

So it seems with the upgrade to MT 3.11 and the issues I had with dynamic regeneration and LJCrosspost, it’s now putting a “read more” link on all my LJ posts, even when there isn’t an extended entry.
Looks like I’ll have to tweak my templates a bit.

Tonight I made Chicken Breasts Chasseur for dinner.
After dinner, as was washing the dishes and Mom was putting away the leftovers, she looked at what was left of the chasseur sauce and asked if I really expected those mushrooms to still be there in the morning. “Whether you have that second chicken breast for lunch tomorrow or I do, I expect the sauce will still be there to cover it.”
One of the mushrooms “somehow escaped into (her) mouth” as she was putting them away, she declared.
Sigh. My mother. The ’shroom addict.

And like all upgrades, it didn’t exactly go smoothly.
I like the new “dynamic” feature, along with support for PHP. Not that I actually know PHP, but it’s nice that it’s there.
In order to activate the “dynamic” feature, I had to convert back to MySQL from db. Luckily they included a nice script that migrates the data for you so you. When I converted FROM MySQL to db, I had to rebuild much of this blog, as it lost all the template settings and so on. Luckily I associate all my custom templates with files on the unix file system, so the templates themselves weren’t lost, just the information to use them. Going back the other direction would have been a pain but for this script.
After making the conversion and activiating dynamic page building, I find it doesn’t work quite as advertised. The main index page will NOT work dynamicly, despite being correctly configured. All other pages work OK, but for some reason not the master index.
It also broke LJCrosspost. Apparently the dynamic page building uses a “Smarty” class of some kind that doesn’t understand the LJ plugin. Converting my individual entry archives back to static fixed this problem, so LJ is updating properly.
Eventually I want to figure out how to do custom category archive pages, so I can use a “LJ” category and only entries in that category get cross-posted to LJ. I know it can be done; I just haven’t found it in the documentation.
The other nice part of upgrading to 3.11 is that MT-Blacklist 2.0 works with it. I haven’t received a single blog spam since the upgrade.

I hear that’s an old adage in the medical circuit. It applies in computer science / IT as well.
Yesterday our cable connection went down. My router couldn’t get an IP address from the cable network. My laptop suddenly wouldn’t get an IP address from the router. I tried connecting my Linux server’s second Ethernet interface directly to the cable modem and configuring it to use DHCP. It couldn’t get an IP address.
I called Comcast. They insisted that I take the router out of the loop and connect my laptop (Windows XP) directly to the modem. No good. Didn’t work. “Your modem is just fine. Try reinstalling your ethernet interface drivers.” Sure, blame it on the customer’s equipment. Blame it on Windows. Uh-hunh.
Well, the laptop wasn’t getting an IP address from the router either, so I figured, what the heck. After several attempts at reinstalling the drivers, I remembered this is XP and simply restored from a previous save point. Hunky dory, now the laptop would get an IP address from the router. But the router still wasn’t getting an IP address from the modem. Neither would the Linux box.
Another call to Comcast (Oh, listen, it’s after hours and it’s an Indian guy answering the phone. Gee, wonder where the service center is? Wonder how much of the previous trouble ticket he bothers to read? None, from his reaction, though he’s at least willing to entertain the idea that a customer could have a router (the first guy wouldn’t even talk about it. “Take out the router. We don’t support routers.”) Still no IP address from the modem. Oh look! Suddenly it works! And suddenly it’s on a completely different Class A network (was 67.something, now it’s 24.something) Gee, think they did some network maintenance? Think they screwed up, then tried to blame customer equipment? Yeah, I think so. It just took them something like 6 hours to fix it.

So in my second “horses, not zebras” moment of the day, Mom launches Outlook and can’t seem to get her mail. There’s no “get mail” button, nothing in her “actions” menu (a menu I’ve never seen before, since I don’t use Outlook, least of all Outlook ‘03). “Something you did to the network yesterday has screwed up my Outlook.” she says. Uh… no. I didn’t touch your computer, and nothing I did on the modem, router or my laptop would screw up your Outlook. click, click, close Outlook. Mom sees the Outlook Express icon. “Wait a minute… (click click). Oh, there’s my mail.”
Horses, Mom…

My domain is back up and running. Email should be flowing again.

It’s because I accidently let my domain expire. I’m only able to reach my own web server to post this because I entered it’s IP address in my local hosts file.
It should be fixed in a day or two.

And I still do a double take every time I see “David Edelstein on …” with what ever movie David Edelstein (the movie reviewer from Slate) is reviewing this week.

Pardon the pun but, oh JESUS this is so wrong: http://www.fansforchrist.org/

As anyone who reads my journal knows, I am a Christian. I attend churc regularly and participate in church mission trips. The play I was recently involved in was affiliated with my church.
I am also a gamer, RPGer and sci-fi / fantasy fan.
These two should NOT be mixed.

Fred Ebb of Kander and Ebb, the song writing team that brought us Kiss of the Spider Woman, New York, New York and All That Jazz passed away.

http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=FA&showDate=16-Sep-2004&segNum=2

Dad flew me down to Austin at the last minute as Mom wasn’t feeling well and didn’t want to make the drive back to Dallas by herself.
He called and asked if I would be able to come down at about noon. I was on a plane at 6:40.
Sunday morning I got a call at Dad’s place from South West. I’d left my keys in the my trunk lock. Someone had turned them in. My name was on the mini-ATM card on the keyring and they were able to track me down in their system and found the phone number of the person who made the reservation. My keys were waiting for me in baggage claim.
Not that there’s any money in that checking account right now, but apparently the police officer who received the keys at lost and found already contacted the bank to have that card canceled. Dunno if that means my regular card (which was in my wallet of course) is canceled as well. I’ll have to deal with the bank on that.

Idea borrowed from Joe Decker.

I want anyone and EVERYONE who reads this to post in here something they would like to do with me someday.

Then post this in your journal to find out what people want to do with you.

I now have an Asterisk server up and running. I can succesfully dial out to FWD SIP numbers and can call a friend’s Asterisk server via SIP. Can’t call his via IAX2 yet.

If anyone wants to play around with it, go get yourself a copy of SJ Phone (or any other SIP dialer), set it up and ring me at sip:1000@redlance.homeunix.org (extension subject to change without notice.)
I’ll probably not be around, but you can leave me voice mail.

Oh, and my FWD number (sip:481794@fwd.pulver.com) should automatically forward to my local number. Actually, if anyone could try that out for me and let me know if it works, that would be great (can’t test it myself.)

So if anyone has been playing around with VoIP / SIP, you can try calling me at sip:481794@fwd.pulver.com
I’d also be interested if sip:andrew@redlance.homeunix.org works.

OK, I take it back. Sage does export OPML. After manually entering all my feeds, I’m can export the OPML file for import into whatever other program I want to try.
I’m not sure I like Sage’s interface. I liked having all RSS items appear as an email message. On the other hand, I like that Sage throws out the HTML surrounding an RSS item and applies it’s own CSS, so each item, each feed, has a uniform look.

So why is it that almost every RSS feed program out there will import OPML files, but none of them will EXPORT your feed list in OPML?
After complaining about Forumzilla, and on the advice of Lisha, I’m trying out Sage. But I can’t export my list of feeds from Forumzilla to import it into Sage.
At least Sage seems to work just fine with LiveJournal. I was able to load Tabby’s posts. Of course Firefox is logged into LJ already and has the cookie stored, and Sage is just using Firefox to load and view feeds, so it stands to reason that it won’t have any trouble with LJ authentication.

while living in my first apartment, that got on EVERY mortgage spammer’s list?
I CONSTANTLY get mortgage spam, and almost every one tells me that “The Edelstein residence” at 1800 Stokes St, Apt 9, San Jose, CA qualifies for whatever scam rate their plugging this week.
They never mention apartment 237, the two bedroom apartment I moved into after 3 years. They never mention the address on De Rose when I lived with Dana. Nor my address in Santa Cruz.