Dear Lord, help me. I’ve been needing a new phone and the Apple goes and does it. Looks like I’ll have to wait until June. I’m going to start the fund today!
Yay!!!

OK 2006 GHP’ers. My literally melted ATI card’s replacement will be picked up sometime after 5:00pm today. I have to install it and install Motion and set to work finishing up the DVD.
Barring any trouble I should have your job-ending DVD out the door by the end of this week. I’m not bitter. Really. 🙂

Sad Christmas:
James Brown
1933 – 2006

Can someone explain to me why people who make spam with subjects like:

And heal on dry land mourneth, and went, up out of Gomorrah:

think, after offending me, that I will respond with anything other than reporting the message as spam and deleting it?
Argh!

/* Begin Insomnia Induced Rant */
 
OK, so I spoke a little too soon. The big computer isn’t completely dead. I will not be able to use Motion until I can get a replacement video card. That’s not as bad as trying to come up with $4500. I was able to dig up the old 64mb video card and so far so good.
 
During the process of figuring out what the hell was going wrong, I somehow corrupted the direcotry information on the boot volume. I let DiskWarrior work on it for about 30 hours. In that time it found 4, count ’em, 4 overlapped files. I’m glad I stopped there because I realized the problem was the broken fan on the Radeon’s heatsink.
 
OK, so after replacing the card, I re-installed the ATA133 controller PCI card, loaded the boot volume in an enclosure, put it on Tam’s iMac and put TechToolPro 4 on it. TechTool wasn’t able to fix the problems, but it was able to get it to mount. So, I then started copying stuff over the network. Thank goodness for Cat-5e and a Gigabit switch!! I have held on to most of the install disks and have a serial number program that I mostly keep up to date. I’m only installing the essential things while I’m limping. As you might imagine, Photoshop is probably the most important.
 
So, I copy Photoshop over, including every file I can find in the Volume Library and the Home Directory Library. I repair permissions, restart and launch PhotoShop. Uh oh. There’s a problem with a missing file in the Application Support folder (never mind that I used ditto). OK, so I guess I need to reinstall Photoshop. I bought it as a download, and Adobe’s still working on integrating the Adobe store and the Macromedia Store; time to sit on hold.
 
51 minutes of Kenny G later, I’m talking to someone. They help me to the download area but warn me that if I don’t have the serial number from the original installation (my version of CS2 was an upgrade from version 7 Educational), the installer will crap out. There is no way for him to find the older version. Here’s what I found out and he didn’t tell me.
Should this happen to you (I’m going to assume that you’ve paid for your original version and the serial number is legit) go here:
 
<Macintosh HD>/Library/Application\ Support/Adobe/Adobe\ Registration\ Database

 
Open this in your favorite text editor and you’ll see something like the following:
 

[Illustrator 10.0]
SERIAL=1XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[Photoshop 7.0]
SERIAL=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[Photoshop 8.0]
PRODREG=ADBE
SERIAL=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
[User]
COMPAN=bitterballerina.com
COMPANY_UTF8=bitterballerina.com
NAME=Benjamin Westafer
NAME_UTF8=Benjamin Westafer
[Adobe Reader 7.0]
EPIC_EULA_DATE=-1108471076l
EPIC_EULA_LANG=0
EPIC_EULA_AGREED=accept
EPIC_VERSION=7.0.0
EPIC_APP=Adobe Reader 7.0

You didn’t think I’d show the numbers!
 
So, either this tech support guy didn’t know about this or believed I was full of shit and had a pirated original version and he wouldn’t be authorized to give out this information. So, there you go. I suspect Adobe will team up with M$ to make you submit a cotton swab before you can be granted a license.
 
Don’t misunderstand, I realize that Adobe and any other software vendor has a right to protect themselves from pirates. Still, it sucks that these guys can’t find a way for you to communicate with them without there being this implicit lack of trust. I really think it has to do with Software vendors having no appreciation of how much software costs. In general, I think we American’s don’t understand the price of things. At any rate, $699.99 is a lot of money to me. If I spend this amount to purchase your software, I expect you to assume that I’m legitimate and help me get up and running; instead of give me a bullshit story about how I’ll need to find the original box or buy a new version.
I hope someone who needs that one file finds it here. Again, I do not advocate stealing software. Indeed, lately I’ve been on a Linux kick where this kind of crap simply doesn’t exist. (There’s worlds of other crap, but you always learn something useful…)

 
/* End Insomnia Induced Rant */

Well, it’s all over but the crying. I figure I have to come up with 121 billable hours to replace her; or a lottery win. Basically, I’m screwed for some time. Interesting that the Lombard is still kicking.

So, the iTunes store can’t accept credit cards; or at least it hasn’t been able to for the past several hours. I had to contact HostMySite twice to get them to upgrade a client’s account. I tried to make an appointment with MCG Sports Medicine for my back and had to leave a message. All I can assume is that Mercury is in retrograde and I’ll just have to wait it out.
In the meantime, I’m enjoying listening to Trance music and sipping a large mocha at the Metro. I’ve only been begging these guys to get WiFi for about three years.
While I’m waiting I’m looking at Drupal again. They have an ecommerce module. I like the idea of a CMS, they’re usually not good at presenting a finished-looking site. I want a CMS that lets me make pages for visitors, not a portal to more CMS looking crap. I don’t know if that makes sense. To put it another way, CMS’s offer all of these widgets that go all over the place, and usually fairly inelegantly. This is why I like MT. I deal with an administrative area, publish it and the user sees a clean presentation. I’m sure what it boils down to is that I’m going to have to learn how to write these things; including shopping carts. I might install Drupal for fun and play with it. I’ll have to get back on that.

So, in addition to working on two separate DVD projects, I’m now working on a shopping cart for SuperNutrient.com.

Continue reading →

After several weeks, really months, of looking around, I’ve decided to go with ZenCart for Susan’s new shopping cart. The decision came to me in Dothan, AL. I’m down here during my 25^th year of the Nutcracker. I like the fact that ZenCart uses CSS for layout and XHTML for markup. It does have a learning curve, but the wiki is helpful and I’ll just need time to play around with it. I may have more opinions about it when I get more into it, but so far so good.
While down here I met Benjamin Linn. He dances in Birmingham with Alabama Ballet. I have several friends in that company now (small world). I’m hoping to help Ben out with the website for his “Benjamas”. He’s got a placeholder site up now, but it needs a lot of work. It should be a fun project and hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze my fat ass into one of his products. I don’t know if they make enough polar fleece.
I’m also looking forward to getting home to work on the DVD’s. My kids have been waiting patiently since the summer and it’s been one thing after the other. Since Tam and I have established an HQ, and I have to shiny new hard drives to install, I can get down to business.

I have finished one big step in getting settled into our new place. Step One: get online. Though I’m certain I don’t need a 12-port patch panel for this two-bedroom house, I’ve gone and wired it so anyway. I’ve put up a four port Linksys Gigabit router/switch, Cat 6 patch panel (with Cat 5e cable (can’t have everything all at once)), cable modem with 8 megabit cable (6712kbps down, 2488kbps up(http://bluefield.speedtest.frontiernet.net/)), Cat 6 keystone jacks and one Airport Express for the laptop. Here’s a picture of the closet:

 
I could not have done this without the training I received from Logan Gray at IntenseTech, and the good folks at Catskill Supply, my Uncle Tom, my Dad (one day he’ll work on his site), Tess for letting me kick her out of her bedroom while I made a mess in the closet, and Tam for keeping the house going and helping me yank cable. I can’t wait to get the rest of the computers over here so that I might smite my friends on ET!

All of this is to say that I’m back up and running in high style. Once I get the computers over here, I’ll be working on the GHP ’06 video at long last. I’ll also be installing a server for ActiveCollab and Zimbra purposes. Fun.