Savage Chickens is a webcomic that I ran across recently and it’s rather brilliant in its simplicity. One guy, one stack of Post-It notes, one pen and a whole lot of bringing the funny. This one is now permanently added to my Portal page so I won’t forget to hit it during my daily webcomic trawl.

Savage Chickens © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Added new plugin, so that if comments are disabled; comment link is removed from main page.
• Found some errors in the server log, moved files to different folder to correct the errors. After fixing the errors, noticed that the styling of certain portions (mood/music) of the project had changed.
• Fixed database backup plugin, so that it works for project leader
• Altered site’s styling slightly to better incorporate items in sidebar

In-Progress

• Fix plugin to sync project with journal.
• Apologize to project leader for playing with boards and deleting one of her posts… Done
• Update site to latest version of WP
• Find/create theme for boards Done: Installed requested theme, though minor tweaking needs to be done yet and project leader will most likely need to update her profile to see new theme.
• Add a contact page/form?

Secret Project Notes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’ve marked the ones I remember in bold and made notes in italics.

Oh and here are a couple they missed:
67. You ever watched Punky Bruster.
68. You thought G.I. Joe was cool but now you wonder how all these heavily trained soldiers were completely unable to shoot anybody; while still being able to take out helicopters from half a mile away with a crossbow.
69. You remember your family getting their first VCR.
70. You went trick-or-treating and actually ate the homemade candy that you got.
71. You were completely thrilled when you beat Zelda for the first time.

Kudos to Matthew Mullenweg for the link

You Know You Grew Up… © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’ve created a new section in the gallery, called Altered. This is where I’ll be putting any photos that I’ve manipulated beyond shrinking and labeling. For example, the dusty road picture attached to this post is one that I had been thinking needed some sort of work to make it pop (for lack of a better word). So I fired up GiMP and did the roughly¹ following:

• Copied the entire image into a new file, to preserve the original.
• Created two layers in the image containing the entire image.
• Selected the bottom layer and applied a 5px Gausian blur.
• Selected the top layer and set it the mode to multiply.
• Flatten the image to save it as a JPG.
• Resize and label.

I really like this altered version vs the original one. Also in currently the altered gallery is a picture I took of some clouds and that tonight I ran through the same basic steps to enhance it. This version of the image also really pops! :)

Oh for those who are interested, to resize/label my photos before uploading them; I use the following shell script:

The script isn’t a perfect solution by any means² but it’s something I came up with –after a lot of Googling– back when I was looking to post the photos from my Japan trip.
¹ I forgot to take notes so if you really want all the details; leave a comment and I’ll try recreating it set by step.
² The label it adds is ugly and the darkened background surrounding my URL doesn’t look centered around the URL.

Altered Gallery © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

You have a Purple Lightsaber.

Purple is associated with wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, mystery, and magic. Purple denotes high spirituality and religious aspiration. Purple also represents Peacefulness and Purification. It also has a sense of intuitive understanding and a feeling of intimacy with the world.
What Colored Lightsaber Would You Have?
brought to you by Quizilla

Kudos to AWelkin for links to the quizzes. Though I have to say that any quiz that claims that a person has “high spirituality and religious aspiration” after answering “Because he/she is a badass” to “Why is that Character your Favorite?” has issues. That purple *shudders in disgust* is the color of my lightsaber is doubly proof that something is wrong with that quiz.

Quiz Time © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Sony Memory sticks are amazingly resilient. I have one that made an accidental trip through the washer (and dryer!) and survived with all the data on it intact.

Random Notes © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I’ve had this domain for a short time now and finally plunked down the moolah to get a proper host for it (thank you Digital Sense Hosting).

I imagine if you’ve probably got some questions about the who/what/why of CoffeeBear.net, so here are some of the answers. If you have a question that’s not answered in this post; contact me and I’ll reply. Though if your question is too personal, then the reply might be no more than “I’m not going to answer that.“

Who?

As I said my name is Mark (aka Manzabar). The domain name came about from several nights spent trying to come up with a name for my blog that wasn’t already being used 40 million times over and that somewhat reflected my interests…

• While I don’t drink as much coffee as I used; I still drink it fairly often and frankly, I’m something of a coffee-snob. I can’t stand that instant crap or that sludge that my office claims is coffee. I’ve got my own 4 cup coffee pot at my desk and my current favortie coffee is the Mocha brew from Gevalia. Or rather I should say that’s my favorite coffee when I’m making it myself. When I want some exceptional coffee; I run over to my local coffeehouse, the Terrapin and order a Grand Canyon (2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, 1 shot chocolate sryup & 1 shot mango syrup). *yum!*
• For my computing needs, I lust after the Apple’s 15inch G4 Powerbook but it’s currently out of my price range; so I use a home-built PC running SuSE Linux Pro 9.0 but occassionally boot into Windows XP Pro for the absolutely necessary items (e.g. certain video games & downloading new/free songs from iTunes).

With those 2 items in mind, I first thought a domain name of lizardcofffee.something would be brilliant. Except, somebody else had taken lizardcofffee.org, lizardcofffee.net & lizardcofffee.com. I know there are other .somethings out there but none appealed to me. So I started looking around for other ideas. Another one that came to me was minion.org² but it too was taken. Then I started thinking harder. I knew I wanted to incorporate my love of coffee into the domain name and I liked the idea of using the name of an animal. I don’t much care for dogs, so that was out. CoffeeCat just sounds weird. CoffeePenguin sounds weird and is a trifle long. Then inspiration hit me and CoffeeBear.net was born (.com was already taken and .org just didn’t sound right for what I had in mind).

What?

CoffeeBear.net is my personal domain. Currently, I’m working on setting up this blog to talk about whatever happens to strike my fancy. I got into the blogging scene because I work on computers, alot. While I’d had personal website before; it was a hassle to maintain it and I’d lost interest in it for a long time. Then I changed ISPs a few times and once I’d gotten my cable modem; I got involved with a project with some people scattered across the planet for a while. They needed a place to be able to store large files that everybody could access. My ISP at the time was running DHCP but my IP address never changed unless something got really screwed up (e.g. bad firmware upgrade to my router).

Since I effectively had a static IP; we setup a small www & ftp server on a spare machine in my place. Since it was my machine, I figured I’d start a new website for myself on the side. When I did this; I’d just found out about PHPNuke and was playing with that for the main site. But it was big, buggy and really more than I wanted for my personal site; however it show me how powerful a CMS is and made me want something for myself.

So I did some searching around, found MT and was initially awed by how perfect it was for what I wanted to do. I loaded a copy of MT on my server and musings³ was born. I’ll admit it wasn’t the most original name, but I didn’t care as I didn’t really advertize that blog and only a few people even knew it existed. After I’d been using MT for a while; I noticed something that really annoyed me about it, rebuilds⁴. *ugh*

Eventually this started irrating me like sand in your shorts after a day at the beach and I started looking around at alternative systems. Some of the ones I considered were:

• Drupal
• GeekLog
• WordPress

But Drupal looked too complicated and Geeklog resembled PHPNuke too much; so I went with WordPress and I’ve been using it ever since.

So where are all my old posts?

I’ve learned in playing with the backup/restore plugin for wordpress that it really doesn’t like you to backup the data from a log on one host and restoring it to another. So I plan on manually moving the old posts over (and trimming out some of the dead wood as I go).

Will CB.net be just your blog or will other stuff go up here?

Once I’ve got my blog up and running smoothly (right now I’m still waiting for the DNS changes to go through); I plan on do my own style/theme for the site. After that I want to integrate some sort of photoblog. As for other kinds of content, well… that’s something we’ll have to wait and see on.

Where’d you get your style for WordPress? The default install doesn’t look like that!

Currently, I’m using the dots style by Alex King. It’s simple & clean but doesn’t exactly match what I want; so when I’ve got some more time I’ll be working on rebuilding my own custom style.

Why?

I’m writing this blog: in part because it’s a trendy thing to do, in part because I want to work on my web design skills and in part to let my friends/family know what I’m up to. I’m absolutely wretched at keeping in touch with them either by phone or by writing letters. I can talk for hours to a buddy of mine when he calls or reply at length to any letters I receive, but calling/sending letters to other people is just something I don’t see to have any skill for. *shrugh* Go figure⁵. So now that I’ve got a my own domain and a proper host; I’ll start telling more of my friends/family about this blog and encourage them to visit it for the lastest news in my world.

Footnotes

¹ I’ve been using Manzabar for a pseudonym/alias for a long time now. The name comes from one of my old D&D characters that I came up with in high school. Yes, I am a geek. Get over it. Anyway, in every RPG that I’ve ever played, I’ve had a hard time coming up with good character names, except for this one wizard that I created back in high school. That wizard is Manzabar and that’s where the name came from. It had such a since ring to it that I’ve continued to use the name to this very day.
² During my college years, I went to a local sci-fi con dressed as a Faceless Minion. It was a popular idea with that crowd and I still have the robe that I used for the costume (and still where it most times I go to that con). If you’re not familar with the idea of a Faceless Minion; then just take a moment to reflect on the most minor of characters in your favorite book/play/radio show/tv show/movie. Some of those characters are so minor they have no names, but they still perform some necessary function to the plot. Those characters are Faceless Minions. I thought about doing something like facelessminion.org but that just seemed too long a name.
³ musings has been offline for a while now. Originally because there was some problems renewing the domain name but now it also appears that my ISP is blocking inbound traffic on port 80.
⁴ MT is only partially a dynamic system. It builds static pages for all your content but when you update existing content; then you have to rebuild your pages. Something as simple as getting a comment posted on your blog could cause MT to rebuild a dozen pages or so. This ends up eating a lot of disk space and depending on the number of pages needing to be rebuilt; it can take a looooong time. Rebuilds are MT’s worst enemy. WordPress on the other hand trades rebuilds in for eating up server processing power. All of WP’s pages are built on the fly based on the content stored in a set of mysql tables. Less diskspace is used but more processing power is required to display the pages.
⁵ It just occured to me that the reason I’m likely so bad at talking to my friends/family about wht I’m up to is that for the most part; I think my life consists of long periods of boredom intertwined with the good stuff. The boring stuff is something that nobody wants to hear and the good stuff isn’t necessarily something that I want to share. So I don’t tell them about my life because I can’t image that they’d really want to hear about it. But if I write about it here; they can always stop reading any given post and come back later when I’ve updated again.

Welcome to CB.net! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.