I doubt at the installation part of you

~’Gilbert’
Urge to fly to India and punch cheap, second rate tech support rising…Urge to go to the MovableType offices and offer up cheesecake and tequila also rising.
Urge to chain smoke also rising.
Renewed my driver’s license today. Afer sitting there for 30 minutes I’ve decided this: If you are too old or addled or whatever to negotiate the system at the DMV then you can not drive. I know the DMV is harder than anything you will ever have to negotiate, but still, I need to know that the other people on the road are at least as semi-skilled as I am. You go to the desk, you tell the lady what you want, she gives you the appropriate form and a number, they call your number and tell you what counter to go to. There’s no need for aimless wandering, staring at empty counter space or weeping.
If you cannot get your license renewed without drooling, I don’t want you merging with me. Go away.

This is a 9.25 pound sugar beet.
I’m off to get cancer.

jackasses

Ghengis lays half across my laps and growls manacingly at every noise he hears. Maddie responds by getting up from her nest, walking to me, staring at me intently and then burping in my face.
assholes.

Just keep swimming

Woke up this morning and found that ‘Jared’ had passed my tech support question along to ‘Brendan’. ‘Brendan’ pretty much told me what ‘Blake’ and ‘Jared’ had been telling me, which was that all the modules were installed correctly. Then he asked me if there were any sort of permissions or settings on their end that should be looked at.
Great good god this is what I have been askign you about since the beginning of time. I once again sent him the list of settings and permissions.
Then I went to breakfast with Alan and David over at Maria’s Colombian Cafe. I had the corn pancake, so damned good.
Upon returning home I found that my issue had been passed from ‘Brendan’ to ‘Gilbert’. I love ‘Gilbert’, I want to marry him. He answered my question, he made the right adjustments AND he found where the problem was in the cgi script so that I could go to MovableType and show them the trouble.
The little green crayfish I wone at the fair…totally named ‘Gilbert’ now.
After ‘Gilbert’ and the joy, we had a doggie playdate! Ghengis and Maddie met Bela and Milo over at the dog park. Milo is Ghengis’ new best friend, he’s also the cutest little puppy! 4 months old, pit bull and shar pei mix (they aren’t positive about the shar pei but I am!!). So lovely, so cute and puppy-ish.
The dogs romped and played and wore themselves out. Nine hours later, Ghengis is still pretty much passed out next to me. Either he’s passed out or he’s pretending to not watch the scary movie. Sigh, my dog’s a wimp. Kidding, my dog rules.
This afternoon was all about productivity. Dishes and laundry and making a nutritious and delicious dinner. Sadly, it meant I missed out on going to Hong Kong Noodle, but they asked me to go after I ate.

This is a picture of me with the Ignatius Reilly statue on Canal Street near the Aquarium in New Orleans. I wonder if the statue is still there. We stumbled upon it unexpectedly, I knew there was a statue of him somewhere in NO but I did not know where it was. You can imagine how excited I was to find it. That whole day was one of my favorites during my visit. David and I spent the day at the aquarium studying every fish in there, I think he is the only person I know who spends more time at each exhibit than I do. Afterwards, we discovered the statue, found the car, spent too long finding a Whole Foods (we found the one on Magazine street; I saw that one recently on a CNN report and it made my heart hurt for how many good memories I have). We were buying ingredients for the rack of lamb dinner we were making for his parents that night. $140 later we were ready. We worked together, made a wonderful dinner and his parents really enjoyed it.
The next day I flew home. David walked me into the terminal and stood waiting until I got past security. I’ll always remember him standing there and how sad I was to be leaving him.
So that’s just a tiny sliver of my favorite New Orleans memories, there’s also the zoo, buying boiled peanuts on the side of the road from an old lady across the border in Mississippi, shopping at the French Market, Beignets, coffee and cigarettes and coffee and cigarettes and coffee and cigarettes and…
The dryer buzzes and the clean sheets beg to be brought up.
And the ice cream begs to be eaten.

Just a thought

If you’re going to outsource your tech support help to India you might want to contract to a company that bans it’s employees from using the word ‘Kindly’. Seriously, it’s the HUGEST tipoff that you’re a cheap-ass company that outsources your tech support to India. Also, it would be nice to get something other than the same exact answer 8 times from 2 different tech guys. Yes, I’m aware that you have the correct services installed on the server, what I’m asking you goes beyond that.
As you can see, the mighty changes here at velvet-c are not going as well as planned and if I had not recently paid for an entire year of hosting I’d consider moving to a different host, not because I am unhappy with the host or its services (though I am unhappy with ‘jared’ and ‘blake’ and their boilerplate tech support style), but moatly because what I want to do works better on any other server but microsoft.
I’ve got nothing specifically against microsoft as a whole. I prefer macs over pc’s but 80% of that is aesthetics. This here website uses microsoft servers and asp and happily thrives. Unfortunately it is also stunted.
There is much more that I want to do with my site including categorize the posts and make a daily photoblog (I have to do something with the 4100 pictures sitting in iPhoto and I am sure I have mentioned my rabid dislike of Flickr somewhere on here). My skills are limited, there’s really only so much I can do. Me ex built this site for me (I made the first, very ugly, very awkward iteration of this site. It lasted about 2 days) she did it before applications like MovableType and WordPress were available.
Now, instead of beating myself up trying to figure out how to add the functions that I want I am going to TRY to migrate over to something that has everything I want and more. There’s no sense in reinventing the wheel and no one has ever accused me of being an overachiever.
The problem is that I can’t get it to install. At the point where I need to log in to get the ball rolling, I get an error. Every bit of research that Alex and I did today turns up the sorts of answers, IIS has issues, fix IIS.
Since this isn’t my server, I must go to tech support and they tell me they have all the modules installed correctly and I tell them I’m very happy and very aware that the modules and whatnot are installed correctly but could they please just answer the actual question I am asking.
Damn, I just went off on ‘Jared’ and asked if he was in India and if he was then perhaps I should wait until Monday when I could talk to someone who actually worked with the servers.
Whatever. I just contacted MovableType’s tech support to see if they had any suggestions. I’m moving out of that realm of pirated software and lack of tech support and into that all too grown up world of paying for things and getting services in return (I even buy music off iTunes! Go me!).
In other news…
had a cubano sandwich today from Manny’s Tortas. It was wonderful, totally brought back memories of trips to Florida. Not quite as good as the ones I’ve gotten down there (one from St Petersburg was particularly nice), but still very good.
Finally did some grocery shopping. We hadn’t done any real stock the pantry type grocery shopping in about 5 weeks or more. it was time.
Also, weird stuff keeps showing up in my comments, for the life of me I can’t figure out why it’s happening. Generally, I just ignore it, it doesn’t affect the way anything works, occasionally they get in my way and I have to make them disappear. Not quite comment spam, but close.
And here are some state fair photos. It’s not all of them but it’s more than none.

Me eating a pronto pup.

The Mighty Midway
There’s more, someday you’ll see the 9 pound sugar beet or the smothered fries or the Magnum PI ride…
Breakfast at Maria’s Colombian Cafe tomorrow morning!
UPDATE:Tech support just sent me a link to a microsoft knowledge base article about my problem. This would seem to be the answer to my issue except the solution offered up to me by microsoft was to contact my server administrator. I emailed ‘Jared’ back and asked asked who my server administrator would be…

yum

When dinosaur pancakes battle, your belly wins
[CHOMP!!! CHOMP!!!]
I win, Mark loses.
I will be making some huge changes around here this weekend. Hopefully the whole place won’t fall apart. Wish me luck!
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, LILY
Happy birthday you happy, lovely doll!