The poster child for drug and alcohol excess in heavy metal, Ozzy Osbourne, is going to have his DNA sequenced. The idea is that scientists would like to understand how he has survived given the chemical abuse he has heaped on himself over the years. It would be interesting to understand what insights will be derived from this research.
WordPress Tweak
After updating the site to WordPress 3.0, I found that I couldn’t make automatic updates to the site using WordPress. A little bit of Googling found a possible answer. Basically, WordPress is confused about whether PHP 4 or PHP 5 is available. WordPress needs PHP 5 for automatic updates to function.
The answer found by Googling didn’t work for me. In fact, it actually made things worse. It made it so that the site would not accept an HTTP POST to log in.
I started to comment out updates made to the .htaccess file for the site and found the correct update for my hosting provider. Add the following to the site’s .htaccess file (all of the usual caveats about making backups apply):
# Make sure that PHP 5 is being used for the WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
That’s it. That’s all that was need to enable automatic updates.
Iron Maiden / Dream Theater Concert
We went to see Iron Maiden with Dream Theater last night at White River Amphitheater (Auburn, WA) last night. This is a bill not to be missed. The bands did not disappoint.
We’ve seen Iron Maiden at this venue before. When we saw Iron Maiden at White River the last time it was a nightmare getting to the venue. We left Longview around 4:00 pm and should have made it to the venue and in to our seats in time to see the opening act. That time, we did not. We walked in to the last flourish of the opening act. On the last trip we encountered a traffic jam on the exit from I-5 all the way to the site. It took us more than two hours to make it the twelve miles or so from there to the venue.
This time with Dream Theater opening we wanted to make sure that we arrived in time. So, we left town much earlier. We arrived the venue before the parking lots opened at 5:00 pm. There was no traffic jam. We hung out on the side of the road for 30 minutes or so until the parking opened.
So with the car safely parked, we then hung out outside the gate for an hour in the “blazing” sun.
Once the gate opened, we had 90 minutes to kill before Dream Theater would take the stage. We bought shirts, found some food, and then set about watching the people. This was fortuitous as we encountered some old friends from high school (this was a first in some 25 years of concert going). We hadn’t seen them since the last class reunion. I had never realized that one of the people was such an Iron Maiden fan (more than 30 shows!).
The Dream Theater set was marred by an old fat guy. He came down from several rows behind us and insisted that we sit down during the show or he was “going to call security.” My son actually had the conversation with this clown as he was sitting on the end of the row. This is a heavy metal show. In heavy metal it is a sign of respect to stand and to remain standing throughout the entire act. The guy looked like he had been to metal concerts before. I fail to fathom how he did not understand that. Sure, we probably didn’t need to stand to see over the people in front of us, but that’s not the point.
In between the Dream Theater and Iron Maiden sets we were treated to a spectacular view of Mt. Rainier. The picture below doesn’t quite do the mountain justice. If the day wasn’t so cloudy, the view would have been just gorgeous.
Also between the sets, we also ran across a girl dressed in lingerie. It was quite the “interesting” sight. This picture also does not do the sight justice. She clearly wanted attention and was getting it.
The Iron Maiden set was great. Bruce Dickenson has an amazing amount of energy while on stage.
Our seats were good, but they didn’t allow us to take really great pictures of the show. One of the surprising things, at least to me, was that the pictures where the state was lit in blue, green, or white turned out reasonably well given the distance while the pictures when the set was lit in red did not. Some of the red ones did result in cool effects, however.
We were not able to get a good picture, but when Eddie was on stage some of the interactions with the band members were shown on the giant screens from Eddie’s perspective.
Another great Iron Maiden show!
MacBook Pro Oversight
Something just dawned on me.
I grabbed the MacBook Pro to collect and edit photos from a couple of cameras from last night’s Iron Maiden/Dream Theater concert while another computer was updating this web site. When I went to stick the first SD card into get the photos, I noticed that this particular MBP doesn’t have any slots for SD cards or any kind of memory stick. The MBP does have several USB connections, but that’s not quite the same.
I am, actually, somewhat disturbed by this discovery. I’ve had this MBP for nearly two years now and never previously noticed the lack of memory stick slots. The physical hardware to accomodate memory sticks can’t add that much to the price of an MBP.
The really surprising thing, to me at least, is that Apple did not see fit to include memory stick slots on this computer. Apple prides itself on the capabilities of the Apple platform for editing digital media. It seems such a gross oversight. Every Windows laptop I have purchased for the last five years has come with a full set of memory card slots.
Lesson learned: handling any item on a memory sticks will have to start on a Windows system. But that also means that I will be less likely to continue working with the item on the MBP as it means having to transfer the item to another medium that the MBP can access.
Oops! I Broke WordPress
Oops! While installing the WordPress 3.0 update, I managed to break my WordPress installation. Please excuse the mess of a broken update and wrong theme while I fix things. Sorry.
Twitter Updates for 2010-06-23
- Dream Theater on the stage. Playing songs I like … a lot. #
- Keytar at a heavy metal show? Now I've seen everything! #
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Outlook Failure After Windows 7 Update
When logging on to one of my systems this morning, I discovered that Windows 7 had installed updates and rebooted the system. By itself, that wasn’t such a big deal. But Outlook was sitting on the screen showing me the “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. Cannot open the Outlook window.”
- Outlook Loading Problem
This error message is fairly cryptic. Clicking “OK” and trying to relaunch Outlook does not solve the problem.
Apparently the issue is well known enough within Microsoft that Outlook does come with a command line switch that will fix the problem and allow Outlook to open.
Start->run..then type the following -> "Outlook.exe /resetnavpane"
This problem could have been avoided by shutting down applications for the night rather than leaving them running. However, this problem could be avoided by a little bit better design of Outlook. Even adding some guidance to the error message would be helpful.
Twitter Updates for 2010-05-29
- Topsy is watching you. #
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RIP: Ronnie James Dio
Ronnie James Dio passed away today. Dio was one of heavy metal’s legendary voices and song writers. He will be missed.
Begging Patterns
We have two pets: Nick the cat and Tipper the dog. They have distinctly different patterns when they beg for food, particularly when food is being prepared.
Nick runs into the kitchen, trilling or meowing loudly. He paces about the kitchen, getting under foot. He’s very much the outspoken, rushed, cranky customer in a restaurant. He begs for everything … ham, chicken, fish, vegetables, fruit. Nick reaches up and tries to snag treats from the counter. Fortunately, he’s a little short to actually get his paws on the counter and grab food. That doesn’t stop him from trying, though. He thinks every can being opened is tuna. He turns his nose up and acts extremely indignant when offered something from a can that isn’t tuna.
Tipper saunters into the kitchen. She finds a place to sit where Nick isn’t likely to be and then watches. Carefully. She knows everything that is happening. It is as if she’s the kitchen manager. She only gets close to the action when she knows something she likes is about to enter the preparations because the likelihood of a tasty morsel being dropped has substantially increased. You hardly know she’s there.
Fun stuff.