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Happy International Hangover Day

Friday, January 1st, 2010

Happy International Hangover Day folks. And no, I’m not talking about the movie here. January 1st was an international hangover holiday since I can remember. That move is not even about new year celebration, so the fact the creators are trying to appropriate this day as their own is a bit disingenuous.

Anyways, it’s a holiday, we are probably all recuperating after New Year’s Eve celebration and are a bit depressed knowing that we have to go back to work on the 4th. As such, no one is probably reading this stuff and so I figured I’ll keep today’s entry short. Basically it’s a throw-away meta post that should have been titled something like: “What can you expect to read on Terminally Incoherent in 2010″. But I’m a lazy bum and I titled the post something else just to confuse you.

Here are some things I will be blogging about in the next few months:

  1. Video Games including:
    1. Dragon Age: Origins
    2. The Witcher
    3. Whatever else is in my queue (probably Borderlands)
    4. Mass Effect 2 when it comes out
    5. Not Modern Warfare
    6. I’m taking suggestions
  2. Movies – I have a queue of movies that I need to watch as well. Bunch of them are from this list. Others are new. And no, I haven’t seen Avatar yet. I also have few general movie rants sitting in my draft folder begging to be finished.
  3. TV – I wanted to mention a few decent series I discovered. Of course this will be limited since most TV sucks ass these days.
  4. Programming including:
    1. Developing apps for Blackberry with Java – I still have bunch of stuff to say about that, but the whole project is on the back burner due to my laziness
    2. LaTex – ok, not programming but I have few Tex related posts in there somewhere
    3. Doing some hacking in Google’s Go language is on my to-do list this year. You can probably expect a post or two on that
  5. Computers are Magical – more of this stuff. At one point I had an idea for a whole cycle but I neglected to write most of it down and now it’s in pieces. But I’ll definitely want to do few more silly pieces in which I can mock users for inventing tech-relate mythology to explain their own ineptitude
  6. Computer illiterate people suck! This is not a topic – it’s a fact. Also a recurring theme of this blog. So yeah…

Please note that most of the above is bullshit, since I’m notorious for writing whatever strikes my fancy at any given time and not giving shit about my self imposed goals. In fact, reading this blog will give you a pretty good idea what I was into at any given time. For me, looking back through the archives is like a walk down the memory lane. So I’ll pretty much continue doing that. The list you see above was basically composed by looking at my Drafts section and examining what games I’m looking forward to play this year.

How about you? What games are you planning to play in the next month or two? What movies are on your list? What hacking projects are you planing to work on? Please note that I’m not asking you about “new years resolutions” because resolutions are stupid. I want to talk about stuff you are excited about doing – not shit you will feel depressed about come February. Let’s face it – resolutions don’t actually have a chance to survive the clash with the bullshit that is reality.

Posted in current, meta | 3 Comments »

Blog fixed via Upgrade

Monday, April 27th, 2009

Just wanted to let everyone know why the blog looks like crap right now. Or rather why do you see the ultra spartan Kubrick theme instead of the bastardized, orange version you are used to.

Last night my blog broke for some unspeakable reason. I was unable to post or edit posts – each time I would hit the “Save” or “Publish” button I would be redirected to my homepage without any changes being saved. Just like that.

I spent whole Sunday ripping my hair out, cursing, banging my head against the wall and tweaking every possible setting on the blog I could think of. I disabled and enabled cache and anti-spam plugins. I upgraded the PHP version on the server. I tried disabling mod_security as per this thread which was describing eerily similar issue. I edited and re-edited my .htaccess files about a million times.

The only thing I didn’t actually do was to update Wordpress… Cause you know – that’s just crazy talk. As my last resort I contacted Dreamhost support, but since it was Sunday they only got back to me today. Do you know what they said?

“We’d love to help ya but you must upgrade your wordpress first cause your version is way old.”

I’m paraphrasing here – the support guy was actually much more courteous and used expressions like “I’m very sorry to hear about your problem” and “I will be happy to help you” but that line above was pretty much the gist of the email.

At that point I got pissed off and did something reckless. I logged into my CPanel and clicked on the big button that said “Upgrade Your Wordpress, Stupid!”. That thing has been taunting me for the longest time but I never had the guts or inclination to click it. I’m one of those… What do they call them… What is the polar opposite of an early adopter? And no, it’s not late adopter. I’m like the anti-adopter.

I run obsolete software and hardware until it breaks. I’m a firm believer in the old adage “if it ain’t broke, don’t fucking touch it less you want to spent the next 6 hours fixing it”. But since my blog just broke I felt compelled to press that button. That was reckless and stupid, mind you cause I happened to be running Wordpress 2.0.5.

Yeah, shut up – I’m that bad. I’m gonna turn in my geek badge at the end of the day. The thing is, when you upgrade from that far back, things are bound to get broken. I know this from experience – I’ve seen many broken upgrades in my day. That’s probably why I’m deathly scared of them. But I was desperate, pissed off and I felt reckless. So I pressed the button.

Lo and behold – the blog fixed itself, and without any major fuckups. At least none that I can see right now. I mean, you can read it and I can post again so that means we are back in business. The custom theme went to hell during the upgrade, but I have it backed up so I can easily restore it later today or tomorrow. The important thing is that the damn thing did not break into million pieces like I expected – which is great.

So that’s why the blog looks like shit today. But look at the bright side – until I fix the theme you get an add free Terminally Incoherent experience for the day. Or at least those of you who are not running adblock.

Anyways, I’m happy and relieved and I can go back to writing ridiculously long, and badly spelled posts for your enjoyment. Oh and Wordpress 2.7 is kinda spiffy. My only problem is that I can’t find anything now. But I’ll get used to it. :)

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Posted in blogging, meta | 7 Comments »

I’m Decreasing Post Fequency Again

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Brevity is not my forte. I don’t know why, but as the time goes by I seem to spend more time on each post and it is becoming increasingly harder to keep up with my self imposed schedule. If you check your feed reader daily, you probably noticed that I clock in 5 posts every week. Furthermore I like to always be 3-4 posts ahead of the schedule so that I can go back, proofread and rewrite some of the stuff that is queued up.

Yes, you wouldn’t be able to tell but I do proofread most of the stuff that goes out at least once. Naturally, I end up rewriting whole paragraphs when I do, and guess what that means? Brand new and juicy typos and grammar errors that get published. Only way around it is to keep proofreading your stuff until you can make a full pass without making major or minor rewrites – and even then you can’t be sure. As you can probably tell, I don’t go crazy with proofreading and I let stuff slide. Most of the time really glaring errors will be pointed out in the first 3 or 4 comments and I’ll fix them right away.

These days I seem to write close to 1000 words per post. I usually don’t aim for that number. I write until I feel like I made a logical and/or compelling argument. Believe it or not, this usually requires that many words. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m suffering from some sort of verbal diarrhea. Sometimes I manage to post something shorter, but I tend to make up for it by writing much longer post the very next day.

If you think about it, 1k words per day, plus proofreading, plus research adds up to quite a big chunk of time I pump into this blog every week. It is a labor of love of course. I wouldn’t be doing it if I was not enjoying it. But lately this pace has been kicking my ass. Not sure why. Am I becoming more and more verbose as the time progresses? Am I spending more time re-writing my posts? Do I simply have less free time these days? All of the above? Can I buy a vowel?

Whatever the reason, I’m usually barely making it. My queue gets depleted almost every week these days. I usually catch up on the weekends, and knock out 2-3 posts for the cumming week, and then tend to struggle finish the remaining two at least a day ahead of when they are supposed to go live. This didn’t happen before.

Hell, I used to post daily, but that sort of ended last January when I took Sundays off. I was fine for a while, but then I was starting to burn out again and decided to stop posting on Saturdays as well.

Now I’m once again in the same place, and I decided to shave another day off my schedule. I’m thinking Wednesday – for symmetry. I’ll post twice at the begging of the week, and twice at the end. Not to mention that Wednesday is my prep day for the class I’m teaching Thursdays and also the day they show Lost on TV. I’m not even going to get into the rant about Lost because that’s another 1000 words. Needless to say I watch it out of habit these days. Still, that’s one less day I need to worry about.

Don’t ask me why I even have this schedule. I don’t know. I am a slacker, procrastinator and a lazy bum at heart. If I don’t have a schedule, you would probably be lucky to see a post every other month. So there.

Also, I just noticed that it took me almost 700 words just to say “I probably won’t be posting on Wednesdays no more”. I’m just going to end this post here before I go off on a tangent again.

Posted in blogging, meta | 7 Comments »

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