August 05, 2005
Summer Finale
I flew back to the States on Tuesday. It was quite uneventful. My last weekend in Vienna was great, thanks to Kerstin, Tom, Oliver, Stani, etc.
Wednesday morning I drove up to Syracuse to check out my new apartment. It is great. The only problem was that it was hot as hell (89°F / 32°C as I later found out) in there, so I drove to Best Buy and picked up an air conditioner. Installing it hurt by back pretty badly, but now I'll at least be able to sleep when I'm in Syracuse.
I also drove out to Target, and strolled around the store. When I reached the back wall, I ran into Ardi and Liz. I knew Ardi was in Syracuse, and had already talked to him about meeting up later in the day, but this was quite the coincidence! I then went to the office and said I was available to work again starting August 22.
In the evening I met up at Starbucks in Fayetteville with Ardi, Liz, and one of her friends. After finishing our drinks we decided to go bowling at Eire Lanes or whatever it's called. We needed to pick up some socks since we were all wearing sandals, so we drove across the street to Target and picked some up.
The bowling place was closed, so I suggested Faegans instead. We had a drink at Faegans and then went home.
Thanks to my jetlag, I was horribly tired, and thus went to bed almost immediately.
The next morning I ate breakfast at Bruegger's at 7:30 (jetlag again), drove to Carousel, and then did some more rearranging in my apartment, before driving back to my mom's house.
The full photo collection of this trip can be found here. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera with me for the night out, but Liz took some photos, so maybe I'll get ahold of them and put them up later.
Posted by newkai at 02:36 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
Another Open Comments Attempt
It looks like I've finally succeeded at keeping the spam out. Thanks to numerous plugins, the weblog has gone over an hour without a single spam comment. So commenting without TypeKey sign in is on again.
Posted by newkai at 02:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 29, 2005
Comments for All
Ever since I got rid of the feature to let anyone quickly comment on my entries, which I did because I was getting thousands of spam comments, no one has posted in my comments section. I had changed it so that you had to sign up with TypeKey, which isn't too hard.
But apparently no one felt like doing that, so I have received no comments. But thanks to this new beta version of Movable Type 3.2, there might be a compromise. This beta has a junk sorter function, which, if set to the right level, might work pretty good. I've set it to a medium level, so I'll have to see how good it works.
Go ahead and test the comments feature, and leave a comment. If it doesn't show up, you've probably been classified as "junk," sorry. But that just means you're put into a waiting list and I'll eventually approve your message.
Update: This test failed. I even eventually set the junk sorter to its highest level, but it failed to even sort out one spam comment. Thus I'll have to go back to TypeKey-only commenting. I'll keep looking for any possible solutions in the future.
Posted by newkai at 01:05 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
23 Hours of Panic
I had just abut finished cleaning last night, when I noticed that a new beta version of MovableType is now available. I decided I would upgrade to it in a little while, until I saw that one of the "32 Favorite Features in Movable Type 3.2" is "Easiest Upgrade Ever." There's even a short flash clip that brags about this.
Please have a look! It'll only take a few seconds...
See!? Nearly anyone could do this!
Since it apparently would only take a few seconds to upgrade, I decided to take care of it before going to bed. I downloaded the files, uploaded them, and surely enough, an upgrade screen came up when I went to my Movable Type log in screen. Upon allowing the script to proceed, it ran a couple operations and then informed me that it was done.
I tried to log in, but my username/password didn't work. I had experienced the same thing when switching hosts last winter, which is a great part of the reason a lot of my entries are still missing. I proceeded to use the default login that comes with the installation instructions, and this worked.
But... All my entries were gone! I did have a backup, but this was the same one that I had used in my host move, and this not only didn't contain my entries from the last several months, but also failed to import a good deal of entries that were actually stored in it. Additionally, I had already manually re-entered a bunch of entries from the early days of my weblog, which also weren't in this backup. Also, all my templates and settings were wiped out.
I was horribly angry. My entries were all in my archives folder of my weblog, but there's apparently no way to import these back into the Movable Type database. A couple of hours ago, I accepted my fate, and wanted to begin manually re-entering all my entries. But, as I had been messing around with files before, Movable Type wasn't working right.
So I decided to delete all Movable Type files, except for the archives folder, and reinstall the beta. I did this, and again got the "easy upgrade" screen, which again ran a bunch of processes.
But... I was able to log in with my old username/password, and... All my entries (pre-upgrade) were there!. So Movable Type must now be able to pull entries out of the archives folder after all!? Anyway, this made my night, as it saved me days, if not weeks, of work.
I still have a good amount of entries to re-enter from my old Xanga weblog, and the ones that didn't transfer last winter. But these are of less importance to me. I'll slowly get to them eventually, spending a couple minutes a day to re-enter a couple.
I learned a couple of good lessons though...
1. It's always important to backup your data.
2. Don't make random decisions to upgrade important stuff at 1 a.m.
3. Nothing is as easy as it looks... Especially if it's from those Six Apart people!
Posted by newkai at 12:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 28, 2005
Cleaning
I've been cleaning all day. Well, that's an overstatement... You know me! But I've done quite a bit today, including washing and then hanging up a bunch of curtains, cleaning two windows, mopping about every floor surface in the apartment, taking out a lot of trash and cans, and cleaning the toilet.
I still have to do the dishes, clean up a bunch of junk lying around, and vacuum two carpets (and another tiny one).
My dad arrives at 12:35 tomorrow afternoon, so I'll have to see how I'll get it done and still get some sleep.
Posted by newkai at 01:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 26, 2005
The Last Week
I've reached the last week of my stay in Vienna this summer. I'm really looking forward to get back to the States and, after another four weeks of waiting, starting up in Syracuse again.
These past few days have been pretty good. Kerstin's back in Vienna, and her presence improves Vienna ten-fold. I went to Merry Monk with her Sunday night, and hung around at her house last night. This weekend should be really good as well.
I've been putting off cleaning my apartment the past few days. My dad's coming back Thursday afternoon, so I have to get it done.
I also found out that Ardi's still going to be in Syracuse one more day after I arrive, so that should be a good night back in the States.
It's going to get horribly hot the next few days. On Friday the high has been estimated to be 37°C (98.6°F). At least it's good for swimming.
Posted by newkai at 09:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 23, 2005
Cops "Raid" Paddy's
Yes, apparently bar raids due exist in Austria. But, as could be expected, they're a little more relaxed. In fact, no one even seemed to care. The cops checked a few people's IDs, but I don't even think they told anyone to leave, and everyone continued to drink and order throughout. Quite different from the "Operation Prevent" raids in Syracuse!
Apparently not much is going on tonight, as I'm staying home. Tomorrow night is already pretty much set, so it should be good.
It looks like I'm actually going to eat a real breakfast tomorrow! I'm usually too lazy to prepare something, so I just skip over it and wait for... Well... Dinner. Today I went to my local Magnet Supermarket and bought some "Real American Toast," some eggs, and some bacon. Finding proper bacon in Vienna is about as hard as finding a selfless girl in Syracuse! I went to the counter and saw some "breakfast bacon," and got some of that. But it's freshly cut and smells horribly strong. My entire refrigerator now reeks of bacon.
In other news, the apartment complex's washing machine is broken. I'm the only user, so I actually have to call the landlord up on Monday to have it fixed. I almost panicked yesterday when I went to retrieve my laundry but the machine hadn't drained the water and the door wouldn't open. Nearly all my essential laundry was in there, so I would have been really screwed. By moving the dial in tiny increments I was able to get it into the unlabeled "open door" position, so that I was able to open the door, which caused a massive waterfall, as it's a front-loading machine.
The next problem was my laundry was soaked. Fortunately, for some strange reason, there's an Austrian-built spinning machine in the laundry room. No dryer, just a machine that spins laundry at 1400 rpm, even faster than the washing machine. This machine vibrates all over the place though, so I basically had to hold it down the entire five minutes or so I let it run.
Yep, that's how I do laundry here.
Posted by newkai at 11:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
