Category Archives: Administrative

SoCal Adventures

OK, not adventures exactly.

I know that posting has been light. I’ve been doing hard-core actual work out here, with little time to post. But I have to relate the following story.

It’s amazing how you (or, well…me) can live somewhere for decades, and never notice a place in the neighborhood. OK, not exactly in the neighborhood, but not more than three miles from it. For the last many years we lived in Redondo, Patricia and I were always looking for good breakfast places in the South Bay. While looking for one on my own before work in Torrance, I noticed yesterday morning, for the first time ever, that there was actually a Norm’s Restaurant on the west side of Hawthorne, just north of 190th.

So I went in to check it out.

The waiter had an expensive “tricked-out name tag” that said (well, strongly implied) that his name was Ismael. I had to resist two impulses.

The first was to say, “So, can I call you Ismael?” Hardy har har.

I resisted because either a) he wouldn’t have gotten the literary reference, so he would either say “Sure, it’s my name, why not?” (leaving me feeling as foolish as I should) or b) he would get it, and say, “Yes. Please do so. I’ve never heard that one before. Well, not more than 83,436 times. Doing so will leave my sides bleeding and my spleen on open display at the continuing hilarity.” Which would also go over like the proverbial depleted-uranium blimp. Many would have done so, either because they didn’t anticipate these two almost certain responses, or because making lame jokes and being the life of the Norm’s party was more important to them than these consequences.

I also considered asking him if he had a sister named “Isfemael.” But I had only just given him my order. He hadn’t gone into the kitchen yet. One never knows what happens in the kitchen. The possibilities are endless, and disgusting.

As it turned out, they had great corned-beef hash with eggs.

Blogroll

I don’t know when I’ll get around to figuring out how to properly incorporate it into the new template (and it really needs weeding/updating as well), but in response to a question in comments, I’ve added a link to my old index page with it, in the upper left box.

Blog Moving Progress

I’ve shut down commenting at the old MT site, and done a reexport from MT, so sometime today, I should have absorbed comments that occurred during the transition. I’ve moved the categories over to the right side, and added links to their feeds. I’ll be slowly getting the blogroll put back together on the left over the next couple days.

Yes, It’s Me

Sorry for the new look, but I haven’t had time to customize the template–I just grabbed one from the available themes.  And I suspect that I’ll never get it looking exactly like the old one–it was based on HTML tables with a primitive stylesheet–and this WordPress setup is entirely PHP/CSS driven.  But at a minimum I should be able to get the blogroll back up, and it should be much more functional now.  And I’ve always valued function over form.

Anyway, one more unhappy ex-MT customer.  I gave up on it when I realized that the documentation had not improved in any obvious way since I upgraded in January and found that it sucked like a Dyson.

Any comments left between now and yesterday afternoon didn’t get imported, so I’ll probably have to pick them up manually later.  It’s not a high priority.  Or maybe I’ll do another export, now that the old site isn’t functional any more, and no new comments will be coming in.

Anyway, welcome to the new place, with the same old proprietor.

Oh, and one nice immediate feature–as you can see, I now have good category pages up, so those who are interested in (e.g.) only the space, or only the politics posts, can now view them without the others.

Warning To Commenters

I have finally had enough, and am moving to WordPress. This means that recent (in the last few hours) comments won’t be picked up in the import/export (and none forward, until I get the new site up). I will try to pick up the stragglers after I deal with the upgrade in general, but will make no guarantees. I’m a little frustrated, because MT 4 decided that any comments issued before I upgraded to it are unworthy of being exported, so older posts won’t see the older comments, unless you find them via the older URLs. And of course, you won’t be able to comment on them, because they’re static web pages.

I’d pay something to someone who has software to merge old with new, but not a lot. On the other hand, there may be a lot of folks in my situation, given the Movable Type disaster…

Progress

After I got fed up and went to bed last night, I got up this morning and fixed my individual archive template. The RSS feed seems to be publishing reliably now, and the pages are updating reliably as well. But I still haven’t gotten rid of the timeouts, and still don’t know what the problem is. I’ve essentially replaced all of the code in the index template (and its modules) with code from known working sites, but the problem persists.

I still have some fixing to do, to get categories to show up.

[Update]

Dang. The RSS has quit again.

Another Test Post

I think I may have made a breakthrough in finding the problem with the timeouts.

[Update]

Nope. Or at least not as big a one as I thought…

Still timing out.

[Update]

Seeing what happens now…

[Update, infuriated]

OK, now I’ve blown it. I screwed up my comments and individual entry templates, and I didn’t back it up. I’ve had it.

A User-Hostile Service

As one can surmise from the previous test posts, I’ve been trying (after three quarters of a year) to fix the problems with my Movable Type installation.

I went to one of the providers listed at MT as consultants, to try to get some help (unnamed, to protect the guilty). They have been somewhat helpful, in that they have eliminated possibilities of what the problem might be, but they haven’t actually determined what the problem is ($150 later, and asking for more).

But that’s not the point. The point is the (to me) user hostility of their system.

When I get an email from them, it comes in the following form:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

[message from unnamed service…]

In my first response, I ignored it, and just replied below (as I always do, since as a long-time emailer, I bottom post to response).

The response was:

====== WHEN REPLYING DELETE THIS LINE AND EVERYTHING BELOW IT ======

Hi

Your reply was blank. I’m assuming this is because you were trying to quote
me instead of deleting everything and then replying. Please give it a try
again by deleting all the original text.

Oh. OK.

They were serious.

They were determined to allow nothing that they emailed me to be quoted in my response. And moreover, even if I top posted, they didn’t want to see their response in my response.

Is it just me, or are they nuts?

Here was my second email in response to this absurd and deliberate policy (the first was minimal, and unreplied to):

One other point. Do you realize how annoying it is to:

1) not include my response in your response and

2) make me jump through hoops to include your response in mine?

Not to mention top posting (though in this case, it’s almost meaningless to distinguish between top and bottom posting).

WHY DO YOU DO THIS?

Do you think that it enhances the customer relationship?

This alone is almost enough to make me want to write off my current investment in you as a bad one, and find someone who can help me without being such an email PITA.

The response?

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.

Here is my response:

Please help us understand why you feel like you should always include our response with ours? Our web based desk records everything, including our responses so we don’t need to see it multiple times. This creates duplicate records.
==========================================================

Yes, because bandwidth for a few lines of text is so expensive…

It is important because I would like to have some context for what I’m responding to, and you should have some context for what you’re responding to, in the email to which you’re responding. If I want to find out what we’re talking about, I have to go back and dig into my outbox, to figure out WTF we’re talking about. If you don’t find this annoying, I don’t frankly understand why. If you don’t want excessive repetition, just delete the older stuff. That’s how it worked on Usenet for years.

===========================================================

We work with thousands of customers and didn’t see this as a problem before.
===========================================================

Then you must have worked with thousands of top-posting morons raised on Outlook and AOL, and who only know how to upload to blogs with FTP, thus opening themselves to attack. It drives old-timers like me, familiar with old-school email and Usenet, NUTS.
I have never before run into a system that MADE IT DIFFICULT (AND ATTEMPTED TO MAKE IT IMPOSSIBLE, EVEN WARNED RESPONDENTS NOT TO DO IT) TO QUOTE AN EMAIL IN RESPONSE. This is a new, and infuriating system to me.

Can you point me to anyone else who has deliberately and maliciously set up their email responses this way, because it is a novel and off-putting approach, that has been making me angry with each exchange? I’ve been sort of happy with you, in that you seem to be attempting to help, even though you have made no progress whatsoever in solving my problem, other than telling me what it isn’t, but you can’t imagine how frustrating this is. Deliberately attempting (in futility, obviously) to make it impossible to include context of email responses is, to me, insane.

That’s where it stands at this point. Who is nuts?