OK. I lied.

The last time I posted here was over a year ago. I thought that was it. The last post here at Blogger. I was moving to a Simple PHP Blog hosted on my own server and simply put a link back here in its sidebar (for those folks who just have to read everything, I guess) and that was supposed to be the end of it.

Well... SPHPBlog has some issues and they weren't getting resolved. So, finally, I decided to move to something else and ended up choosing a software called Pivot.

I installed it and tweaked it and moved all the posts from SPHPBlog to it and all sorts of other fun stuff right at the first of the year. But I ended up breaking the link to all my posts here.

So today I go in to fix it and everything is working like a champeen... except for the RSS feeds.

*sigh*

I've got 'em adjusted so they show up in my aggregator but, since nothing's changed, the aggregator doesn't bother to download the latest and all the internal links (i.e. the ones to the actual posts) still reflect the old urls.

This is a long way of saying... hopefully one more post will fix that.

Meanwhile, if you've just stumbled across this blog, my real blog is Ukulele & All That Jazz.

Thanks for your attention!

The end of Don't Make Me Uke!

This is my last post in Don't Make Me Uke!

I finally took the advice of several geek friends and decided to host my own blog. Though I've actually been hosting this one on my server, I still had to go through Blogger.com to post and to display the posts.

What with the recent spate of hangs while trying to publish and the very long wait (still unfulfilled) for categories, I gave up.

Despite my bitching, I'd like to thank Blogger for being here for me for nearly 300 posts! No doubt once they get their new beta out it'll be even more rockin'. I just won't be here (except in the archival sense).

After a bit of a search I found a blog software that did pretty much everything I want so over the last two days I've been setting it up, customizing it, etc.

I invite you to join me in my new blog, Ukulele & All That Jazz. There's one post there already. Pop in and let me know what you think!

Don't forget to change your bookmark (or RSS feed... that's the best way!).

This is a test...

... of the emergency blogcast system.

This is another test of an offline blogging tool for Linux.

I had posted a test from a different one but I deleted it because it had no title on it. (Actually, I'd put the title in but apparently Blogger's API doesn't do well with that feature. It seemed to hose that up when I tried a "direct to blog" thing from YouTube a while back. I had to go in and edit the post in Blogger anyway.) The first offline thing was also so simple-minded that all you could do was italics, bold and plain hyperlinks.

I guess this one will at least allow me to work offline and then post, edit and re-publish once I get to somewhere with a net connection. It at least knows enough about the Blogger API that it greys out the title entry bit. It's also fancy enough to (supposedly) do images, custom tags (like my little "aside comments" boxes) and such.

Ah well. It's all part of learning this Linux thing I'm sure.

Test.

Dance or curse.

Or sometimes just go... "meh."

(edit from Blogger: Yeah... it could work.)

Why babies dance

I think I've probably posted before about how much I like to see babies dancing away in their strollers (or the slightly older ones on their feet) as they listen to my music. Rob Hampton, in his blog A Guitar Teacher's Lesson Notebook, relates a great story on babies and rhythm.

Rock on, babies!

Ubuntu: about a week later

With a couple exceptions, everything on Ubuntu has "just worked." And the things that haven't just automatically worked I've gotten to work with a few questions in the proper forums.

I plugged in a digital camera and it says "Hey! There's a digital camera. Wanna get the pics off it?"

Well, yes... yes I do.

I put a blank CD in and it asked how did I want to burn it, data or music?

Popped in the little flash memory card reader -- you know... the one that Windoze would not recognize no matter what I did -- and it just worked. It just worked. Now I can get the raw tracks off of my digital audio recorder straight to the computer as wave files... not have to run it in, two tracks at a time, as audio... essentially recording it twice.

I think I mentioned in my previous post on the subject how I just plugged in the ethernet card and it worked.

No driver or other installs for any of those devices. They all worked off of what came on the Ubuntu CD.

And, of course, it's free.

And now, I'm sitting in the Belltown Uptown Espresso, the same wifi cafe as the last time I posted remotely, but this time I'm sure it's just working. I've already switched back and forth between the wifi card and the ethernet card at home and neither one confuses the other. They just work.

I have a few more things to do in order to bring this up to the same functionality as my Windoze box (i.e. do the same stuff I do over there). In some cases it'll mean learning new programs, in others it'll just be using the Linux version.

Take that, Micro$oft!

(edit 10/11/06: Hopefully this will actually post this time. Not the wifi's screwup, blogger is just hanging when you try to publish... even when, like now, it's via the ethernet at home)

Garrison Keillor shoots from the hip

I'm not usually a big Garrison Keillor fan -- mind you, Prairie Home Companion can be fun... occasionally -- but today Clicked pointed towards this rant by him (in the "Pahrump Valley Times") that just knocked my socks off.

He has some things to say about what's happening to things like habeus corpus that you (or at least, I) would not expect from him.

You go, Garrison!

Ubuntu: First Impressions

So I finally bit the bullet and tried Ubuntu Linux on my laptop.

It took me six hours to download. After a bit of trouble with the first CD burn, the second started right up. I played a bit with it and decided... wtf, I can re-install Win98 in a half hour or so. Let's try it.

It installed easily and in my playing with it thus far I'm impressed.

The most impressive part was when I decided to see if I could get online with it. I plugged in the PCMCIA ethernet card, plugged in one of the extra ethernet cords we have hanging about and fired up the pre-installed version of FireFox.

I get a local html file... "Welcome to Ubuntu". So I type in Yahoo's address and boom. I'm there. Absolutely no settings to tweak. I'm just online. Yep, I'm entering this one from the laptop.

And it recognizes the Windows-based LAN with no problems either. It immediately located it and let me log onto shares on both our other machines.

So far the only issue I see is that the little font chooser here in the blogger editor doesn't seem to work well. Oh, and it doesn't seem to see the PS2 mouse so I'm having to use the nasty little "scratch pad" mouse. Feh! I'll be searching the help files on that one.

More reports coming. Next: The dreaded WiFi test.