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Made The Leap
Jan 10th, 2012 by Mike

So I finally made the leap to a new theme. The old one was called Simplicity, but was kind of boring. This one is called Ahimsa by Ravi Sarma. It’s a tad more colorful and has these neat rounded corners on everything. The theme is skinable, so I’ll be able to change the color scheme, if necessary. Now the only thing left to do is to revamp the Now Reading library to display properly under this theme.

I hope you enjoy the new eye candy.

By the way, if you don’t see the sidebars, there is a tab on each side labeled sidebar which when clicked will reveal them. Conversely, if they’re shown, you can hide each one by clicking on its sidebar tab.

© 2012, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Bored With Current Theme
Dec 23rd, 2011 by Mike

I’m getting bored with the current theme, Simplicity. I’m going to change it, but I haven’t found one that floats my boat. Also, every time I change themes, Now Reading, the plug-in that displays the books I’m reading, breaks. The theme writers don’t use the same names for similar style elements, so plug-ins that use templates that display whole screens break if the names change. Perhaps I’ll get lucky and have the new theme use the same style names as the old theme.

© 2011, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Taps for the iBook
Feb 1st, 2009 by Mike

Da da da.

I changed the disk drive, loaded the original operating system, booted it up and it worked.

I decided to upgrade the operating system and in the process, the upgrade failed because the DVD quit reading the OS 10.4 DVD. After that I couldn’t boot the iBook. I tried everything, which I won’t go into here. I even booted the iBook in target mode, booted using the iBook’s drive on my very old iMac and it worked. 

Looks like the iBook is dead. It’s old enough that it would not be worth it to take to Apple dudes for them to fix.

Da da da. Oh, well.

© 2009, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Site Upgrade
Jul 18th, 2008 by Mike

I upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.6. It was a pretty painless upgrade. We’ll see what all that means in the days to come.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Potpourri
Jul 10th, 2008 by Mike

Mrs Major continues to improve. She’s ditched the cane and now walks around even better than before the surgery. She’s still a little tentative, but she doesn’t waddle any more like her knees hurt. She’s cut way down on the pain meds. Maybe she’ll take back some of the household chores.

My golf game continues to improve. I’m pleased with that.

It’s hot. 98º with 50% humidity (5:30 p.m.).1 It seems cooler, now. Around noon it was 91º with 80% humidity. At least we’re not burning down like California. Or flooding like the midwest did.

Is it just me or are our choices for President getting worse each election? I’ve got my clothespin for my nose all ready. I haven’t missed an election since I was 21 (yes we had to be 21 to vote once upon a time) and I don’t plan to miss this one, but I’m really tempted to stay in bed on election day.

I just upgraded my main Mac to OSX 10.5. I like it. It seems to run faster and has lots of new features I like. I ran into some trouble because all of my web sites I test locally on this Mac before I do major revisions to the Internet ones. When I upgraded, none of them worked. Turns out you have to turn on the programming language and databases with 10.5. Earlier versions were automatically turned on. No big deal…just a few edits to some configuration files, but it drove me crazy for about a day and a half.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

- - - - - footnotes - - - - -
  1. I’m not complaining. I love the heat []
Got Bored Again
Apr 20th, 2008 by Mike

I got bored again so I changed the theme of Musings. I had to modify it a little because I didn’t like the way some stuff was displayed and it didn’t accommodate all of the plugins I have installed.

I’d also love to do a countdown for Mrs. Major’s knee replacement and for Son Major and The Major’s trip to California to work at the U.S. Open Golf Championship, but the plugin that handles that doesn’t work with this version of WordPress. I guess I’ll keep looking for a compatible one.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Guarding The Site
Apr 14th, 2008 by Mike

I added a plugin to Major Mike’s Musings that requires that anyone making comments must be a real human. You’ve seen this on other sites. This feature displays two words from a book which you will be required to enter in order to comment. One of the works a computer can’t read.

I’m getting tired of reviewing spam posts. I’ve had over 17,000 of them. 

UPDATE: It looks like the feature wasn’t working and people couldn’t post comments. So I disabled it. It worked fine on my home server test system. Hmmmm.

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

A Bit of Geekishness
Apr 2nd, 2008 by Mike

First, here are some statistics from my email spam catcher, SpamSieve, for the month of March:

Filtered Mail

  • 1,040 Good Messages
  • 14,076 Spam Messages (93%)
  • 438 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy

  • 2 False Positives
  • 61 False Negatives (97%)
  • 99.6% Correct

To be honest, I administer two domains that get mail and I review all the misaddressed mail. Unfortunately, spammers will take a domain, like majormike.net and add a bunch of fake names in the hope that they will get lucky and come up with a real address. This tends to proliferate the number of bogus messages I have to review. But you can be sure I won’t let bzjz@majormike.net pass.

Second, I just converted the underlying software that supports this site to the latest version: WordPress 2.5. Now aren’t you impressed? I has a few glitches, but it looks like a good product.

 

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Upgrade WordPress
Jan 21st, 2008 by Mike

I did upgrade to WordPress 2.3.2 (the latest version of the software that publishes this blog) today. The transition went smoothly with no problems.

I perceived by my earlier post that I get the most comments when I publish stuff that’s incomprehensible to most of my readers. So in an effort to generate more comments I respectfully submit the following:

Read the rest of this entry »

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

Code Changes
Jan 20th, 2008 by Mike

Today I made some code changes to the template that displays this site. That little guitar that displays below each post is now part of the background code instead of code in each post. The advantage is that (1) I don’t have to cut code from a text editor and paste it into each post and (2) if I want to change the icon, I can just change it on the server by uploading a graphic with the name post_bullet.png. The disadvantage is that if I change the template, I have to make code changes to a few files in the new template.

Tomorrow we upgrade to WordPress 2.3 (If I have time).

© 2008, J. M. Erickson. All rights reserved.

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