Reloaded: Cloudy Autumn Edition
A “reloaded” post is a quick-clipped summary of a bunch of small things from the past few days. I want to write them down, but I am either lacking in (a) details or (b) time. That’s just how it goes sometimes. Enjoy.
The Chopping Game
I’ve been playing Minecraft again. I’d kinda been off it for a while — the summer mostly — but in the last couple weeks I’ve ventured back into the world we created last winter and I’ve been chopping my way through the new features, rule-sets, and other changes. I’ve still not figured out all the bits, though: I really need to find that wiki and spend some time look at what all the little tweaks mean. The food and nutrition structure has changed substantially over the summer, as has — it would seem — the spawn rate for all the critters. Everything I knew seems slightly askew from what I need to know now. Frustrating, a little, but I enjoy the challenge. Except when I build a giant well-lit cavern with water and pasture that a few months ago would have been sprouting cows and pigs like no one’s business, but then — tumbleweed rolls by — no cows or pigs! WTF? Hey… these are important details for a gamer.
jQuery
I’ve been picking my way through a new jQuery book I bought trying to, y’know, learn jQuery. I’m not sure how useful it will be as I’m not doing a ton of actual design for websites these days. But it’s another tool, I figure, and it can’t hurt to have some more tools in the old digital tool-belt, right? The book is called Head First jQuery, and is a bit of a spin on the “Dummies” style of textbook, but with computer-ish things. In some ways it’s a little too dumbed down. But the information seems solid enough, so if I can put up with a few more corny examples and bad jokes I should finally have my mind wrapped around that JSON stuff everyone seems to be using these days. I hope.
Crate Quiet
Sparkle seems to be enjoying her new crate — at least in as much as a dog can enjoy being locked in a confined space. I don’t know if it is just laziness or stubbornness, but over the summer she started doing her thing — y’know… her ‘thing’ — on the floor overnight. We weren’t confining her, but where she used to wake us up to pee, she kinda gave up on that and just went. So we started restricting her to the laundry room at night. And you’d think that would be fine what with a nice bed, a water dish, and a lot of space to walk around in, but pack animal that she is being separated from us by thirty or so feet is apparently a hardship. She was waking us up in the wee hours of the night and doing this thing where she’d try and trick us into letting her out then dashing into our bedroom. It was resulting in a lot of late night chases around the house which one might imagine is not great for sleep. So we got her a bigger, wire-mesh-type cage for our bedroom, thus she seems to sleep through the night now. And that means so do I.
Two to the Power of Eighteen
…is apparently the file-count limit on my web server. And I ran out the other day. I was uploading photos to my gallery and — choke — the errors started popping up and there it was: Out of space, despite the fact that my actual file size quota is still in the single digit percentages. I’d capped my file count, though, and had to spend a few hours that evening deleting old chunks of sites from the server. Now, how the heck does one use up over two-hundred and sixty thousand files in one server, you ask? Well, as it turns out, I still had a copy of my old gallery — Gallery 2 — running in a directory tucked away and linked to from somewhere in this very blog. And it also turns out that if you don’t clean out the cache for that particular bit of software, it just slowly accumulates little tiny inconsequential temporary files… nearly a hundred thousand of them, to be precise. And, yeah, that is a big chunk of my server quota. (All better now, though.)
