Oooooh….. Shiny!

Sorry posting’s been a bit light again. I have got a ton going on this week, but I’m also… (ahem)… playing with WordPress.org – and I am just rather enamored of its sheer awesomeness.

My mad techgeekchick skillz don’t seem to be serving me that well this time and I feel a little bit like a newbie trying to learn Windows 3.x all over again in that respect – and there is just SO much stuff!!! – but it’s pretty neat and I’m having fun. And have fallen in love with the hosting company (Host Gator) after my yucky experiences elsewhere (I won’t say who, but feel free to ask me which companies to avoid at all costs). I actually made a spontaneous decision (based on the recommendation of a WordPress.org expert) to jump over there after pulling my hair out for hours trying to install and update a WordPress blog where I was, and when I got set up at Host Gator, I had the thing on and live in less than five minutes (as well as some really cool other stuff that came with the account).

I’ll let you guys take a look at it when I get a little more moved in and situated. I don’t project that I’m going to move the Zone over there  – well, maybe someday, but I’m still rather attached to WordPress.com and even though it’s probably dumb of me, I never really wanted to put any advertising on the personal blog and whatnot. Now, the music blog, that might be another story – but I’m not jumping ship from WordPress.com with the personal blog anytime soon.

This new adventure is pretty cool though, I’m getting a kick out of playing with it. I just hope I don’t break anything, eek.

Nope, Not Dead Yet

Well, hello there. I bet you maybe thought I wasn’t coming back, unless you’re on Twitter and in that case you knew I was awake online again. Pffft, I always come back eventually.

This blog will be 13 years old in February and I suppose it’ll still be here 13 years from now. Or somewhere anyway.

There’s really not much to say – which is kind of ridiculous because I bet I’ve had 100 blog posts written in my head. It was a really trying summer. Things are (maybe, hopefully) getting a little better now.

We lost Little, the last of the elderlies, a couple of weeks ago. She was a very old kitty at 17 or 18 (I never can remember which year she came here), and had been very sick for a long time, so it was time. The oldest four-footed thing in my house right now is 12, which seems odd. Everybody else is fine. I’m still trying to get used to not having a dog around that is scared to death of thunderstorms (and rain) anymore, or fireworks. Instead Dobie’s niece and nephews bark at fireworks, which is certainly more annoying.

There’s more, I’m sure, I’m a bit sleepy this morning though so this will be short. I thought we were supposed to have thunderstorms today, so I stayed up through the night working, thinking today would be a good nap day. Silly me, I practically need sunglasses indoors today, it’s so bright.

Hopefully anyone who’s subscribed via feed will get this. I discovered accidentally, several weeks ago on the MMH blog, that Feedburner had been scooped up by Google (thank goodness not Yahoo which now has its hands in my AT&T mail which works like crap now), and stuff had changed and I needed to migrate the feed, so hopefully this post is showing up both on feed and in MyBlogLog.

Also, unless you’ve got the feed or never had anything but the WordPress link, you may not even know I’m still here yet since I’m having a little bit of a disagreement with my domain & web host (i.e., they suck and their account re-up tactics suck even more). I’ll straighten that out eventually, but for now you can bookmark/link @ http://thelynnsterzone.wordpress.com/ – same for the music blog except it’s lynnstersmusiczone – it’s always been here anyway and will never change.

More later, I’m yawning despite the wayyyyyyy too bright sun.

The Miracle of Malwarebytes

Well, that’s seven hours of my life I will never get back.  I have spent most of the day since I woke up again (after working late last night) trying to rid my newish computer of a particularly nasty strain of malware/trojan/etc. that I’ve acquired before, but the last time I had it, that strain was more easily eradicated.

This one refused to be killed.  As many know, I have a pretty large stable of protection programs of various kinds, and generally my computer is usually probably locked up tighter than Ft. Knox.  None of my usual stable of stuff was working this time – all of which are generally excellent – nor about a half dozen more things I tried in the process.  This thing just wasn’t going away.

Doubly sucks that I wound up with because of a stupid web page.  I suppose I have a little bit of respect for the hackers that come up with executable virii & trojans, the ones you actually have to open up or DO something to get infected.  I even have a friend who was one of those folks in his younger and stupider days.  These drive-by web page weenies are just cowards and ought to be prosecutable to the fullest extent of the law.

Well, anyway, to make a long story short, after hours and hours and going through virtually every other program in my stable ‘o stuff which are all generally excellent and reliable, without a single one working to rid myself of this nasty piece of coward-created work -

Folks, I hereby present to you Malwarebytes.  It was the ONLY one out of about twenty attempts with other programs to rid myself of this thing, and hours and hours of trying, that worked.  I’m a believer now, and am probably going to be replacing one of my usual standards of protection with it, most likely.

I’m not much for commercial endorsements of any kind, but given the circumstances and the outcome, seemed like I ought to share.

On another note, apologies for the lack of anything much since Christmas.  I’ve really been much too busy trying to stay afloat and not homeless and totally starving (as opposed to starving three or four days out of the week in general) and all that fun stuff.  More soon, I hope.

Oops

Apologies to all my readers who still insist on using Internet Explorer as a web browser. I guess y’all must have thought I’d lost my mind last week. I was alerted to the odd-lookingness of my blogs late last week by my mother, and at the time I blamed it on her web browser, which was technically true because if you use Firefox or most other browsers, you likely didn’t notice anything at all different.

But apparently a very small change in HTML I made last week sent Internet Explorer into the equivalent of a grand mal epileptic seizure. She & I had discussed the problem she was having viewing the blog again on the phone earlier, so I fired up IE myself to see what she was seeing, and yup, it was alllll messed up. After we got off the phone I thought about it for a while and poked around a bit, and then discovered the HTML culprit and promptly removed it.

So it’s all fixed now, and I removed a couple of other tinier things that apparently had an issue with Internet Explorer too, so now all you IE diehards should be seeing the same things on both blogs that everyone else does. This is why…

On another note, I saw something at Aunt B.’s today that made me think once again, as I often have in the past, that it’s probably a good thing that I am so ancient that we didn’t have webcams and other such video equipment so easily at our disposal when I was a teenager and in college, or cell phones with cameras and all those sorts of things, or most especially YouTube. Because I would have never gotten anything else done because I would have been making goofy videos or video blogs all the time, no doubt.

Of course, I might have been rich & famous by now, too, but that’s beside the point.

Technical Pause

So I am working on a couple of projects this weekend that have badly needed completing for a long time, and I just came across an old post from 1999 where I am all excited and happy about getting a new 56K (dialup) modem.

It kind of feels like I just admitted I remember when the light bulb was invented or something. Hee.

I wonder how many times now I’ve told these two stories:

The first PC we ever bought (after the C64, and before that, the Atari 400) is still sitting in my back bedroom, and probably works if I plugged it in. It was an XT, has 4MB of RAM and a 10MB hard drive, which is all “they” said at the time anyone would ever need.

A couple of more computers down the road, I bought my first “big” hard drive. It was a used 976MB (not GB, MB) drive, and I paid $235 for it.

OK, now I feel like I just admitted I was around when they invented cell phones and when cable TV came out. Oh, that’s right… I was.

That Bytes: Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T Propose to Byte the Hands That Feed ‘Em

Way to go, Time Warner, Comcast, and AT&T:

Charging by the Byte to Curb Internet Traffic

Yes, let’s take the future of technology BACKWARDS about about a hundred steps instead of moving forward, why don’t we?

I’m not even likely one of those that would be highly affected, the principle of it all just annoys the techgeekchick in me.

I’ve about decided that one of the best things that could happen is that the United States takes some of the money that gets wasted annually on unnecessary junk, WiFi the entire country, and be done with it all.

By the way, Comcast, you’ve got a lot of nerve even proposing such a thing, seeing as how you lost thousands of the customers you inherited from Time Warner (both Internet and cable TV customers), and most everyone (in Tennessee anyway) agrees that your service sucks. I know people who had RoadRunner accounts from practically Day One, and for YEARS, that jumped ship soon after you moved in. I’d back off if I were you, but hey, that’s just me.

(No offense to the one unnamed friend of mine who works for Comcast, of whom I am certain does a standout job amongst a sea of ineptitude.)

HT: Newscoma via Twitter

UPDATE: In browsing links to blogs talking about the NYT article, I just read the most perfect comment about this whole situation from someone in Canada, I believe:

The internet providers were given massive tax breaks to improve their networks (fiber to the home and whatnot). Now they not only haven’t done that with the money, but the inferior networks they’ve built instead are reaching capacity.

Somebody should make your ISPs sleep in the bed they made.

Well said.

UPDATE #2: And oh yeah, no offense either to my other friend in the Metro Nashville area who works for AT&T, even though I wouldn’t call that the sea of ineptitude Comcast is.

Bits & Pieces, Or Just Bits ‘Cos I Don’t Have Time for the Pieces Right Now

There’s just really no time to be spared, so pardon me for this hit & run update.

1. A little while ago, I ate a cheese Krystal – because I was badly in need of food that I could get quick and didn’t have to cook and it was 3 in the morning – and it was unbelievably, horribly, terribly, awfully & ungodly bad. I have never had a Krystal that tasted that disgustingly, putridly bad in my life. Yes, I realize that Krystals are not haute cuisine, but come on – it’s a Krystal. How can you screw up a Krystal that bad?? If I die in my sleep here in a little bit, you’ll know what happened. Blech. A shoe sole would have tasted better I think.

2. I’ve been eating entirely too much fast food lately anyway, which is kind of okay because I never eat anyway and all I ever get is, like, one little McDonald’s cheeseburger, and they’re all of a dollar and I DO NOT HAVE TIME to cook. But let’s not talk about the fact that in the past two weeks I’ve been served (A) a cheeseburger that was between two top buns, and (B) got home one day and opened the bag to discover I had a top & bottom bun with cheese in the middle – and no burger. Wake up, people! I know it’s just an unimportant $1.00 cheeseburger, but it might just be someone’s only meal of the day that you totally screw up.

3. I know I shouldn’t have laughed because they’re both elderly and one’s a little sickly and might be a bit senile, but watching not just one but two of my cats fall off the desk a few minutes ago, within a few minutes of each other, with an empty chip bag (the small 99-cent Big Grab size) on their heads was almost as funny as a few years ago when my elderly then-16-year old cat got his head stuck inside an empty Krystal Chik box.

4. On a not-as-amusing note, Maggie’s (same Maggie as in the pic above) new favorite place to nap is with her head on the edge of my keyboard, which usually eventually occurs to me at some point after being puzzled as to why I’m typing in all caps or ““““` is appearing on the screen again.

5. I am apparently now completely and totally assimilated into the electronic communications world at this point, because now that my fax AND my printer are both borked, and a fax that I needed to get where it needed to go so I could start getting some commission payments didn’t go through because that dinosaur of a mid-’90s era fax that I inherited from my old office is totally dead now… it took about a month for it to finally occur to me that I could just put a stamp on an envelope and MAIL it.

6. Besides the petered out fax and printer, now my desktop is apparently on its last legs too – I’ve known it was coming, was hoping to hold it off a little longer, seeing as how that’s pretty distressing since I do 100% of my work on this computer these days – but it spit out a frightening serious error at me the other day and threatened to not start (but it eventually did). In the course of seeing what I could afford to ditch in an effort to get it speeded up a little and prepare to defragment the drive for the first time in I dunno how long, after going through some other directories, I took note of the millions of Notepad files I’ve got saved to the desktop – and had a bit of a chuckle over the title of some of those files, such as: CLC Links Widget, WP Tutorial, Moved Blogs, kathyt, kathyt Links Widget, More Moved Blogs, B Blogger Template, one simply titled B, B Tutorial (yes, I don’t remember why I felt I needed to make her her own instead of giving her the one I gave everyone else), and Sarcastro Stuff (which reminds me yet again that I STILL need to repost all his old photos one of these days, ugh). Anyway, giggle – yeah, I’m a blog geek.

7. There are angels in the blogosphere and in my MySpacesphere too. Angels, I tell you.

8. I’m so tired I don’t have time to BREATHE, and I don’t have time anyway because I have way too much work and projects to do. This staying up for a day and a half at a time, sleeping a few hours and starting all over again is getting a little old. I’ve been up again for about 38 or 39 hours now and worked straight through for about 22 well, really about 29 or 30, of those, so yeah – ‘scuse me if I’m a little loopy right now.

That is all. But seriously, if I don’t at least show up for a minute on Twitter by tonight? Food poisoning. Ugh, a nasty, dirty, filthy shoe sole would have no doubt tasted better. Yuck.

9. (Yes, Lesley and Brittney, I know I shouldn’t eat meat anyway.)

10. (But still – it’s a Krystal! How can anyone screw up a Krystal??)

11. Zzzzzz…

A Big Zone Breakthrough in Technology

Hoo boy, yeah, we’re really getting up to date and into this century here now, you bet. How, you say? Why, take a look down that left sidebar. No, further down. Yeah, there.

You can now subscribe to The Lynnster Zone via e-mail. (Or you can use this handy dandy link in the previous sentence.) Are you excited now? Yes, I’m being sarcastic.  So now, for those of you who don’t want to, nor know how to, nor care to learn how to subscribe by feed, you can have me delivered straight to your e-mail box.  Aces.

No, really, I was updating some stuff at FeedBurner (like those poor little subscription chicklets down in the left sidebar that half of them were pitifully old) & while there I just happened to wander in the “E-mail Subscriptions” section and looked around and went, huh, wonder why I never bothered to set that up before. No, I don’t know either.

There’s something else new too, down there in the right sidebar. No, further down. More. Yeah, right there.

Yes, even though I have had my OLD music pages that haven’t been touched in at least two or three years in a little link group down there, for whatever moronic reason I had never bothered to do the same with my CURRENT pages I manage nowadays practically every day. So, probably not too exciting unless you’re a diehard music fan and/or Aussie music fan – or if you’re just interested in seeing what ELSE I spend my voluminous amounts of free time on (*cough*) besides this blog (*choke*) – but well, now they’re there.

I probably did something else new here tonight but whatever it was, I’m sure it wasn’t terribly important.

I am a busy little bee this week doing some real work plus another project plus determined to get some to-do’s off my list that have been sitting there waiting to be done forEVER – things that if I will just get them DONE they will be super low maintenance from there on out – so back to the salt mines I go. Ciao.

Blogger, You Still Suck

I wanted to comment today on this post over at Knuck’s because he has a really cool little kid having a birthday today, and the post is a really touching father-to-daughter post even with that special Knuck brand o’ sarcasm (heh), and I just liked it. Having also been an only child and daughter (in this scenario my sister doesn’t count), I dug it (and got just a little bit teary reading it, but don’t tell anybody).

But alas, I have given up all hope of being able to comment on Blogger blogs anymore after months and months of trying and even having consulted with a Blogger/Blogspot expert of sorts, who also eventually gave up trying to figure out why I can no longer comment on blogs on the Blogger platform. When someone who actually was a part of building the damn Blogger platform in the first place can’t even figure it out, I’m sure not going to keep wasting my time trying to.

I love all my Blogger blogging friends, they probably think I don’t care anymore nor read but I do, and I miss being able to comment over at their respective cribs. It figures, and is just my luck, that the majority I would like to comment often on are using Blogger’s regular comment system and not HaloScan or something. Most of these folks I have tried a time or two to get them to convert to WordPress (or ANYTHING besides Blogger) and my powers of persuasion have failed miserably. Or simply, as with some, they just never have had the problems those of us who fled Blogger lo now so many moons ago have had, so they felt no need to move.

Which is okay, really. I still read most of them. I just miss being able to comment at Knuck’s, or Lindsey’s. Or Short & Fat’s. Or Rex L. Camino’s. Or Chez Bez. Or Klinde’s. Or Linda’s. Or Larry Elvis & Curly’s dad’s. Or The Vol Abroad’s. Or Mrs. Bez. Or Dr. Woo’s. Or my out-of-state blog crushes Churlita and Margaret. Or many, many more.

On the upside, the list of folks my powers of persuasion to move to WordPress worked on (or someone else moved indirectly because of it, thanks to some of those) is WAY longer than the Blogger holdouts, as well as the ones who never went to the Dark Side in the first place, so I guess I shouldn’t grouse too much.

No, this post wasn’t meant as a sneaky way of tossing out some link love, I just wanted to bitch about Blogger again ‘cos it sucks. Hee.

On another note – hey, I just noticed I got written up at AnimalShak a couple of weeks ago, sorry it took me so long to notice. I’m not the most observant crayon in the box some days.

Technogripe

So, I get that you’re this incredibly huge, incredibly famous, humongous tremendous media site with a bazillion readers and probably about as many advertisers.

But you also aren’t the online alternative site to a print media paper/magazine, either.  (Not that I don’t have pretty much the same issues with many of those, too.)

So why, why, WHY is it so hard to read anything - and find things one wants to read – on your site?

Heck, I can’t even read the RSS feed.  You’ve got that all bamboozled too.

I know you take in more than enough money in advertising alone to paste up something that’s not worse than trying to read Usenet articles in a circa 1995 newsreader.  Use it.