I had a great time back in NC and 2 days in Atlanta. Now it’s time to get back to work. And start planning 2009. It looks like I have already allocated all of my vacation time. But that’s fine with me because it requires a ski trip to Lake Tahoe, my parents coming to visit the southwest, a trip to Istanbul and Cyprus, and two trips to NC one in summer(wedding reception at Big Butte) and one for the Holidays.

This week I’m going to be getting my beer brewing kit. I want to make sure I have room for it my already overcrowded apartment.

Speaking to one of my brothers, I realized that I am not using my iPhone to it’s full potential. There are really only a few apps that I use regularly. So I am looking at the apps in more detail for ones I will actually use. So far I have found vlingo which works quite well. I may feel like using the iPhone while driving is not so horrible (well still only at red lights).

An interesting, but maybe not so useful app comes from instamapper. Which also segues into my hike in Ventana Canyon yesterday. Because of the steady rise in the terrain and the great line-of-sight to Tucson, I had reception for most of the hike. And so you can see a rough route of the hike.

In other news, my iPod mini up and died after about four years. Here is the culprit.

Luckily for around $70, I’m getting a 32GB Compact Flash drive(solid state) and a new battery.

Finally, I hate the traffic that goes with Christmas shopping.

But really the motivation for this post is to get back to posting regularly….So I begin with a screen shot from an episode of Law & Order

Isn’t that the most awesome IP address EVER?

It’s really coming to crunch time for me. I will be selecting where I live and the job I will have. It’s coming to the end of the semester and there is a demo for research. I will so ready for a change of pace with out 20 different things to do.

I would like to think when I have free time I will better utilize than I have in the past. But only time will tell.

Oh yeah, Happy Leap day! A Holiday we can all get behind.

So word I was thinking of was mass. I must confess it was a lot of fun riding around Atlanta with probably 100 other cyclists. Too bad I don’t really know any of them (two of them work in the same building). I need me some cycle buddies.

I would love to be in school and TA hassle-free for a few years. That would be my ideal. Basically I want to be challenged and have time to pursue (with cohorts of course) my own ideas, thoughts, and desires. And quite frankly I do not have the concentration to more than three things. And that is why I think graduate school has not quite been all that I had hoped. Don’t get me wrong I don’t regret any of it, but I had high hopes.

At least I’m trying to get out again. It’s been a while since I stretched my legs. I am going to cycle somewhere that requires a overnight stop (hopefully spring break). But for this weekend its off to my hometown for some home cooking and some fresh air.

Today Ralph Nader has declared his candidacy for the President of the USA. This begs the question of when (not if) the remaining potential candidates will announce. I am of course speaking of Mayor Bloomberg.

But back to Nader…I think his major strength is his connection to FDR. That’s right folks, FDR been in office less than a year when Nader was born. I am not going to fuel the popular beliefs that FDR had himself cloned, but if you believed such things the timing would roughly add up.

I must confess, Nader or Bloomberg could steal my vote from Lobsterman (and many other voters) if they followed the tradition of ancient Rome.

“Candidate” is a derivative of the Latin “candida” (white). In Ancient Rome, people running for political office would usually wear togas chalked and bleached to be bright white at speeches, debates, conventions, and other public functions.

[source]

In all a large combination of factors could be contributing to this malaise: It is winter, I am recovering from a cold, I have a lot of work to catch up on, I am not meeting any of my personal goals, and did I mention I am one year older? My regrets for this week are that I did not spend my sick time reading. My goals for the next week are to return some balance to my life and complete my taxes (I need that money back).

Maybe I’ll actually find some time to work on the many projects that seem to pile up the hidden niches of my mind. This week I did order some sample parts and dissect a CD drive to poach the brushless DC motor (apparently RC people rewind these things for more power).

I fear they will again have to wait until the summer which I am ready to welcome. Which reminds me to mention I am ready to cut my hair off. I will probably say goodbye to my long hair in the next week or so. I am just ready for new starts all around. Shall I go Shaolin again? Probably not.

March looks to be interesting. I will visit Maryland Pok Guy only to return to the FRC regional which leads into Spring Break (ATHF style). I promise to be more interesting next week, when I am rested.

First it wrote over my old install (because I was using a symlink). I was quickly able to restore that. At this point I made sure to backup mysql database. I changed the name of the databases to import them into mysql by doing a search and replace in the sql dump. I thought at this point the upgrade was only a few moments away.

But Wordpress is not a simple mistress. No, I got a few cryptic errors.
First I didn’t have permission to do anything. Somehow during the upgrade another wp_capabilities entry was inserted into the usermeta table that made admin not an administrator. so I removed that entry. And I was admin again.

Then there was this gem of recursive redirects. after some printfs I found it was because of URL rewriting. Basically wordpresses canonical URL settings where looking for www.freshred.net, but the apache server would automatically remove the www.. Worpress said, that ain’t right and redirected again. So I changed the Blog URL setting in wordpress admin area and it worked.

After fixing the redirect issue I found that it was documented (Trac Ticket #5306).

It is 3am and I need sleep for a busy day tomorrow. I always do this to myself. Anyway, please forgive my incoherent babbling int his post.

I have started to wonder now if any potential employers will find my blog. I doubt it, but I am up there in the search results for my name. I am quite sure I can credit (or blame) either my friend directly or indirectly.

Finally for the real reason I am posting. I have decided to change my tag line from the nonsensical “Tending to run metaphorical red lights” to what I claim is more suitable:

Not lost. Finding a path to the same destination.

I have been losing sleep and not productive enough to justify it. Just typing is taxing my brain to its limits. Of course the fact that firefox got stuck in gaelic spell check and think’s every word is wrong doesn’t help with typing. I will figure this out when I am of sound mind. Hopefully I will sleep more this weekend and start eating real food again. I think I have consumed more coffee this week than food and that is not sustainable.

My research suffered from the time I spent not sleeping and the time I spent browsing jobs. I got some stuff working yesterday and today, but too little too late for my liking. All I know is that the CMTS is not set up correctly cause I can ping one way, but not the other. Some network interface has two (2) IP addresses it is recking havoc.

Lastly, I think I deduced the transliteration into devanāgarī I thought about, गृफ़ीती. Although I can’t do the irregular ‘ृ’ for ‘ग’. Please comment if you know if it is right or wrong or think I am insane.

Update: I figured it out thanks to this wikipedia page. There is a modifying character in this word (at least when typed) called ‘halant’ or virāma [another link]. So the correct way to type it is with the halant as the second character ग ् र = ग्र . ग्रफ़ीती Now you see why I was not productive.