Month: June 2005

Once again, I’ve managed to slip into a cycle that doesn’t include posting. Blacksburg was fun last weekend, everything except getting a ticket on the 460 bypass coming into town. What really sucks about that is I was in the right lane going the same speed as the other cars, but I’m the one they decided to pull over. I enjoyed getting a chance to catch up with people who I hadn’t seen for over a month. Oh, and now I have Mill Mountain coffee at home. Mmmmm . . .

It’s been a fun week. Kinda. I moved my desk at work down the hall at work (not my choice), but it’s ended up being completely anticlimatic. Made lots of progress on my current project at work. Had an awesome service on prayer Wednesday night at The Gathering. The main downside was dealing with Verizon (see earlier post). Now I’m off to spend the weekend in Blacksburg, where the DSL is still down. So call me, since I won’t be online.

I’m trying to move my home phone line from Verizon to Verizon wireless, while keeping my Verizon DSL. Doesn’t seem so hard, does it? So far, I’ve spent about 10 hours on the phone and we’re still nowhere. They cut the DSL. I have a cellphone with the same number as the still active land line. And the incoming calls come to the land line.

It’s so bad it’s almost amusing. It’s not my name on the account. It’s not Kevin’s name on the account (which it was up until we tried to change it two weeks ago). Somehow in the switch, Andy (who lived there 3 years ago and I’ve never met) ended up with his name back on the account. A supervisor tells me it should be resolved in 24-48 business hours. Folks, this is why monopolies are bad.

Some of you who have known me for years will remember that I first started my web site sometime during my junior or senior year of high school. Senior year, I overhauled the site into more of a blog. I wrote all the HTML for it myself during geosystems one day, including the first post. I continued to update that page during high school, and moved it from the systems lab at school to my home computer (running an impressive newly released Red Hat 9) when I graduated. All of my early posts were supplimented by epic away messages that were essentially an IM version of a blog.

I continued to make the occasional update or post into the second semester of college. At that point, I did a major redesign of my site to make it look good and update the content. Sadly, I never finished that update. I posted the nearly complete results and continued to update the content, but never finished my template.

As time went on, I posted less and less frequently. By the end of the semester, I had all but stopped posting. That site remained active the entire next year, but I knew it was time to move my site to blogging software.

What kept me from using Blogger, Xanga, or another hosted blog service? I’ve always liked hosting my own sites and having full access to all the code I’m using. Therefore, I knew that I would either need to find GPL blog software or write my own blogging system.

I am just now getting around to finally putting my software into WordPress, a GPL blogging system that looks like it will meet all my needs. Check back here for frequent updates!

Also, I’m working on a blogroll (links to friends’ blogs/sites). If you’d like to be included on it, please send me a message or leave me a comment with your URL.