Thanksgiving break

Personal,

Thursday morning, thanksgiving day, we hopped a plane to Denver for a vist with some friends. Landed at about 8:30 and it was off to Keystone for a couple nights. The highlight there was going to be tubing at Breckenridge, of course going there and not skiing kind of sucks but no one else was up for it. The tubing was a blast though so even if your there to ski I’d recommend taking some runs down the “tub track”. You can see some pics in the new Flickr Feed on the side bar.

Saturday on the way back to Denver we stopped in Idaho Springs at the TommyKnocker micro brewery. It’s a great place to stop in between Denver and Dillon. That night we took in a Avalanche game at the Pepsi center. Sunday the girls shopped and it was football for the guys. All in all a nice few days away. Today it was back on the plane and in Nashville before the rush hour. The boys survived the kennel and it’s good to be home.

Back to the grind in the morning, it’s going to be a busy week.

A move for the boys

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Cooper and Roscoe's houses

This weekends project was to move the dog houses. I finished the temporary fence last weekend, it could still use a bit of work but it should be OK for now… more on that later. So the move was up the hill in the back yard, about 50 feet from where they were. You can see from the pic on the left the angle is a little steep and their’s a flat spot fit for a pair. So after prepping a little to level where the houses would sit and getting some pavers to lift them off the ground about four inches we were ready.

A friend came by and in about 40 minutes we were done. The houses are 36 x 48 and the roofs come off. Got to say thanks to dad for that cause otherwise it would have been a three man job. Now back to “the fence should be OK for now” comment. Tonight while sitting downstairs Cooper started a barking fit I first thought was directed at the cats next door… that is common. But after a little more ruckus than normal I went up to find Cooper in and Roscoe out. So much for my good fence work !!!

It was about ten minutes to calm Cooper down and then into the truck and up the road. A quick drive around the neighborhood, as a road circles back above us to a dead end, and on the way back hear he comes jingling up behind me. One of the other neighborhood labs (lucky) was hangin around too so my guess is Roscoe found his way there and they were playing.

When we got back I put the invisible fence collars on, I took them off earlier as we went for a walk, and figured we’d be good… got it out of our system. Not ten minutes later the whole episode started again but this time he didn’t get far. Back in August I mentioned extending the fence almost all the way around the lot, good thing cause the fence caught him this time. Unbelievable !!!!. So by this time I’ve had it for the night up to the house we go with the 10ft leash wrapped to the tree and he’s staying there. I’ll work on the corner where he got out tomorrow. But in reality the wooden picket fence you see in the pic is only four feet tall, they both can jump over it if they really want to. With any luck I can make it to spring when I’ll have to put in a new fence as the existing one is close to falling down. O well what’s life without a little excitement.

Move to a new server

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I noticed yesterday afternoon problems sending email, same old smtp connection issue that crops up from time to time. Normally I don’t think anything of it as my hosts forum comments about domain email traffic and what they will do about it. This ran into the evening and I also noticed no email being received. Guess I shouldn’t complain about ‘not’ receiving my regular spam but you never know when something important will show up.

So I headed off to the forum. I didn’t see anything current about email issues but did notice some posts about domains on servers using a specific administration tool. It peeked my interest since one of the tools mentioned is the same tool that comes up when I log into mine. Some further reading mentioned shutdown dates that had since past. Hummmm, server to be shut down, date has past and my site is still up…. do I really want to know the answer, do I want to be surprised when the site goes down. I think naught.

It might be good to mention at this point it’s getting somewhat late and trading emails with support over the next couple days was not where I wanted to go. Not to mention Kay was starting to complain about email… we don’t want that to keep up. I would later realize the move wasn’t really necessary but in the long run it was for the best.

So time to migrate, following directions for moving. I backed up the blog database, pulled down all the files from the static pages and signed up with 8-95.com. Within minutes the confirmation emails showed up, and no email was not fixed yet I used a non habbenet account. After logging in and creating the accounts, (I keep passwords in a list cause you can’t remember them all) I moved all the files to the new host and the static pages tested fine. Udpated DNS at Network Solutions and then started in on restoring the blog.

Restoring the blog is where things got interesting. I use WordPress and their is a world of info about upgrades, migrations, etc but I didn’t think I’d need it. Well as it turns out I did need it as I’m no MySQL expert. The easy part was uploading the files, creating the database and running through the install. The problem came when attempting to login and receiving “.. you are not authorized to view this page”. That was the last thing I figured I’d run into.

Now comes some digging and even though I’d rather not be doing it theirs no reason to panic. I have a backup of everything and it was working before the backup, so it will work again. Also the amount of info that’s available from how to’s, forums, and documentation I should be able to find help. A quick google pointed me to a number of resources but none of them did the trick. After a little more searching and I ran across this post that pointed me to some of the sql tables and how others made changes for their problems.

Once I checked the tables it was nothing more than a simple rename on some rows where the old database prefix was referenced. With the move to the new host I couldn’t keep the old table prefixes when creating the database, but I didn’t think some rows within the tables would be affected. Live and learn. As of this afternoon the DNS changes seem to be propigating quickly mail is back up and all is good.

rdesktop … connection refused !

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Last week as my work load seemed to increase I found a need to remote access my XP_SP2 machine. As the laptop is Ubuntu I needed remote desktop, no problem so I thought. Since rdesktop comes as a standard package I didn’t think anything about having problems, but when my first attempt said “connection refused” I thought hummmmmmm.

A quick check of the remote desktop service to make sure it was running and a test with VNC, which was successful, and I was scratching my head. That is until I googled a little and checked to see if terminal services was running, nope. Start em up and you should be good.

And yes I’d rather put in the extra time from the deck or the couch than sitting at the desk.

Edgy a few days early

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With the next version of Ubuntu to be releasted in a few days thought I’d go ahead and load it on an extra drive for kicks. What’s nice about this version is the iso is a Live CD which you can then install. I had to do a double take at first when I took the default option on boot and we went straight to the desktop. The install was quick and immediately prompted for 70 plus updates. All major hardware was recognized and no special configuration was required. How cool is it when stuff works !!

The only quirk at the moment is the Alt key on the right side of the keyboard doesn’t seem to be working. A quick change of the keyboard identification didn’t help so I may need to check on that. Otherwise it’s all good.