Month: April 2007

Ok, that’s one thing

I discovered why OpenID comments went from working some of the time to working never: last time I upgraded my blog I’d inadvertently made it so none of the directories within my blog site were writable by the web server, and the OpenId plugin makes temporary files. That lead to the discovery that as well as OpenID comments, the directory used by the Gravatar cache wasn’t writable, which lead to the discovery that the Gravatars weren’t updating at all, even after I fixed the permissions, which lead to the discovery that when the Gravatar plugin discovers it can’t write to the Gravatar cache directory it just silently turns the “Enable caching” option to off, which lead to the discovery that even when I turned it back on, it still wasn’t updating, which lead to the discovery that there is an option in the plugin to “Use REST protocol” which evidently Gravatar doesn’t support any more so I had to turn that off. Phew. Now Gravatars seem to be working again.

Knees still hurt like hell, though.

I should be doing something

It’s a beautiful day. I should be out riding my bike, or kayaking, or clearing out the basement, or putting up screen windows, or getting IFR current again, or something. But I’m not, because my knees hurt worse than they’ve hurt in months, possibly years, and it’s a chore to walk down the stairs to get something to eat, never mind do something that involves using them for anything. And it’s that stabby pain that I get every now and then, as opposed to that diffuse pain that’s part of the constant background, and that pain does not seem to respond to Alieve at all. The diffuse pain doesn’t respond quickly or well to Alieve, but at least if I forget to take it for a couple of days I notice the pain level increasing. This stabby pain comes and goes on its own schedule.

Maybe I’ll use the time to fix the OpenID commenting on this blog (or at least get it back to the point where it works for some people, like when I use it myself from my Powerbook, but not for other people, like when I use it myself from my Linux computer at work). Or fix the long broken loader scripts on my waypoint generator site. Or see if I can get the Gallery upgrade to work this time. But I don’t feel like it – I’d rather just curl up and try to sleep. At least then I wouldn’t be aware of the pain.

META: Don’t use OpenID

OpenId comment authentication seems to be extremely hit-or-miss. It works for some, and for others their posts get flagged as spam, and for others still they get swallowed entirely. I’ve tried to debug it, but I haven’t figured out what’s wrong. I tried to deactivate it, but it just made things worse. So until further notice, please don’t use OpenID or your LiveJournal ID to comment on here.

Update: I just remembered that I had to hack the source in order to make this work before, and I recently installed an update. The update probably over-wrote my hack. Now to dig though the backup to see if I can find the hacked file.

Why I hate dentists

They say “you’re going to feel a slight pinch” when they really mean it’s going to feel like they’re driving an ice pick through the roof of your mouth into your eye socket.

They tell you to sit up so they can take an x-ray while you’ve got a 2 foot long pipe cleaner sticking out of hole in your front tooth. Then they tell you to hold the film in place with your finger.

They keep screwing these things that look about 2 feet long into your mouth, and then pulling it out. I kept closing my eyes when they brought it out because I was sure it was going to be covered in blood.

All during the root canal, you can hear her stomach growling, and afterwards she tells you not to eat for an hour. Yeah, I bet you’re not going to wait an hour.

And after it all, they tell you you’re going to have to come back in a week for more pain.

Oh, this bodes well for meeting our end of month deadline

The ClearCase server machine is still dead. Evidently both hard drives went tits up yesterday, and nobody can bring it up. And I’ve got a bunch of files not checked in – from what I remember back when we had a ClearCase administrator, files that aren’t checked in aren’t backed up.

And just to make my day complete, I can’t log into Lotus Notes.

Good thing I’ve got some movies on my iPod.