Still going after all these years.
My website repair efforts continue to limp along. I am manually rendering the past few days in October, and will be looking at any pages that I manually designated as having a static path (mostly via my Site Map).
In the meantime, I’m full speed ahead on the redesign. Notes to come.
Almost all the static site has rendered now and is once again available at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com. Notable exceptions, all from 2003: the end of September (being rendered now) through October. Also missing until I upload it again: my genealogy records and some miscellaneous pictures from other old parts of the site.
A great dinner tonight, a minestrone with meatballs, with a Chianti Riserva from 2000 that was mellow but lively. As are the dogs, who are taken with the new digs here in New Jersey and, after a day, have settled back into their routines.
It looks like the outage that has plagued my site over the last week is slowly clearing up. I have the ability to render pages to the static site on a one by one basis, so the front page has been posted. However, for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to execute Manila’s “render this site” command. Maybe I’ll try another time when traffic is lower. The bottom line is, while the site is coming back, there are still going to be a lot of broken links for a while.
It looks like the static server is back up, but publishing problems are still prohibiting adding new images. At least you can all read my prose… Thanks to Erin Clerico at Weblogger for his quick work, and looking forward to a fully functional site again soon.
A quick update on the outages. It looks like a number of Weblogger hosted sites are similarly affected, including weblogger.com. If you’re reading this RSS feed, my discussion site at http://discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com will at least let you read the text; my static site at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com appears to be completely down. No word yet as to the cause of the outage.
In the interim, I’m writing more holiday reviews but will hold on posting them until I can get picture support working again. The Past Listening and Past Reading sections are similarly on hold.
This was kind of bad timing as I wanted to work on a new site design over the holidays. Hope the outage clears up soon.
It looks like the server that hosts a lot of my static content, including my images and the real CSS stylesheet for this weblog, is offline. I’ve pinged tech support. In the meantime, please “enjoy” the extra weight of inline stylesheet on each page (the last backup I had), complete with extra nostalgic old text sizes and leading.
Thanks to all for the birthday shoutouts, including Esta, Craig, and Tony Pierce.
It’s going to be a pretty mellow birthday. I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact that a stomach ulcer was keeping me from going out for my first adult beverage in a bar upon my legal majority. It’ll be a nice quiet night at home with my wife.
Of course, I’ll be out Saturday at the company Christmas party, and plan to do some singing (as part of the entertainment, not spontaneously) and some dancing (spontaneously, not intentionally as part of the entertainment), but that’s a whole ’nother story…
Update: Thanks also to George and Becky for the CD and the kind thoughts.
We said goodbye to Ed and Gina a few hours ago; this was the second Thanksgiving holiday we’ve had with them in as many years. Partly this is because they’re the only ones of our friends who don’t head back to their respective families for the holiday, but mostly it’s because they’re such great company.
While I was putting Thanksgiving dinner together (aside: 14 pound brined turkey, bouquet garni and onion inside, with pan gravy made with prosciutto, veal glacé, and Calvados; the Changs brought garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, candied yams, and salad; and Lisa made a killer apple Charlotte; and after all that I cooked a duck breast with apricot sauce for a kind of lagniappe), I started thinking about everything I was thankful for. This year it’s easy to break it down:
I have a lot of sleep to catch up on, so I anticipate this will be a light blogging weekend. Hopefully I can resume intelligent commentary, or at least voluminous commentary, soon.
September 2, 2002: Sonic Youth at Bumbershoot 2002. Still one of my favorite pieces of concert writing to date, in a sort of Hemingway-esque way: “The band went offstage, then came back on and played ‘Disconnection Notice.’ After the rest of the set, it felt somber and almost valedictory. This was the last set of their tour. Wind came up into Lee’s hair. They left the stage. I left the stadium and drove home.”
My blog just became the beneficiary of the new TrackBack features added to Manila by UserLand. Theoretically at least I have the ability to send outbound pings and receive inbound pings. I say “theoretically” because I’ve tried sending an outbound ping and haven’t seen any results, and haven’t seen any inbound pings yet either. But it should work.
Things that I’ve found while working on enabling this feature:
Esta asks about the asterisks showing up on my blogroll. I finally got the active blogroll religion with Blogrolling.com. The asterisks mean that the Blogrolling.com server shows that blog as being updated in the last 24 hours. I think as long as you ping Weblogs.com, Blogrolling picks it up.
I’m thinking about doing a complete site redesign, but I’m too lazy to do it right, so you might see things change in drips and drabs over the next month or so.
Today is my second blogaversary. Two years ago I started this blog in earnest and quickly got embroiled in XMLRPC, scripting, and other stuff. Since my first blogaversary, graduating from business school, moving 3000 miles, and buying a house, the blog has been a lot less technical and hopefully a little more human (apologies to those for whom either prospect is daunting).
Some things remain the same: the first post was about listening to Radiohead’s Amnesiac, and music has continued as a theme. The second post was about beer, and I’ve since broken out food and beverage as a separate department (and one that I haven’t written for in a while). The third: about the Mac and streaming audio.
I went a little light on blogging the last week or two as a combination of workload and concert week stress took their toll. And, as is customary, all hell broke loose across the blogosphere. The combination of the discovery of the identity of Salam Pax (he’s a gay Iraqi translator who now has a column in the Guardian and who worked for other reporters without their even knowing!) and the passage by the FTC of the new relaxed regulations for media ownership (though no one has actually seen the regulation in question, I’m told it probably still requires media owners to be human) has me reeling.
So reeling, in fact, that I’m half inclined to give both of them a miss. I’m feeling some post-war numbness, folks, right around the spot between my eyes. So better wait until this afternoon for my critical instincts to kick in. I’ve got to get to work, but I’ll be loading up my CD player with Big Star and New Pornographers for that pop inspiration.
I hadn’t paid much attention to BlogShares for a while since it went out of beta. But my curiosity got the better of me after I got some linkage from Doc Searls and others recently. When I checked today, I found that my blog had IPO’d with a valuation of $4500 on Tuesday. And that people had been trading it pretty actively, driving the price per share up to $224 before dropping it with a huge sell order down to $56 yesterday. Now it’s trading around $173, which yields it a P/E (according to the game) of 193.
Pretty funny considering how little it has to do with what has actually been happening on my blog. Actually, that’s my main criticism of BlogShares: other than the basic valuation model, which counts incoming links and values your blog according to the value of those links, very little in the game seems connected to what goes on on the individual’s blog. And very little of the trading seems connected to the fundamentals of the blog’s value. If I had paid attention to when my blog IPO’d, I could have bought a bunch of shares of Esta’s blog on the cheap, knowing she was going to jump in value after my IPO.
Ah well. Only a game, right? 🙂