Rottweilers Ate My Laptop

In addition to my own blogs and websites, I host and maintain a few websites for friends, family, or organizations that I belong to. I’m thinking about switching some of those websites from conventional hand-coded sites to CMS.

I’ve played with test installations of both Joomla and Drupal on my own server. I found Joomla slightly easier to wrap my mind around. Joomla has a wider variety of free and paid themes available; Drupal is more secure. The sites I want to switch are quite simple so both Joomla and Drupal seem like overkill. They may be a good choice for the sites that belong to organizations since it would be easy to integrate a members-only area, discussion forum, or other interactive features down the road.

My first self-hosted blog used Movable Type and of course you know my current blog uses WordPress. In the past, I never really considered using blogging software as a base for a website, but some of the WordPress frameworks have made me think I should reconsider. Tonight I took a little time to read up on StudioPress’s Genesis theme framework and Crowd Favorite’s Carrington framework. My brain hurts. I’ll let you soon know what I end up doing!

(NaBloPoMo | August ’10: 6 of 31)

Sorry I haven’t been around as much as I should be. I seem to have lost my way this month, with a NaBloPoMo fail and a definite shortfall of Mingling and Blog Hopping. I’ll play catch-up as best as I can, but I think I’ll forego any more attempts at NaBloPoMo until fall!

As you may already know, Freya’s training and trialing has not been a source of joy and wonder lately. A vet visit didn’t turn up any physical causes for our training and performance issues, but I didn’t have any lab work done at that time. I’ve been debating with myself about having a thyroid panel done. Her last one came back normal not quite two years ago. But she will be seven years old in November, so is now edging up to senior status (noooooooooo, she’s still my puppy girl), so at this point, maybe it is money well spent rather than a long shot. Hypothyroidism is also one of the only non-fatal things I can think of that could cause mood swings, hyper-reactivity, and weight gain (in her case a more subtle inability to get back to her ideal weight… hmmm… a problem for me, as well). Anything else I can think of is either much scarier, or else points back to me sucking big time as a dog trainer (this is actually the most likely possibility).

Speaking of health tests, I still need to get Axel in for his OFA cardiac clearance. I have been holding off in hopes of a cardiac clinic being offered at a nearby show, as the cost savings would be very significant (try at least 50%), especially if the clinic is also doing Dopplers. Since there have been no known heart issues with his parents or siblings, and I don’t have any immediate breeding plans for him, I guess it won’t hurt to hold off just a bit longer.

I know I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m going to mention it again anyway since it’s one of the things that has been eating up my time this month. Please think about subscribing to The Total Rottweiler Magazine. I am currently a volunteer (unpaid) proofreader and copyeditor for TTRM so I do admit some bias as I tell you it’s well worth checking into if you have any interest in Rottweilers and dog sports.

So that’s the short version of what’s been going on. I have a backlog of Freya training videos to analyze and comment on, as well as a couple of hopefully more informative short rally obedience-related videos that I’m editing in iMovie as time permits. I hope to also have some Axel frisbee video soon. On the technology side, I have some MacBook and Sony Reader thoughts to post. Oh, and I did manage to fit in the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 as well.

I know it isn’t supposed to be a main focus for this blog, but I still have some TV breaks that I never posted. Lucky for you all, some are no longer timely so you won’t have to read them, but at some point I still plan to tell you why Glee is the devil. I’m sure I’ll have at least a few new TV breaks once Rescue Me and Mad Men start up again on June 29 and July 25, respectively.

I don’t require my blog readers to register to read or comment, and I removed any visible links for registration or administration at the time I started the blog. So it was definitely a scary thing to receive an email claiming a New User Registration from an email address I did not recognize. I hoped it was just a spammy thing, and not a hacker-y thing. I deleted the new user, changed my administrator password, used phpMyAdmin to make sure there was nothing awry in the database (there wasn’t) and went off in search of more information.

Turns out that I was in very little danger since my WordPress General settings did not set new users to Editor or Administrator. These mystery registrations have been hitting a number of WordPress installations via bots searching for the usual address of the registration page. The WordPress forums address the issue:

Someone registered as a user on my wordpress blog – possible hacker?

If you, too, were visited by this bot:

1. Go to General Settings.
2. Under Membership, uncheck Anyone can register.
3. Under New User Default Role, select Subscriber (Subscribers cannot post to or make edits to your blog).
4. Go to Users and delete the unwanted user.
5. Go to Your Profile and change your password.
6. Go to phpMyAdmin at your host and check the wp-users table to make sure there are no unwanted entries there.

This happened right after returning home from another potentially scary experience. I used to have my hair done at the beauty colleges all the time during high school, college, and right after. I haven’t done that for a very long time, and I’m not even sure why. My worst hair experience was not at the hands of a student, but at a salon with some good recommendations from friends and acquaintances. This was in the early 80s, and I fell victim to an overly curly perm.

I never returned to that particular salon, but I didn’t go back to the beauty college either, until tonight. I went to the beauty college near my house that is affiliated with a salon that I have visited fairly often with good results. I don’t like color surprises, so I usually bring a copy of the formula for my favorite color. I had a bad moment upon learning that even though the salon uses that brand of color, their associated school does not. I almost considered bailing at that point, but the stylist and her instructor showed me how they would get to “my” color and it was pretty convincing, so I stayed.

This story has a happy ending that is not scary at all. The cut is good, the color is great. My stylist was a woman about my age working on a midlife career change. I enjoyed chatting with her. I still have money in my wallet. The total cost was about a third of what I would have paid at the salon. If I’d started doing this sooner, maybe I could have bought the MacBook Pro instead of the cheaper MacBook after all!

(NaBloPoMo | April ’10: 13 of 30)

The update to WordPress 2.9.1 went fine, as did the updates to several plugins and the pre-update backups to the database and files. So at least something is working well here. Not everything, though.

I’ve been trying out some to-do list/task manager software. BlackBerry Tasks doesn’t sync to anything else. Google Tasks doesn’t sync to my BlackBerry. Remember The Milk syncs to Google Calendar when both RTM and Google Calendar feel like speaking to one another, and that’s apparently not predictable. Is that big fun, or what? I’m thinking about going back to pen and paper. There really is something very soul-satisfying about drawing that heavy line through a completed task.

Another technology issue that came out of left field involves my family and Skype. I would have never in a million years expected most of my family to want to do the video call thing. But after my uncle passed away last month, one of the things my brother and cousin did was to get everyone set up on Skype to be able to stay in touch despite the distance between most of us. I’ve had a Skype account for a while, but I’ve used it only for magazine business, mostly file transfers and text chat. I do not do video. Ever.

To keep in touch with my family, I suppose I can be more flexible on that point. And then it turns out I may have difficulty doing so, since it seems to involve some workarounds to get the Sony VAIO Motion Eye camera to work properly with Skype. That will have to wait until the laptop comes back from the fan replacement. By then I should have mustered up the energy to deal with technology issues.

(NaBloPoMo | January ’10: 10 of 31)

I’m running on empty for no apparent reason, so I’m just going to make a few notes about some topics I want to talk about, before I forget about them entirely.

• I got my invite for Google Voice last week. I did set it up, but haven’t had a chance to play around with it much, nor have I tried to set up its BlackBerry client. I’m sure at least a couple of you out there might like to hear about it!
• I wrote a little bit about WordPress for BlackBerry when it first came out, but I should probably do a more complete review. There have been six updates since then, over the space of less than a month, so the developers really are working hard on bug fixes and enhancements.
• As you all know, Freya is working on her rally obedience titles. When Axel goes back out with Julia this fall, he will also be working on rally obedience titles along with his AKC championship. That is, if I make sure he knows all of the Novice stations before he leaves. With about two and half months to go, we should definitely be able to do that, and get some training posts out of it, too!

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 30 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 187 of 274)

I don’t have enough to say on any one topic, so you get to listen to… ermmm… read… this “brain dump.”

• I’m awaiting the arrival of my WordPress 2.8.1 automatic update bar. It is sad that even the five-minute update is too much work for me now that I’ve gotten accustomed to the automatic updates, which work great for me. I know some have had issues with the automatic updates. I am not one of those users. If I were smart, I’d be backing up my database and files while I wait, instead of waiting for the update bar to remind me.
• I really enjoy Thursday’s Monthly Mingle and the bloggers I’ve “met” there. Thanks, Indigo, for the fun that is the Mingle!
• As part of my rally obedience education (remember, I’m the dumb half of the Freya and me team), I joined one Yahoo! Group devoted mainly to AKC rally, and one specifically for UKC rally. I am truly appreciative of the good information that is shared freely in messages and files, and I hope to be able to contribute in time as I do in other groups where I actually know something useful about the subject matter. However, the signal to noise ratio of forums and e-mail lists just amazes me. So many people just don’t seem to care about netiquette, or maybe they simply never learned it. There was a time when only “smart” people had computers, but there was never a time when only polite people had computers, so what gives? This isn’t about the two groups I just joined, by the way. It’s an observation about forums in general (these two actually have a very good signal to noise ratio).
• Bird neighbor update: I haven’t seen the male cardinal in a while, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he hasn’t been around. I think we keep very different hours. The female cardinal has been sitting on her nest daily. According to several different sources online, cardinal eggs take from 11-13 days to hatch, and the babies leave the nest in about 10 days. I’m not sure when the eggs were laid, but based on when we first noticed the cardinal pair, I’m going to start being very careful with the dogs near the rosebush starting late next week.
• I’m really amazed at how many hits have come here as a result of searches for “Mary Wild” or “show dog deaths.” That awful incident has been in my thoughts as well quite a bit ever since it happened on June 22.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 9 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 166 of 274)

The long-awaited WordPress for BlackBerry is here! I’m using it for this post, which will be rather short to prevent thumb cramps. So far, so good. It installed with no issues on my Verizon BlackBerry Curve 8330 running OS 4.5.0.131. I already had XML-RPC activated for my recent test of MoPress, so adding my blog and logging in went smoothly as well.

(NaBloPoMo | July ’09: 7 of 31 | 75% Challenge: 164 of 274)