Doug & Megan’s World

Taking pictures on the golf course

September 26th, 2009 11:24 pm Leave a comment

I took the new 85mm F1.4 lens along on a golf outing to Jefferson Park with Scott today. Another application it seems well-suited to.

Last sunset of the summer

September 21st, 2009 8:56 pm 2 comments

Like thousands of other Seattleites, I took a picture of the sunset this evening. King5 News and a few other people were kind enough to re-Tweet my shot from the bridge at the north end of Beacon Hill …

Another shot from earlier this evening …

Fish

September 20th, 2009 10:19 pm Leave a comment

View from Moon Temple

September 20th, 2009 9:54 pm 1 comment

We stopped at Moon Temple for a couple of Jack&diets this evening. It’s right across the street from the Guild 45th Theatre.

The thing about Moon Temple is, the drinks are cheap and strong. Well, there are some other things too, but probably the only one I should mention is that they have great Chinese food. We didn’t eat anything this time, though.

Mom & Fish

September 20th, 2009 4:30 pm Leave a comment

Mom dropped in this afternoon. She’s between trips, as usual — just got back from South Dakota, headed for Ireland in a couple of weeks.

That’s the “dry cutout” effect in Photoshop, on everything except Mom.

I give up, Wordpress

September 19th, 2009 1:47 pm Leave a comment

The last few months, I’ve had a little ritual I do whenever things slow down for a day. The goal of the ritual is to get the latest version of Wordpress running at Mahugh.com/blog, but no matter how many times I recite obscure chants and throw salt over my shoulder, it never works. There’s always yet another prerequisite that doesn’t install correctly, or yet another unexplainable surprise. The latest was unrelated to Wordpress, actually: the admin password for Mahugh.com stopped working for some things, but not others. I went round and round with tech support on that one, and then suddenly it started working again, with no changes. This feels familiar.

I wanted to get my blog migrated over to Mahugh.com for several reasons. One was to save some money, and stop paying for hosting this blog. Another goal was to fix some reliability problems. Over the last year, posts here have mysteriously shut off comments for no reason, then turned them back on; some people get weird PHP errors and can’t post comments, while others (or the same person on a different day) work fine; and comment spam has been totally out of control. I upgraded to the latest Wordpress version last year, thinking that would solve the spam problem, and the upgrade installed without a hitch but the porn spammers never missed a beat.

So I just give up. I don’t have time to screw around with this any more, but I do have some things to say from time to time that require more than 140 characters. So screw it, I’m back, right here. And surely talking to myself, since there’s been nothing much to see here for a long time.

Welcome back, Doug. Thanks, Doug, it’s good to be here. The place feels dysfunctional yet familar and comforting, like so many things in life.

Feel free to comment if you can. And if you can’t, I’ll be absolutely no help at all on the matter. Just want to set expectations appropriately.

Twitter Followers

May 22nd, 2009 2:50 pm Leave a comment

The mosaic below is the avatars of my 187 Twitter followers as of today. It was created by Sxoop. (Updated 9/20/2009, 346 followers now.)

I was surprised at how many of them are faces I know. I sometimes forget who I’m ranting and raving to.

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Ike

May 2nd, 2009 10:25 pm Leave a comment

Elton

April 29th, 2009 9:08 pm 3 comments

Where's Doug?

April 22nd, 2009 5:13 pm Leave a comment

Hmm, this place is getting pretty dusty. Dark, deserted, cobwebs everywhere. Downright creepy.

I guess, since it’s my blog, I should explain. Well, it’s like this …

I started having problems with Wordpress on this site a while back, as I’ve mentioned before. Many people couldn’t post a comment at all, and others could post but they’d get weird errors, and people I had already approved started getting put in the moderation queue, and so on. These are all great strategies for reducing blog traffic, and it worked like a charm in that regard.

Upgrading the Wordpress software didn’t change a thing, and my hosting company was quite unhelpful, as was Wordpress support. I kept hearing the same crap I’ve heard so many times in life, implicitly if not explicitly: “it’s you, Doug.”

OK, cool, I can deal with that. Hey, I’ve been me for a long time, and I know how to roll with the punches that come with that role.

So for the last few months, I’ve been manually clearing out the moderation queue from time to time, and simply deleting everything that’s there. I’ve typed DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved=’0′ so many times I can do it in my sleep, but unfortunately this solution deletes “real” comments as well as spam. Another great way to reduce traffic.

(Why don’t I manually review everything in the moderation queue? Because it quickly fills up with thousands of comments if I miss a few days — Wordpress’s spam filtering is another thing that hasn’t been working very well. And then Wordpress just crashes, if there are too many comments in the queue. Sorry.)

As a result of all this nonsense, I’ve lost interest in this blog, and have moved on to other places. I post pictures to my Flickr stream often, and I post on my Twitter feed every day (both of which you can find on the Mahugh.com home page). But the sheer tedium of dealing with all of the technical problems on this blog gives me incentive to stay away for weeks on end, and I do.

Going forward, I’m planning to migrate all of the content from here to a new blog over on Mahugh.com, but I have to do a few things first to get ready for that, and it will take a few hours to handle all the details after I’m ready. So that will be done this summer some time, if I had to guess. And the new blog will be a Doug & Megan blog.

After that’s done, I’ll be shutting down this blog (and saving $19.95 a month, whee!), and Megan will be shutting down hers, too (more savings!). Then we’ll both post to the new blog, which will be on our own site so we’ll have more control over the techie details.

I’m also planning to shut down my Facebook page, because Facebook has become a place where people go to kill time, and that’s not a mode I’ve been in much lately. And it’s totally redundant: like LinkedIn, but with SuperPoking and such.

Flickr for photos, Twitter for snippets of nonsense, LinkedIn for business contacts, a blog where the wife and I can share deep thoughts … what more does a guy need?