…what an unbelievably long week! I'm tired but I felt like making one more post. I'm still working out bugs in the pathauto module that makes aliases to my stories from the title so this story is accessible from http://azbay.net/time_for_the_weekend instead of something funky like http://azbay.net/node/242, which is more for me than you, but if you're interested I also went over it here a couple days ago.

Anyway, testing this one last thing, and after writing that last heartfelt post I'm going home, sucker! I'm OUTTA HEEEEERRRRRRREEEEEEE!

…have been underway for about a week now. Mainly unnoticeable for most of you as they are upgrades to the back-end of my site. The main upgrade was to Drupal for our CMS, and we just moved from the 5.x version to the 6.x version. Again, not much you'd notice reading the site but it's made some major improvements to the way the site works and the administration of the site.

I also upgraded Gallery, my excellent photo gallery software, from version 2.2 to the development version. Not something I really would want to do normally but with the 6.x upgrade to Drupal, and its associated Gallery module, the requirement for the software went from the 2.2 version to the development 2.3 version. So far I haven't noticed any issues, hopefully this will continue.

…I just realized the obvious incongruity that some of you may see in posting videos of myself, family, and friends shooting automatic weapons with a post preaching peace and arguing against the extremist views of islam and it's blind hatred and wanton jihad against the infidel's of the west. Yes, it is in a way taking opposing views, but you have to understand that we (meaning the people I hunt and shoot with) use guns as a way to get away from the stress of life for a while and return to nature, or to just watch an amazing piece of machinery at work destroying a tin can, water bottles or the occasional rusted out car. We don't condone violence or use of any of the guns we own against humans (well, I guess unless absolutely necessary ;-) Anyway, more fun and interesting gun videos on their way. Keep looking at this post because of the higher quality (640x480 30fps, which I'm sure will be highly degraded by YouTube) takes forever to upload. So they won't all be on for a few days. Fortunately no one really visits the news portion of the site too much so by the time anyone reads this the video's will be online.

…work continues. I'm happy, actually very happy, with the theme I have. I think it's the best theme that I have ever had on a site, and required very little work to make it my own. I like the CSS, I like the Web 2.0 look with the 5 color swatches, I like the Web 2.0'ish logo and the way it flows. Galley looks very good inside it with it's default theme (matrix). I did find another them for gallery that had a little less fluff and worked better with the site, but the theme tried to implement some fancy forward, back via click position on all the images which didn't work so well, and the bread-crumb trail of links on the top of the gallery pages didn't work anymore so I nixed that theme until they get a working version out.

…ok, so I've found some time to mess with the site. Basically I found out after our Hawaii trip that the newest version of Gallery2 that I had running on my site is incompatible with my iPhoto plugin, what that means in English? I can't post any pictures to the gallery (well I can, I just can't do it very easily). So what do I do to rectify this situation? I install upgrades across the boards of course! So we have a new version of Drupal, we're in the 5.1 range now how exciting (and I hear they're releasing 6.0 soon).

What does this mean? Well not much currently, there's a new theme that you may have noticed that's very Web 2.0, I think I'll stick with it for a while. I had to rebuild the entire Front_Page modules page because I forgot to back it up, so it's a little different and in making that mistake, I have made a good backup with instructions on how to get it back up and running. So after several hours of upgrading and blah... still no photos ;-). Well all that's about to change because I've just decided to go with Gallery2's nifty little Java app which of course is completely and utterly ugly but works.

Yes, I'm a bit of a theme well for the lack of a better word, whore. I switch themes so much that I can't keep track of all the different versions of my website. I tend to like the newer Web 2.0'ish looking sites, nice rounded corners and other fancy CSS, but I really think I'm liking this theme I've applied today. It's called Marvin, after Drupal's Marvin, and it's quite plain but has everything that I think is necessary for a good page, a nice layout, easy navigation and it's easy on the eyes.

From now on, I think I'm going to try my hand at theme customization, and/or building my own theme. I'm sick of having a website that literally any geek with a little time can duplicate. I want something more my own, well OUR own as this site belongs to my wife and I both. I need to practice theme generation anyway as I'm hosting my friend Kyle's site and it's going to take quite a bit of work to get it looking the way he wants it. He had a site that was homegrown and extremely difficult to maintain and edit (I'm sure) and wants the new site I've setup to have a similar look/feel to his old one. The only problem is there is no way to move his old theme that was all done with HTML and Javascript to a modern CSS, XHTML compliant page.

Now with work settling down, and that's really probably not factually consistent with my actual workload (I'm busy as hell with the start of the school year). However, I do find myself with a few moments to actually sit down and express some opinion in my Blog.

First off, Blackboard support. Jeez where do I start here. They are excellent in most cases, and I do like the TSM's that I've dealt with, but the current problem that we're just in the process of resolving started on February 9, 2006. Resolved, hopefully, by the end of this week. That's 6 months. SIX FRIGGIN' MONTHS! During this time, I have jumped through several hoops, and performed several other feats of mental contortion to arrive back at the root of the problem that I (and Sam Hammond to be fair) said was the problem in late February, IT IS indeed the DATABASE that's the root of the problem. Not our network, not software running on the server, not virtual memory on the server, not any other of the 500 things that Blackboard tried to pin on US as the root of the problem. No it is in fact as we originally contended Blackboard's issue and only one that they can fix.

So I have had sleepless nights, put up with people telling me I was wrong and having to ask other departments to check and recheck things that had absolutely nothing to do with the actual problem, looking like an ass most of the way. I've endured pissed off customers, pissed off supervisors and all for what? A problem that I could have never fixed on my own.

Well after fighting with the DSL line, and calculating the cost of running our own server, Jen and I decided it was best to move the AZBay.net site to a host. Now that I'm working full time and don't have the time to keep up with all my servers, and since Qwest couldn't deliver more than 96K of upstream bandwidth, it really made sense aside from the fact that it is much cheaper to have a default internet connection instead of the static IP block and high speed DSL line.

So here we are, at site5.com. You might have noticed that we're using a different content management system as well. I was really tired of the PostNuke interface, and lack of theme support, well easy theme support anyway. Also, I don't like posting directly on the web. I've been using ecto to post to my personal blog for quite some time, it keeps a backup of your posts and the editor is much better. It really makes it easier to post so you will get more updates than previously with PostNuke. I think the last entry I had made with the old system was like 6 months ago. I am working on a way to import those stories, something automated, but that may not happen. I do have an archive of them though.

I will be working on getting everything up and running, and getting the Gallery going again.