Wasn’t up too terribly late last night; I think I was in bed between 2 and 2:30, and didn’t get up for good (I was up once to feed the cat, and awake several other times from about 6:30 am on) until about 11:45. I remember just bits and pieces of dreams from last night; one sequence that is still with me was my being at some sort of combination house-antique store-musuem, in which lived a big cat (I’m pretty sure it was a Russian Blue). I was trying to leave through one of the back doors, and the cat kept running over to try to get out (this is exactly the behavior of Alex–my Maine Coon–when I go to leave the condo). He did manage to get past me, and out the door, but I snagged him up and brought him back; he was licking me and kissing me the whole time.
A number of days later, I was visiting my parents, and they told me that they believed the cat had rabies, but that it had gotten out again and no one had been able to find it to confirm it, so I would have to start prophylactic treatment. It had been long enough since I’d been there, that there was concern that the disease might already have taken effect. Yet I was procrastinating making the call for an appointment with a doctor (just as I continue to do in real life). And that’s all I remember.
For more than a week I’ve been spending a lot of time struggling with my installation of Movable Type, the software with which this journal was created and is maintained. Several weeks ago I had upgraded to the most recent version, and things had been working fine until sometime over a week ago when I started getting time-outs, internal server errors, and page not found errors when rebuilding new entries or rebuilding the entire site. I hadn’t changed anything. I visited the support forums for the software, and other people were describing the same thing–many noting that the problem had only come after upgrading to the current version, and often only on some blogs within an installation but not others, and seemingly out of the blue after working normally for a while. No one so far has been able to completely resolve it or even tie it to any specific cause.
My frustration has been growing, and yesterday I spent almost the entire time between noon and 8pm, except for a few bio and meal breaks, working on the blug (to be fair, a good deal of that time also was spent looking at other blogs, adding some new functionality, etc.). I finally did get the overall rebuilds to begin working correctly again–by decreasing the number that are built at once, even though this had never before been a problem–but this entry will be my first test of whether new postings also are reliably working.
[Update: it did work, hoorah; and this re-saving of it with the update will be a test of that functionality, which had been breaking as well, seemingly at the point where it normally would try to ping.]
[Update of Update: no, the resaving of an item still is causing a time out and pings not to be sent, though at least the actual text changes do get saved to the database and thence to the site.]
[Another Update: well, it seems to be related to categories; if I only have one category when building an item, it builds fine. When I add additional categories and rebuild it, it times out and fails. And when rebuilding the entire site, it was the category archiving that was failing along with individual entries. So I’ve turned category archives off, and now everything is working fine.]
I watched Some Like It Hot for the first time last night (yes, I know–believe me, if I had ever had a gay card, it would have been taken away from me, shredded, and the pieces burned and buried in a landfill many years ago. I saw my very first Opera–not counting a college production of Don Juan–just a month ago, too.). Really enjoyed it, and some of the queer subtext was quite funny.
After the movie I went into There, briefly, in a good mood, where I joined Matt, Lee and Roger already in a conversation. Matt and I started talking about Santorum’s comments, the President’s description of the man as “inclusive,” and the phenomenon of “bug-chasing” and other real-world topics, but Lee and Roger left the conversation–Lee didn’t want that part of the real world to intrude upon the game. So eventually we re-joined them, where they were continuing to explore the range of clothes and grooming options for their avatars, but by then I was feeling pissy and bored, and Matt was feeling just bored, so he logged out to watch some TV, and I logged out to do some other things.
I don’t mean to make Roger and Lee come off as prissy little gay bois only interested in clothes and looks–in real life, they’re not at all like that, though in game they do sometimes get rather caught up in shopping for their avatars and trying on lots of different looks (and I’ve certainly done my share of that off-and-on in game, too). It was just the particular circumstances of last night, of coming into game feeling really up and social, and feeling a little shot down because I was engaging in heavier conversation. At the same time, I can understand how they felt. Geez, I’m always so wishy-washy about describing even the mildest conflict, since I want to be so fair about presenting all sides and not always assuming I was in the right; in this case, certainly, there were no right or wrong sides, just different moods and tastes.
This is related to an email exchange between Gene Cowan and I on Friday in which we touched on the first–and unpleasantly unsuccessful–virtual contact he and I had had around 1995; his blog query about whether he should include more personal diary-like entries; and how other people that one writes about–and who might read these entries–might feel or react to being discussed in this sort of forum, often from a purely one-sided perspective.
Bad, wicked, naughty brain! Always thinking and rethinking and processing and reprocessing every little detail and every little fear. Sometimes I wish it would just shut up.