Happy National Coming Out Day everyone, and in case you haven’t picked up on it by now, well, here you go.  I’m gay!

So what now?  Well, I need to blog more.  I know several people are following me here that aren’t on Facebook (sorry parents, you can’t be my Facebook friend) and I need to get things back on track here.  Next, I need to use Twitter more.  As part of that, I included my Twitter feed along the sidebar to the right, meaning you can quickly see what I’m up to in between blog posts.

I also updated the blog software and this busted some plug-ins, meaning you might notice a few things here or there that don’t quite work like they did before.  If you run into these, please throw a comment in for this post just in case I missed it.  I’ll admit, though, that the older the posts are, the higher chance they’re busted.  I did work on the Magnum XL-200 video posted in the CoasterMania 2008 blog post, but that might be troublesome for some.  Maybe I’ll upload it to YouTube, but I don’t like the idea of my videos being part of a giant pool of videos that just anyone can do whatever with, but, maybe I’m too paranoid and need to take off the tin foil hat.

And the site is no longer valid XHTML (the little W3C image in the sidebar).  Translation:  the site might not render correctly sometimes.  When I get a chance, I’ll dig around and see what needs changing like I did last time I made some major changes.  Until then, there might be an oddity here or there, but, I think it’ll be very minimal from the errors I saw called out.

3am – I’m headed for bed.  Catch ya later.

//A

IN THE EAST PUGET SOUND LOWLANDS INCLUDING CITIES SUCH AS BELLEVUE…ISSAQUAH…NORTH BEND…AND BONNEY LAKE…SNOW IS EXPECTED TO PICK UP IN INTENSITY THIS EVENING AS A LOW PRESSURE SYSTEM SAGS SOUTHWARD. EXPECTED 2 TO 6 INCHES OF ACCUMULATION BY THURSDAY MORNING. TEMPERATURES WILL FALL FROM THE LOWER 30S TO THE MID OR UPPER 20S OVERNIGHT CREATING ICY CONDITIONS. SNOW WILL BECOME MORE SHOWERY THURSDAY MORNING.

We were in the mid to upper 30s Fahrenheit all day, but we hit 32 F when I came home this evening.  There was moisture on the roads that I imagine will turn to ice overnight.  I have tire chains if I have to drive somewhere, but I’ll most likely walk to work and not worry about it until I slip on the sidewalk or something.

Of course all this was supposed to happen during the day, but it never materialized.  Massive school closures today, and for the north and south areas from us, it made sense as they did get quite a bit of snow, but for the Seattle area, we saw maybe a few flakes.  Local weather reports suggest the Olympic Mountains to our west blocked it from heading over here, and it’s still doing so right now it seems.  We’ll see in the morning what happens.

…WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT…

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN SEATTLE HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH…WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH LATE WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

HEAVY SNOW IS LIKELY OVER WESTERN WASHINGTON ON WEDNESDAY. FOUR TO EIGHT INCHES ARE POSSIBLE IN CERTAIN AREAS…INCLUDING THE EAST PUGET SOUND LOWLANDS…THE NORTHWEST AND SOUTHWEST INTERIORS…AND THE STRAIT OF JUAN DE FUCA AREA. SNOW IN THESE AREAS WILL BEGIN IN THE NORTH LATE TUESDAY NIGHT AND SPREAD SOUTH WEDNESDAY MORNING. BY WEDNESDAY NIGHT THREE TO SIX INCHES OF NEW SNOW ARE POSSIBLE.

So here it comes, a giant snow event.   And with temperatures set to stay at or below freezing until Saturday, that snow won’t be going anywhere.  We broke a record today set back in 1964, the record was a low of 20 degrees, and today’s low was 19.

As long as the power holds things will be fine.  It went out a couple times yesterday leading me to reset appliance clocks a few times.  I do have some Duraflame logs I can burn in the fireplace to keep warm, but food would be reduced to peanut butter sandwiches and a handful of other things such as a couple apples and such.  I don’t imagine that happening, though.

One thing I do know – I can’t wait to see my electric bill next month.  Ugh!

Here’s their demonstration video (and I love the laugh at the end).

Interested in some specs?  From Woot:

• Powered directly from the USB port on your computer and possibly entertain you any time of day or night
• 30 second dance track
• Multi-colored disco lights, recreate an authentic night club atmosphere
• As music plays, the dancer spins around the pole, moving up and down as she spins
• Connect an MP3 player and she will dance to your favorite music
• No batteries or software required

Website this is from is here [funnyordie.com].

What I haven’t mentioned here yet is I also did some background work on the server itself.  It’s been emailing me for a while now saying it’s not happy, and initially it was just that and nothing else.  Later on it started partially dropping off the web for 5 or 10 minutes and then would return.  I say partially as things like web pages wouldn’t open from it (you couldn’t read this blog, for example) but other items kept working, such as email.

For that one, I started around 8pm Friday night and wrapped up around 4am.  After a few hours of digging, I pinned it down to two issues.  First, up2date (a program that updates some of the software running on here) wasn’t reaching a valid update server, and second, the website managing software that runs on here also wasn’t reaching update servers.  The second one was easy – I had an entry in the hosts file that aimed the update process at a specific server, and that server isn’t around anymore.  I took that out and it started working just fine.

The first one, however, wasn’t as easy for me to fix, given that up2date is aimed at an update server at The Planet, the company that I have this server at.  I opened a trouble ticket explaining that up2date was aimed at a specific server that was responding to pings (a.k.a. it was booted up and listening) but was returning “Internal Server Error” to my update requests.  About an hour later they had it reconfigured with updated settings and things were working properly (Yay! Thanks The Planet ).  I spent the next few hours getting everything updated and I also adjusted the firewall’s settings a little.

All in all, I think we’re looking good, and it seems those I talked with agree.  But do me a favor – knock on wood for me and hope we’ll be problem free for a while.  I can’t keep staying up past 3am every night.

The code for both was not XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant.  For those that don’t know, there are different standards for placing information on the Internet.  At the beginning of a website page’s code, there’s supposed to be information on what standard is in use so that your web browser can properly understand how to show you the web page you’re loading.  It’s also designed to help a web page look similar (if not the same) across different web browsers.  What happened here is that both the video and the animation parts were hand-coded in, and I didn’t follow this standard exactly right.

You can verify that I’m XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant by clicking this graphic that I can proudly display now.

But that wasn’t the whole problem.  Back to that video.  The way it was rendered (drawn on your screen) was first some text was placed there – the exact text doesn’t really matter (it was “Magnum XL-200 video” but again not important).  Then, some JavaScript (it’s a way to program things, to put it simply) took that text and threw the video on top of it.  It was this act of modifying text into an image that I think caused this.  It would be ok normally, but again referring to the Microsoft Knowledge Base article on this, I was editing text outside of the child container (I think), which lead to running into the bug.

It is 5 am local time, so at this point, I could be completely wrong on any of this being the cause, but hopefully I’ve fixed things up.