Dream of Waking

Two days ago, the server I’m hosted on apparently took a dump. Of course, this is perfect timing what with Memorial Day weekend and all. I wasn’t even expecting this to be back up before Tuesday. Funny enough, I got an invoice for this month’s payment while my site was down, before my hosted email even came back up.

So I broke everything and upgraded WordPress to version 2.5. Now I’m an idiot and never documented the changes I had to make K2 to make it look this way so when I upgraded WordPress and found out that the version of K2 I was using wasn’t really compatible, I had to upgrade that too. Everything with K2 isn’t working perfectly but everything with WordPress 2.5 is working great!

I’ve disabled user registration temporarily because the version of WordPress I’m using has a vulnerablity in it involving new users and I haven’t had the time to upgrade. Not that I get any new users.

Not a lot though. Just kind of rearranged the sidebar. And added a spot for my gamercard.

I’ve added a header image and a boring little icon. It almost livens up this place. Like a fake fern in a hospital lobby.

I think everything is fixed now. What a pain in the ass.

So a big thanks for tossing a brick through my glass window to AlganX from SpyGrup.org. A simple email would’ve sufficed.

I’ve deleted like every category because now I’m using tags to mark crap, which in my opinion eliminates the need for categories entirely but WordPress insists on using them so I’ll play its little games. If you’re (god forbid) looking for something I’ve written in the past, the search box would be way more help than tags or categories right now.

I’ve added some links. They’re on the right. Under the old-ass pictures.

I’d up some more pictures to Flickr but Katie has commandeered my camera and I find putting more Iraq pictures up there rather depressing.

Oh jesus, Katie just found the quacking hand puppet.

I’ve been home for a couple days now, I just haven’t taken the time to really alert the internet. I was on the local news too.

http://www.wkrn.com/node/36405

I’ve got to spend two hours getting more briefings today. There’s a whole week-long process of getting “reintegration” briefings that simply can’t wait for the work week. Thank god they’re only a couple hours in the morning and then I’m done for the rest of the day.

I have less than 10 hours left on this base. I’ll spend six days at another base, a day or so in Kuwait, and I’ll be home in a week.

Words don’t describe how thrilled I am. I cannot express my happiness in words. I don’t have the vocabulary.

Katie’s asleep and she’ll probably kick me when I get home for posting it here before she actually knows but seeing how she’ll be asleep past my bedtime, I should at least put this somewhere.

I leave the base I’m at on July 13th to come home.

I have to go to another base from here first and then to Kuwait but the important part is that once I leave here I only have to catch a couple flights and I’m home. Start counting days. I’ll be home within a week of leaving here.

So if you’re blind, I was testing my Flickr account yesterday. Apparently it’s working. So go see new pictures here.

 http://www.flickr.com/photos/emnii/

Okay I think everything works. Katie helped me plug some holes (huh huh, plug some holes) before my DNS itself could update so most stuff was working before I could actually get to it. I’ve got a pretty big entry coming soon so this is good.

I’m totally ready to come home now.

Okay so I’ve got my domain transferred and my new webhost purchased so I’m just setting stuff up right now. At some point I’ll make the switch and hopefully no one will notice the difference.

I’ve used this quick little guide from Lifehacker on encrypting email in Mozilla Thunderbird to setup keys for all my email accounts. The only one that really matters here is my “default” email account so here’s the public key for brian(lol)dreamofwaking(what)com:

—–BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
Version: GnuPG v1.4.3 (MingW32)
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67HQA/8KClox1FJYszF2o077XF9J8doW4xCwHHCdfMA7N9JmOPRoNgiljqeBpDky
KG6lKzHmDA5QxBTOs5/cNGxqdCg5oMPUksFm1jU3PCOWPFEvpkEkVLUeMsv9wXXu
JYNX6YF+LEm+MXi2CNSK6v0scx3foN9hNro2J7ML6skIVgcPNec47QBKj1+1oxtm
7XZgM6Au8VmuNO0W4FWXLLxrDTSYrNenvsMZ/rDVCBl1PoJdBsOdrpZSF9mhnirx
6ZGNaY4lOxT44NngksOSULF7FG/55AzCNXnspCa/0pwy2dsmYzAqzlOoVnt9nM+b
psVQTfYKF4LGsBfwmNM6KeemJXdL4Np/+lG+qIBWcgr/zmxQ6+49Ac92FX3qznns
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VmSCp9DjK7FH0ZK6Nd5r4VpZhm/kNqjB5wADBQ/8CLhC2dfmN7ExmF/t4YM6Ycla
s8cV+ythgKlhwq57c07bdFtNqaZxgHcbdPoRiQEwBqi+yAU3/zSFYay/4AF5QcPz
qyTKvkPwrwvuS8yszFt/u8z3PrfVkJcoP824Cf2gg33YTuIhslXQdJbEzdbESPfi
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gTll9qJCBio1CM2wwDN+4EQDn8tx93lj97Pm7PAx7Lx6j12smr/UIHFb9sDgrXLf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=
=UvlG
—–END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK—–
I’ll update my “where to find me” page to reflect this. Note: I’m using an enormous 4096-bit key because I’m insane. Also note that this kind of thing works two ways. You can send me encrypted emails but I won’t be able to send an encrypted email back unless you set up something similar (as in, PGP and not something else) on your end too.

Bad news, kids. My host is going under by the end of the month. The good news is that I’m resourceful and I’ve got a new host and domain registrar lined up. So Katie and I are backing up our stuff and I’m getting the domain transferred so stuff might break for a time. I’m going to get the new host set up before I move anything over though so downtime will hopefully be minimal. I’ve got everything backed up so nothing should be missing when I do swap over though. Bear with me.

Apparently the internet doesn’t want anyone to see my boring pictures yet. Flickr sucks and so does FTP.

So the “nonsense” category has become the “asides” category. I intended “nonsense” to be more or less where I dump links to be shared and stuff not worth more than a paragraph. Well now it’s even less important, as you can see from the previous entry with the less and the unbold.

Is it bad that I spend two days sitting on a mountain and come back with nothing to say? I played a lot of an old Magic: The Gathering PC game and I watched the first episode of season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, and I read 25 issues of Y – The Last Man and the Brief Lives storyline of Sandman. I can read 25 issues of Y because (nearly) every issue ends on a cliffhanger, it has healthy doses of comedy, drama, and action, and it’s well drawn. Sandman is outstanding too but the stories have a definite start and stop. It hops through time. Y flows in a nice orderly fashion from one story to the next. Sure, it’s almost entirely made of 5-part sub-plots but one sub-plot leads into the next which ties the overall story together. They’re two different things and I like them both but I’ll finish the rest of Y before I’ll finish Sandman because it moves in a nice orderly fashion.

I’m still changing stuff. I like this layout because it takes advantage of my nice wide screen but it reveals that the shoutbox widget is broken so I disabled it for now. I’ll get around to modifying the emo out of it whenever I get bored.

Today, April 13th, 2006, is Katie and I’s wedding anniversary. I’m stuck in Iraq but I’ll be home for year three. This year kind of sucked but that has nothing to do with our relationship, it’s the stupid deployment crap. I’d just like to spend one full year of our marriage together and the Army hasn’t given me that. I guess I should’ve seen that coming.