Archive for August, 2007
Nobles down for a visit
Today was a productive day at work.
I knew there were plenty of things to do before our guests arrived tonight. I made a call to the guy who bought the Mr. Do! from Rob Caroll to talk about some photos.
I then sent out an email to Canon about upgrading my scanner to work with Vista 64 bit. Then there were a ton of the little time consumers that add up. I had to clean the guest room, take care of letting out the dog and feeding him, and unload the dishwasher.
The main task for tonight, well, I can’t get into that. I had to do some writing and some updating:) But, by the time the Nobles arrived, I didn’t finish what I needed.
Once they got here, and unloaded, we sat around and chatted. We talked about stuff that boring grown ups talk about, things that are going on in our lives. For us it’s our dog, for them it’s mostly school and professional growth.
We played some Yahtzee for awhile and had some rousing debates about Christian music and responsibilities of grown ups!
With a bottle of wine in me, and the night mostly behind us, we popped in a movie. I am sitting here typing this, and we’ll all be konking soon I am sure. Hey, we’re old now.
NOS Circus Charlie
On the klov forums there was a poster that claimed he had a NOS set of Circus Charlie sideart. This got posted in the forum that got start in 2006 about a guy looking to reproduce the sideart from another set of NOS sideart.
He basically hinted at the fact that it was for sale, and he was taking offers. I posted that I wanted to get some photos of it before he sold, but I am not holding my breath. Ideally I would like scans if it is NOS, but the chances of having him do that are slim to none.
There has been a lot of activity about Circus Charlie in the last two days. One of the collectors who originally spurred me on to think about reproducing it decided to put his machine up for sale instead of finding artwork for it.
Oh well. I have 2-3 guys already that have said they will take photos of the sideart for me. So, if I want to still pursue tracing it, I can and then find out who might want a set. Hell there is a thread already containing the names of those interested from when the guy who was going to produce a set had asked on the forums.
WordPress 2.2.2 still crashing my server
Well, after a long day, I didn’t get anything figured out.
I made a long, detailed post on the WordPress forums about my issues, but not one person replied. I don’t know if that is a newbie thing, that no one responds to new posters, but the forums seems heavily trafficked.
I thought briefly, that made I had to update my .htaccess file for the blog. But then I figured out that WordPress doesn’t come with a default .htaccess file, you have to make one. It seems like most people use it for permalinks using the mod_rewrite function of the server. I hadn’t gotten that far, so I hadn’t created one yet.
I made a blank file on the server through ftp, and then I didn’t touch the site for the rest of the day. Little did I know this caused an internal 500 server error. I didn’t figure that out until just now:)
So, with no replies, and no luck finding anything else, I am preparing for my site to be shut down tomorrow night right when we have company. At least I told my host to just remove the wordpress version and leave the regular site.
Cap Kit for Wizard Of Wor
I finally got the capacitor kit for the Wells Gardner monitor today. Last week, when I had the whole week off I had intentions of going up to get the Wizard Of Wor Cap Kit, but wanted to combine a trip with something else, or take a bike ride. Well, needless to say, I never got around to it.
So, I got stuck with it this week, and it involved two long trips to Meunier (Indianapolis) to get it. One day to drop off the list, and then another day to go get it. It was significantly cheaper than getting it online though. I think without gas it cost about $6.75, and if you count my gas, maybe another $2. Not to mention, they didn’t have one of the caps, so I had to then run over to King’s Electronics down the street and get the last one. (Their prices suck, usually they are about 3x higher than Meunier)
Now it is Thursday, and I don’t know when I will get to do it. It is so hot outside and we have guests this weekend. Hopefully I will get to take the monitor out of the Wizard Of Wor at least and discharge it before the weekend is up.
Nokes is jumping on our bed
I really thought he was too small to do it, but he has started.
Lately he has been waking us up around 7:00 each morning. He’ll hop up on one side of the bed, paws up, usually catching us on our arms or back, giving us deep scratches (no matter how much we trim his nails). If you came in and saw us, you’d see our big queen size bed, and us huddled in the middle by the morning in anticipation of being shredded to pieces.
He has been sporatically been able to jump up on the bed, but last night and this morning he just jumped from a sitting position without a problem. Bam! shedding, liking, biting, clawing monster at your service.
WordPress is maxing out my server
Well, I figured I would encounter issues when I was converting my blog to a WordPress website, but I didn’t figure it would be this big of a deal.
On Monday night I started having issues with my admin interface. My posts would time out, and the website itself took forever to load. Not only was I losing work, it was frustrating me that I couldn’t be productive. It felt like the whole server was running slow.
Well, turns out my website was crashing the server, timing out the processor overloading it with apache and php requests. My site got taken offline for a day as my host tried to figure out what to do. He first transferred me to a server box with low traffic and few sites hosted on it, but after accessing the admin it acted up again and crashed that server. He then moved it to a higher end box with maybe one other site and got the same result.
Meanwhile, I am reading on what to do. WordPress 2.2.2 came out in the last three days, so I decided that I should upgrade. I may have upgraded to 2.2.1 around the time I was having issues, but I was thinking that was earlier last week. But you never know, that is what could have broke things. A looping line of code that was a bug in the upgrade, I don’t know. I looked in the list of fixes in the 2.2.2 upgrade and didn’t see anything related, but again, it couldn’t hurt.
I also installed WP-Cache with my host’s help, we’ll have to see if that changes things. But so far, most of the posts I have read in the support forums have been about the server being ill configured. There are a significant amount of posts about overloading servers, so now I wish I would have read more into potential issues to watch out for in my switch over. I am committed now with the amount of time I have spent thus far, and the tempting feature upgrade:)
I did read in some posts that shared servers can be a problem, even though it isn’t a requirement to have a dedicated server to host a wordpress blog. Some huge sites from Apple to the New York Times use WordPress, so it should work.
I found out that the server box I was on had 267 virtual domains. That was a good amount, so hopefully now with a switch that will help things.
I also went through the “Presentation” section of the website and first turned off the post tally option for the Archives, and then turned off Archives all together. I haven’t noticed any improvements just yet.
My host says that these are the two lines of code that are executed from 5-7 times per second. Maybe an infinite loop like I mentioned above?
(IP Address) – – [08/Aug/2007:14:19:47 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=56& HTTP/1.0” 200 34797 “-” “WordPress/”
(IP Address) – – [08/Aug/2007:14:19:47 -0400] “GET /wpblog/?cat=63& HTTP/1.0” 200 34797 “-” “WordPress/”
I need help, and I am not sure what to do, but this is hardly something I want to deal with.
Reproduction of Circus Charlie Sideart
I have seen two posts in three days about having some reproduction art done for this game. I know very little about it, but thought maybe I should capitalize on that and work on making some vector tracings.
There are very few collectors listed on VAPS with this game, but I emailed the few that listed as having a dedicated upright cabinet.
I have heard back from two of the three I have emailed, hopefully I can get some good photos.
Talking to another reproduction artist in email today, it sounds like he scans in sideart when possible in a ton of pieces and then puts it back together. I hadn’t thought of that, putting the game flat and going to town. That is a ton of work, although it probably gets you the most accurate without distortion. He said that he will mail his scanner to people though. What a process. What if they don’t have the software? You have to have a really willing soul to help you out with that, and a deep bank account.
