I’m happy to report that the much feared transit to the east coast with cat was far less difficult than anticipated. Thanks to Denver’s best veterinarian – Dr. Cassie Todd, of the very cool Firehouse Animal Hospital down on 6th Avenue – my feline charge was only moderately disruptive on the red eye out to Boston. The mild sedative that Dr. Todd prescribed, Acepromazine, worked effectively; the Az monster was not knocked out, but was rendered far more docile than she would have been otherwise. It didn’t hurt that as is usual on JetBlue, virtually everyone within two rows of me had headphones on for the majority of the trip.
While that part was easy, however, the trip to and from Maine was slightly more problematic due to a variety of traffic incidents, a defective alarm clock, and more. I managed to make all of my scheduled one to one interviews, however, which was excellent. More on those later.
In the meantime, a couple of other items for your consideration:
- Laptop Situation:
I’ve had very few suggestions as to how I proceed with the bad block on my Linux partition, which is bad news. I’m having significant problems working off Windows (it doesn’t always find networks that my 770 does, and I’m not terribly thrilled with Thunderbird as an email client), but I’m not ready to write off the data from the Linux partition just yet. If I don’t have any potential avenues of approach within a few days, I’ll have to suck it up and simply load a replacement hard drive with what little info I have. Thank god for Flickr – I would have lost most of my pictures otherwise. - Ongoing Migration Issues:
Some of you may have noticed that while the migration seems to be complete, things are not quite what they were at the old site. Click on the permalink for an entry, for example, and your browser displays the base blog URI rather than the permalink. My belief at this point, following a conversation with Cote late last week, is that a lot of the odd behavior is attributable to the way that 1and1 appears to be forwarding our domains. When we cut over to the new server last week, I was looking for the shortest route possible to not pointing at our 1and1 hardware. Rather than fully transfer our domains, I forwarded them. This has generally worked as expected, but it’s triggered a number of smaller problems, because 1and1 is loading everything in some weird redirected frameset. As a result, I’m currently working with Johncompanies to fully migrate our domains over to them. What does this mean to you? Hopefully very little. It’s really just the difference of being directed to our server versus being forwarded over there. - Backup Scripts?:
Next maintenance task following our domain forwarding is setting up appropriate backup on the new server to Johncompanies shares. Does anyone have any scripts for cron jobs that backup production servers handy – particularly any that dump and transfer MySQL databases? Would save me a fair amount of Googling. - Movable Type Migration:
One other note vis a vis the migration. Some of you may have clicked on older links, either via bookmarks or search, and gotten HTTP 404 Not Found errors. This was because our new instance of Movable Type built the pages with a file name composed of the data and an “entry base name” element rather than the simply numerical index number as it did previously. I’ve corrected this (under “Individual Archive” in MT, have it build the filename as %e.html), so let me know if you have any further issues in this area.
Apart from all of that, here’s a travel reminder: I’m in Boston all day tomorrow, flying back to Denver tomorrow evening. Following a half day of packing on Wednesday, I’ll be hopping in the car and driving out to the east coast. Net net? Don’t expect much from me from Wed-Fri.
