Category: diary

technorati seems to be
having trouble with this dynamic blosxom blog, although it let me
claim the laymusic.org static
blog with no trouble. So I’m putting their code into this post to see
if that helps.

Technorati
Profile

From my log, it looks like they might be looking at the .rss feed,
which doesn’t have all the stuff in foot.html, which is where I put
the original link.

The idea of docboook is that you write one source file in sgml or
xml (which is a subset of sgml) and you can process it to get plain
text, html, rtf, or tex output, or put the information in a database,
or any other format that someone can write a program to read the input
and get the output.

This is an attractive idea for people who have to email to
collaborators, maintain a website, print hard copies, and keep track
of where they’ve put the stuff they do. (I’m sure I’d transcribed the
Ravenscroft “Three
Blinde Mice” before Bonnie did it this week, but neither of us
could find it).

However, before last night, I’d tried several times to get the
docbook toolchain to work, and never managed to get both text and PDF
out of the same file (using the test files I got off the web), let
alone have it magically solve my website database maintenance
problems.

Last night, I finally hit on the DocBook Install
mini-HOWTO, and it works!

Of course, the pathname to the DTD file isn’t exactly the same in
Debian as if you install everything from source, but slocate and
updatedb are your friends, and there’s a Makefile template that will
let you find the files once and then let the computer remember where
they are.

I’ll let you know if I manage to get it to clean the house and
roast the Thanksgiving turkey for me.

For a while in the mid-nineties, I was brewing a couple of times a
month and sharing it with friends and brewing most of what I was
drinking.

This is no longer the case — I haven’t brewed a regular beer in
well over a year. But I still buy apple cider at the Boston Wort Processors annual cider
picnic, and make several gallons of cyser with it.

This year’s recipe is simple:

• 6 Gallons cider, pressed by Russell’s Orchards,
  containing mostly baldwin apples, with some cortlands, macouns, and
  russets.
• Close to a gallon of wildflower honey, bought over the internet
  from ebeehoney.com.

I’m thinking about adding some lemon juice, and if the fermentation
gets sluggish I will probably add some raisins. But honey and cider
by themselves really make a very good beverage.

I heated this enough to make it easy to dissolve the honey, and put
itinto a three gallon and a five gallon carboy. When it was cool, I
added the yeast. I had hydrated two packets of dry beer yeast in
small amounts of the cider, one
Nottingham and one Edme. Unfortunately, I failed to keep track of
which packet went into which carboy. They both bubbled
enthusiastically in the cider, and fermentation in the cider/honey
mixture was well established within an hour.

Update, November 2: I noticed that the larger, formerly
more enthusiastic, carboy had practically stopped bubbling, so on
October 30, I added a handful of raisins. I also shook it up a
little, and it immediately developed a layer of bubbles on top of the
liquid. As of November 2, both carboys are bubbling at a rate of
about one bubble per 40 seconds or so.

I discovered last weekend that I can write limericks these days.
I’ve tried before, but they never came. Probably all the writing I do
these days just makes rearranging words in my head easier than it used
to be.

The inspiration was the annual Boston
Wort Processors pub crawl. Jim Fitzgerald posted a “Night before
the pub crawl” and suggested that other people write crawl-inspired
poems. We agreed that the limerick was probably the most suitable
form, although there was also a suggestion of haiku.

This one I made up before the crawl:

A youthful wort once had a knack
Of tying six beers to his back
   As he finished one beer
   Drew the next past his ear
And continued to snarf the 6-pack.

And these two are day-after-the crawl ones:

A lazy young fellow named Fred
Kept deciding to go back to bed
     When his dog said, "We Walk!"
     He replied, "You should talk!"
And the dog followed where he was led.

A slippery fellow named Bill
Put some beer he'd brewed into a still..
    It came to a boil,
    And dripped out the coil,
And Bill took it instead of a pill.

And here’s the haiku I came up with.

lazy summer day
after the crawl
more beer soon

If I figure out how to do it about harps or serpents instead of
just beer, I could get published for a slightly wider public than
wortnet.

So here’s the first harp one:

A harper who knew how to flip
Levers, stopped as she snuck in a sip
     Of her wassail, but soon
     She lost track of the tune,
And she ended up getting no tip.

And here’s a serpent one:

A young serpent player named Joan
Tried to teach her C Serpent to moan.
      As she blew in the top,
      All she got was a pop,
So she went for a heart-rending groan.

On Friday, August 5 at about 11 AM, apparently one of the hostrocket mail servers went down.
So I stopped getting email. Apparently at some point it started
bouncing email people sent me saying it didn’t have a laymusic.org
account.

One of the things I’ve liked about hostrocket in the year or so
I’ve been with them is that their customer support is usually prompt,
friendly, and knowledgeable. However, I don’t think much of their
disaster recover procedures.

At 11:30 on Saturday, August 6, I filed a support request asking
that if the mail outage was going to last much longer, could they set
up a forward to one of my working email accounts so that I was at
least seeing current mail. They ignored this request, and predicted
that I would be getting my email in “a few hours”. I continued to
report that I was getting no email although they claimed to be having
a “delay” while they were processing their backlog. Finally, they
said at 11 PM that they weren’t able to check for any other problems
until the entire backlog was processed, which would take a few hours,
and that if I still didn’t have mail when I got up in the morning,
that I should tell them and they’d check immediately.

At 8 AM, Sunday, August 7, I still had no mail from that account,
and I reopened the ticket with that information. Since then (3 hours
later) I haven’t heard from them.

I actually moved my web hosting to hostrocket from your-site.com last summer because
your-site had a similar problem, although I don’t think it lasted as
long. So does anyone know a mail provider with good disaster
recovery procedures?

Meanwhile, if you want to email me, I’m suggesting that you use lconrad@wort.org.

Update: I finally called the phone support,
who assured me that my bulk mail had all been processed and that my
mail was working. He sent a test mail to the main account, which
worked. At this point I realized that when they brought the server up
after the crash, they didn’t restore the catchall account, so
therefore all the mail they reprocessed and everything everybody has
sent me since they brought it back up has probably disappeared
forever. This is really not what’s supposed to happen. When I finish
transferring the domain registration, I will route my mail differently.