My family is taking a vacation to the Los Angeles area next week; so for the time being I’m back in the Old Pueblo. The two things I remembered right away:

1. how little traffic there is, but how much it doesn’t seem like it because of how poorly managed it is; and
2. how little there is to do here.

It is kinda nice to get away from the condo for a while though and be back with my family; it was starting to get old, sitting around all day with nothing to do. Preferrable to summer school, but all the same, calling something an improvement over summer school isn’t saying much.

The one downside to our vacation is that we’ll actually be driving from Tucson to Los Angeles. Not as bad a drive as the one to San Diego—we pass through real civilization, Phoenix and Blythe instead of Yuma and El Centro—but still not optimal. I guess I see where my parents are coming from, with flying being much more expensive and really not saving too much more time over driving, but that doesn’t change the fact that being in a car for seven or eight hours is no fun. I will be taking pictures and will post them once I am back in Tempe at my own computer.

In the meantime, my laptop is now (or will be later this afternoon, anyway) dual-booting again, so that I can at least have EVE Online and World of Warcraft with me at home and on other travels. If it weren’t for the fact that certain games require me to use Microsoft products, I would be more than happy to never have to acknowledge their existence.

Now I just need to finalize my decision between openSUSE and Ubuntu for a Linux distribution to dual-boot. Ubuntu I have much more experience working with, and I prefer its package manager; but openSUSE looks better, and works better with docking and undocking, but it’s been harder for me to configure. I am open to opinions and recommendations, so feel free to leave a comment.

Yup. Part of it was my dissatisfaction with Drupal as a straight-up blogging platform (versus WordPress’s specialization as one), and part of it is the vast improvements made by WordPress in the area of photo uploading and management. That part will still take some playing with to get figured out, but at least I’ll be able to upload more than one photo at a time. I still need to find or write WordPress versions for a couple of Drupal modules I had come to find invaluable, but that’ll get done in time.

I am still migrating posts over from the old Drupal site (which is available here for the time being), but it seems to be going smoothly. In the meantime, proceed to the next post and enjoy some photos of my “new” dice set (which I’ve had for a while, but need to move the photos of over here anyway).

I was having weird problems with Firefox lagging every once in a while, so I decided to just build my own for Mac OS X Leopard on my Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Pro. Didn’t turn out to be too difficult; Neil Lee at BeatnikPad already has Intel and G5 native builds of Firefox 3 available, but I like having the default branding (Firefox instead of Minefield, the fox icon instead of the weird bomb-planet thing) and a little more customized optimization. Here’s a basic walkthrough of how I did it; you’ll need the latest version of Xcode installed, a passing familiarity with the Terminal, and the latest version of libIDL (if you have Fink, fink install libidl2; for MacPorts, sudo port install libidl).

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Like I mentioned previously, this site is now being served up by lighttpd; it took a while to get clean URLs working right, but what right now is making my server tick is a very carefully laid-out filesystem and set of bash scripts and lighty config files, wrapped around a Drupal multisite installation to make installing modules and upgrading the entire system as intuitive and painless as possible. Upgrading Drupal (from 6.2 to the brand-new 6.3 for example) takes no more than running a single command. Here’s an overview of how my own site is set up, generalized to make it applicable to almost any other system.

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Still not on any better of a schedule. Not really worth discussing.

The site is now running on lighttpd, to cut back on the memory consumption compared to Apache. It took a while to get all the rewrite rules working right, but it seems to all be working now; use the contact form (returning soon) to let me know if something isn’t right.

And between finishing up my summer class (”Philosophy of Science”) and working on this site and the one for work, I’m just about completely settled into a new condo with one of my suitemates from last year and a friend of his who I got to know over the course of the year. It’s a nice place, about a mile from campus and cheap enough for us to afford digital cable and epic-fast cable internet in addition to food, electricity and rent. No real gripes aside from the dishwasher apparently being broken; I’m still working on getting everything unpacked and set up, but I like it so far. I don’t have any photos online here yet (they’re on Facebook for the time being) but as soon as I have a way to upload photos straight here from iPhoto I’ll post them.

Really not a whole lot else to write about. Maybe a couple more tech how-tos coming up soon, but not tonight. I think I actually want to be awake for most of the day tomorrow.