Go check out Inchoatery!

I’ve also written up a bit about the challenges of pretending to be a whole rock band as a solo musician, in a blog post over on the music site titled The Lonely Iterator.

Check ‘em out!

I tried a few things but couldn’t find a problem: WP’s actual files seemed fine (diffs against a same-version install for another site turned up nothing, etc) and it wasn’t a rogue plugin, and .htaccess was fine (and more on that below*), etc.

What ended up doing the job was blowing out “phoenixblue” in the wp_options table’s “current_theme” value. I replaced it with “default” just to see what would happen. What did happen is that I loaded the site and it came up looking just fine. And not looking like it was using the default uggo WP theme, either. Taking a look at the db again, I found that “current_theme” had been redefined as “PhoenixBlue”.

So did DH reconfigure something such that the handling of the theme name got case-sensitive overnight? Or what? I’m boggled.

* On the .htaccess front, I saw about ten days ago the sudden failure of this site to load, again without any recent change on my part; in that case, nothing, not even plain files or raw directories, were loading. The fix was to blow a couple of lines out of my .htaccess file:

RedirectMatch ([0-9]{4})([0-9]{2})([0-9]{2})_[0-9]{4} /$1/$2/$3/ [L]

Not really a problem, since it was a years-old redirect from when I moved to WP in the first place from some home-rolled blog software with a different permalink structure. But, again, something changed and not on my end, which is weird. The server had rebooted with no warning earlier in the day when that happened, so that’s almost certain when the change, whatever it was, happened. Dreamhost reconfiguring apache in a way that borked the old .htaccess functionality, maybe?

I don’t know enough about Apache or .htaccess to be confident in assaying the correctness or potential quirkiness of the above bit of mojo; it’s possible they just reconfigured something in a way that made bad code that shouldn’t have worked in the first place finally actually not work, I don’t know. But ugh. It’s been a fun couple weeks.

Josh Millard, Musician

I’ve collected several hundred songs and recordings of same from the last fifteen years or so in one place, organized for easy browsing and quick listening via embedded mp3 players. It’s a work in process as I continue to do writeups about individual songs and collections, and I’ll be making music-oriented blog entries over there as well.

It’s been a busy, Metafilter-centric three months — after finishing up that trip (which was fantastic), we did a raffle (complete with wierd Paypal headache) that raised over $12K for charity, we ran an informal UI experiment with Metafilter favorites (complete with much arguing), Matt found out he had a great big pituitary tumor and scared the shit out of us, and said tumor has ended up responding very well to non-surgical treatment. Plus a dozen other slightly less landmark-worthy things I’m forgetting to mention.

And two mefites, newish member Bageena and long-timer and blogosphere-coiner Brad “bradlands” Graham, both passed away suddenly this last week. Sobering start to the new year.

I think I’m going to dodge the formal Resolutions thing again this year and just state a general intent to get my shit in gear.

Whole bunch of content up on Meeting Metafilter, more to come as the trip continues.

I’ve set up a site to track it all: Meeting Metafilter. I’ll be posting text, pictures, and even some audio and video as I can manage it.

1. My wrist is feeling much better in general. Still taking it easy on it, but I’m basically pain free again and seem able to deal with moderate loads with it again. Rock.

2. Cat came back! She finally wandered in at some point last night; I found her when I got up at 3am to use the bathroom, just meowing in the kitchen. Yay cat!

1. My right wrist (read: the one I do everything with — music, mousing, gaming) going all wonky. Doc says tendonitis. Brace, rest, ice, NSAIDs, check back in a couple weeks.

2. One of our cats, Freyja, has gotten out and has been missing for a few days. Doing all the things we’re supposed to do. Someone who may or may not be her has been eating food we’ve left out the last couple of nights. Waiting for her to show up at home or for her microchip to get scanned at a vet or shelter.

So, shit. Wind out of sails somewhat. But the show goes on, and I’ve got a week to get ready, so it’s time to get ready.