So people at work have been nagging me to get a Twitter

account — why?  So they know everything I’m doing all the time?  Finally I just decided to go with the flow and so far it hasn’t been that bad — as soon as I joined and started “watching” my boss, I had like 6 co-workers join as watchers.  I think the idea of Twitter is great, but it kind of seems like a stalking tool.  I mean, anyone can “watch” you and know exactly what you’re doing.  Good thing they at least have a block tool to keep the creeps out, eh?

Anywho, you can see my status at any time on my side bar.  And if you’re not a creepy pervert, feel free to watch me as well =)

Well, my 21st birthday is finally here…yay! Of course, all that means to me is that I can now do everything I’ve already been doing for the last four years, only now I’d be doing it legally. So happy birthday to me, I’m getting plastered tonight.

FYI, no pics yet — the party is this Friday the 25th so I’ll have plenty then and I’ll post ‘em here.

I thought this was too shocking to be true but the other system admins confirmed it – Google officially wants to be the next god of the universe. The datacenter that houses over a hundred of our servers also caters to some of Google’s servers, and apparently Google also owns part of the building or something like that. They decided that they don’t have enough power for their servers, so they are actually demanding that the entire datacenter be stripped of all power for about two hours while they install more power lines. No, not more power for the datacenter – but just for their little cage. So basically, all hundred or so of our servers housing thousands of sites (as well as the other hundreds of servers belonging to other occupants of the datacenter) are going to be powered down for two hours so Google can expand their empire and eventually take over the world. I hope Google is happy with the fact that we’re all going to lose customers and reputation over this, so happy that they all get gonorrhea and die.

Also, mozzy on over here and take a look at the mildly humorous pictures.

I decided to stop being lazy and get around to those upgrades I needed for my site and server:

- Upgrade PHP to 5.2.5 and Apache 2.2.6

- Upgrade Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin for WordPress

- Upgrade WordPress to 2.3.1

First, I should admit that I do use the EasyApache installer from WHM, as it has vastly improved to the point where I don’t have to troubleshoot its builds afterwards, nor do I have to go back and reinstall eAccelerator and Suhosin – The current release of cPanel now includes those options and I must say that they have become rather flawless. In other words, it saves me the time of compiling shit by hand when all I have to do is click a few buttons and it’s all done.

Second, I was avoiding the Gallery2/WPG2 upgrade because I remember that the first time I set it up it was hell, and since it was so long ago I didn’t want to go through that again.

Third, since my last WordPress upgrade I had numerous problems with plugins and as a result I had to tweak most of them because their developers hadn’t released an upgrade yet. I finally decided to just suck it in and upgrade, though it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. There are a few things to point out:

- Ultimate Tag Warrior has been discontinued due to WordPress 2.3.1′s native support for tagging. If you’re a UTW user like me, you can still keep your sexy tag cloud by follow these steps:

1. In your admin section, go to Manager > Import and use the UTW import tool to convert your UTW tags to WordPress tags. Then go to Manage > Categories and convert your categories to tags too, if they were linked to UTW before.
2. In your theme code where you normally would display your categories, change the code to <?php the_tags(”); ?> instead of <?php the_categories(”); ?> or whatever it was before.
3. Since your tag cloud is now gone, remove the UTW code and replace it with <?php wp_tag_cloud(”); ?>. You can read more about configuring the tag cloud here.

Since removing UTW and upgrading my plugins and WP, I noticed that my site loads a ton faster though, so I’m overall glad that I finally got around to doing this stuff. If you’re lazy like me and still haven’t upgraded to WP 2.3.1, below is a helpful guide on how to do so:

http://polymathprogrammer.com/2007/10/29/upgrade-wordpress-2pt2-to-2pt3/

Those of you who read Corgie’s post on the front page of Digg the other day, the answer is no — I’m not selling ad space (or sponsored reviews) on my site at this time, and obviously not for $560 a month. I might in the future when I get more traffic but when that time comes the announcement will be made by me, not some idiot who eats roaches for a living. In case you’re wondering why:

1. At the time of this writing, my monthly traffic totals about 756,000 hits per month and 20,000 per day (give or take a few thousand), only a fraction of which are unique, reflected by the stats counter on the right-hand side of my site. Corgie claimed that I get millions of hits of day, making it look like $560 is a fair price to pay. The reality is, most of the sites that I link to already only get 30-100 hits per month from my site, which is probably only worth $2 per month.
2. My site is a personal site mainly focused around programming and the worthless stuff I choose to write about sometimes. I’m not going to fill my website with ads for shit that have nothing to do with the content of my blog.

I’m not against selling ad space, in fact, I’ve already been planning to start doing so in the near future as long as my traffic continues to increase at the same rate it has been for the last 6 months. However, the advertising will only be available for progammers and other site owners who are offering technology-based services.

I recently became pretty fond of Ubuntu when I installed it on my work computer after dealing with daily crashes of Windows XP Pro. I find it to be a lot easier to manage, though it sucks that some software is still not compatible with Unix and installing a wireless network card is about as hard as finding a 34D push-up bra at Victoria’s Secret. I mean, it’s a lingerie store…you’d think they’d have a bigger push-up bra. Maybe I want my boobs to peek out of my shirt every once in a while…or maybe I’ll decide to turn tricks someday and need a good “come get me” outfit. I also just realized that this is the third time today I went off on a tangent about boobs.

So anyways, out comes PCLinuxOS which is a new OS determined to be the bridge between Linux and Windows, targeted towards beginner Unix-ers who aren’t quite ready to kick Microsoft to the curb. It’s not quite the Gnome desktop, but rather a Windows Vista-inspired interface powered by a Linux core. I think it’s a good idea and will probably help the world see that Windows is officially the dead rat in the soup, by converting end users over to Linux. Best off, it’s completely free and can be downloaded here.
I don’t have any plans in the near future to use PCLinuxOS since I’ve become very content with Ubuntu, but If you’re a beginner to Unix you might want to give this one a look and let me know how it works.
Screenshots

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Just when I though he disappeared for good, our culturally observant (yet sexy) friend Andrew Hearst released some new Magazine covers that are almost as good as the infamous subliminal cocktail featured on Snopes a few years ago.

The last time I posted something on Andrew Hearst I had people asking me if I even knew what a Panopticist was. Ok, the answer is still no, seeing that I don’t even know how to pronounce the word (pan-nop-tih-cist??) but this page is supposed to explain it a little bit. Too bad I have the attention span of a flea, so yea. You can see his other fabtaculous magazine covers here and…um… what was I talking about again?

Ok, I know, I’m a bit late on this but I just got around to watching the MTV Movie Awards that I taped on DVR last week, and I swear when I saw this I couldn’t even contain myself. I mean, Sarah Silverman must have balls the size of church bells to be able to own Paris Hilton like this in front of millions of people. You’d have to watch it to get the full effect:

And I use the word “released” very loosely. Yes, I just upgraded my blog to use WordPress 2.2 after this guy made it sound delicious. No, I don’t regret it, but I do think it would be best to wait for a bugfix. I shall start with the positives:

- It’s optimized a bit more to help your site load faster. This may or may not be noticeable to you, but it probably is to your webhost

- It’s harder to break your site by enabling a botched plugin. I tried to enable Staticized-Reloaded and I got what I interpret as the “WordPress Screen of Death”:

This is also a shame because this happens to be one bad-ass plugin.

Now for the bad, which outweighs the good:

- Don’t be surprised if your plugin database disappears. From some odd reason, WordPress could only find it after I created a new plugins folder and copied over my plugin files again….and yes, I had to re-enable all 30 of them.

- WP-Cache no longer works (at the time of this writing), and you’ll find that enabling it will cause some strange behavior on your blog. Oddly enough it also caused my plugin database to be erased yet again

- TinyMCE (the WYSIWYG editor) malfunctions, esp. in Firefox when trying to use certain functions.

- You may need to tweak your theme a bit. I had to make several code modifications to my sidebar and header files.

- Your boobs might shrink in size. Oops, wait…that’s what happens when you stop taking birth control.

Anywho, those of you who are thinking on upgrading, be prepared to spend a few minutes messing with your site and testing your plugins and such. It may be a good idea to wait for a bugfix, which by WordPress history will probably be out within the next few days.

For anyone who hasn’t met the newest addition to the Vasilé family, I’d like to introduce you to Capone. He’s a purebred pitbull currently at 12 weeks, 25 lbs. His vet estimated that based on his genes he’s probably going to reach about 80-90 lbs by the time he’s a year old. Yes, that means that my puppy is going to be beast, and he’s probably going to make your puppy his bitch. I’m already working on digging a hole in my backyard to dispose of all the contingent body parts he’s probably going to bring home.

Click on the pic for the full image. You can see more pictures of my sexy-ass puppy in my Gallery.