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Archive for February, 2007

The first day of February greeted me with the majestic landscape covered in a thick blanket of untouched pure white snow. And then I threw the kids into it!

Snow in the South isn’t that common of a thing. It’s not like those scenes you see of Chicago, New York, or all of Colorado where people brace themselves against the driving winds as they are sandblasted with bits of ice that go by the name of snow. It’s not rock pellets that sting your eyes and slowly freeze them open. It’s not a scene where the heathen inhabitants are under the wrath of their local diety who is trying to wipe the slate clean and erase them from the face of the planet.

The Southern slow is a more easy going and gentle snow. It lasts about 3-4 hours, is usually just enough to cover the lawn so the kids can sled, closes all businesses and workplaces, except for the grocery stores where there is a mass onslaught of people buying up every crumb of bread, milk and butter they can lay their hands on! It’s pandemonium in the aisles and in the streets, but it’s fine sledding conditions everywhere else.

So what do you do when the schools are closed, work is closed and you are all home together? Get outside and make snowballs to throw at people of course! Throw some kids down a hill with a slick pastic disc strapped to their rear ends! Show off your building skills by making a snowman that is the envy of the neighborhood. Let the kids frolic and play with him in some of tribute to Frosty. Take hundreds of pictures to show the good times they’re having (so during their teenage years when they later claim they never did anything fun in life, you have the evidence). And then when everyone has gone back inside with frozen fingers and toes, you can work on your Jackie Chan moves and Ninja Kick the crap out of your creation. You can mouth some sort of cool dialog from your favorite macho movie as you put your boot upside Mr. Snowman’s head! You can wail on him with your Kung-Fu Grip of Death!

And when you’re done cracking his skull open and spilling his snowflake innards all over the lawn, you can tell the kids a band of hooligans came along and vandalized their new friend. You can let them know you did everything you could to protect him, but the band of roughs were too quick and before you could come to his aid, Frosty was a shattered wreck of a snowball. For dramatic effect, place your fist on your chest and swear that at the next snowfall you will build him again and will seek vengenace against anyone who dares come to close.

Or you could do what I did, which was take pictures of the snow coming down. You can see the short lived winter wonderland by clicking here.

The snowman assault scenario is not approved for children under 8

I forgot to include a few things in regards to the PHP 5.0 install. Here is a good link with instructions on how to get PHP installed should you run into trouble. I did use the Windows Installer package that is available at www.php.net. The only real snag was I attempted to use the CGI files for PHP and found out that that the ISAPI filter was actually easier to use and install.

If you need help, let Peter Guy point you in the right direction. As I said I didn’t use all the steps, but it was worth checking to make sure the PHP DLL’s were loaded within IIS.

As for Wordpress, the only snag I hit, was to make sure I created the Wordpress database. It didn’t make it by default so I had to use the command:

create database Wordpress;

After that, everything went fine. And if you’re from the Windows world like I am, remember the default account is ROOT, not Administrator. I kept on typing in the wrong username and password and cursing MySql for not being the easy to use database tool that the Internet had lead me to believe, until the Mrs. (who is a real SQL DBA) told my to knock of my shenanigans and type in the right information.

As you sit there reading along wondering to yourself, “Why, oh why would you ever do such a thing? Just keep this in mind. Because I can!

In the endless pursuit of knowledge and just to see what I can get away with, I decided I need a blog. Everyone else there has a blog, why shouldn’t I? Prison parolees, cafeteria ladies, ill-tempered librarians, even wayward girls with small pocket cameras have blogs. If I had one, I would be cool too. People would like me. People would come to visit just to read the witty and pithy pearls of wisdom I had to offer. Google ranking would go through the roof as time after time my page would be loaded and people from across the city, nay the state, NAY, the country would accept me as their new literary hero! Yeah, it sounds like a complete load of crap to me too. We’ll stick with because I can…

I ended up installing the Wordpress Blog software and the SMF discussion forum. It was a pretty neat experiment since I’ve never installed PHP or MySql before, which all the cool apps seem to use. ASP seems to have withered on the vine so to speak and the high powered Internet software with cool names all use PHP. And they’re all tied to MySql.

So I set about my business and downloaded everything I needed. It’s pretty straightforward actually. There were a couple of snags when installing both programs and I’ve documented a couple of cool websites I came across while looking for answers.

I kinda goofed up the FrontPage Extensions as I was going along. But I got it worked out by reloading the DLL and extending the websites again. I don’t think this is a normal part of the process. I think I got a little over zealous with adding and removing components and fouled up a few settings. It was pretty easy to fix by reconfiguring the FrontPage Extensions through the SharePoint Administrator. I can only blame myself for that one.

So anyway, it’s all up, it’s all good, it’s all about me