Paul’s alice.homelinux.net weblog

The 7th annual LoveFest this year was awesome! For those that aren’t `in the know’, LoveFest is a tradition started when Holly and I still lived with our parents; her parents kicked everyone out of the house so we could have a candlelit gourmet dinner together. Now that we have our own place, though, the menu isn’t so much a surprise beforehand.

Past years’ entrees were:

1. Crab Cake Appetizer, Tilapia with Sauteed Mushrooms and Spinach
2. Swordfish Ka-bobs with Red Pepper
3. Angelhair Pasta with Scallops and Walnut Pesto
4. Pasta with Vodka Cream Sauce
5. Snapper with Orange Cream Sauce
6. Chicken Marsala

And this year…

Cheese Tray (click for detail)

Sauteed Pear, Walnut, and Maytag Blue in Endive

Lobster Thermadore with Croissant

Needless to say, everything was incredible!

This sucks. I determined that to have some decent bandwidth that I’d need to migrate my Wordpress blog over to Dreamhost (best hosting ever), instead of my upstream-bandwidth-limited home connection, and encountered the following sequence of events:

• Found an awesome blog about moving Wordpress to Dreamhost.  This guy does exactly what I wanted to do.
• Completed up to the 2nd-to-last instruction, injecting the SQL database.
• Loaded the blog to see if it’s updated…  It’s a mess!  Nothing worked.
• Found my personally served copy of Wordpress is out-of-date, and needed to be updated before injecting the database.
• Found several forums where someone else was having the same problems; all recommended dropping the database and starting from scratch.

That leaves me where I am today.  I’ve re-loaded a fresh copy of Wordpress, and manually copied and pasted my articles over to the new blog, and changed the DNS to point to Dreamhost’s servers.   Done.  So far I’m missing everyone’s previous comments, most of my links to external sources from the old blog, and my blogroll.

What’s even more taunting is that there’s an “import/export” feature built into the new version, that dumps everything out in a nice lowest-common-denominator XML file, and would have saved me hours of work.  Apparently that wasn’t so important in the old one.  I guess you can’t complain about free software, but you can still be angry with it.

I’ve changed the theme from Ocadia to Random-Image, and added the Category Icons to the upper RHS of each article. Time to peruse some stock photo sites to see what will align with my categories. I love flipping through these while listening to some music:

• stock.xchng
• iStockphoto
• freeimages.co.uk

• Tackle the Tower

Ah, yes. The 31 floor climb to the top of Oakbrook Terrace for the American Lung Association. I haven’t made the climb since 2000, when I tackled the tower with cross-country colleague Andy Argyrakis. This year I got my brother Keith, friend Jeff, and his dad Lloyd in on it with me. I’ve been “training” (if you call it that) on the StairMaster at Moraine Valley. 68 floors on Wednesday.

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