TheNHBushman.com

Please bear with us while we are still trying to get our blog back to normal. My Nikon D80 has been in the shop for parts of 3 weeks to fix a simple CCD bad pixel re-mapping, which is taking forever! Without my Nikon, I feel little compulsion for blogging, you understand.

Unless you’ve been under a rock you know that there is another typhoon bearing down on Taiwan. This thing is a full day away, and yet is dumping a fair amount of rain on us already. Last night about 01:00 (AM) the drain in the first floor kitchen started to backflow, dumping water up into the kitchen. As you recall, the last time that happened our living room was under a few centimeters of water. This time however, I was ready, for I had purchased a submersible pump the previous week while shopping at B&Q.

The pump sits on the floor and does it’s thing, suspended a few mm over the surface of the floor. It doesn’t suck up 100% of the water because of being offset slightly above the floor surface, but nevertheless was I very impressed with how this pump handled the water coming up out of the floor. I tossed the end of the hose out the door and the excess water followed.

Typhoon Fung-Wang: Initial Effects On Taiwan from MJ Klein on Vimeo.

Now, on an entirely different topic, I recently purchased a new ASUS M70s notebook computer. This thing is a beast! We use 3D modeling software in our business and I needed a platform that I could use for presentation when talking with our suppliers. Not only does it work well for solid models, Google Earth plays like a video game on this machine, with virtually no delays. I’m very impressed with the hardware, but the OS is Windows Vista. Those words are difficult to type for a linux user, but it couldn’t’ be helped. I tried for 3 days to get a working 64 bit linux distro to function on this notebook, and nothing worked as it should. So I reluctantly returned to Vista and copied my data over from my linux machine. The really good news is that the latest version of KDE runs under windows, so the vastly superior KDE tools such as Kmail and Akregator are up and functioning on my notebook, under Windows. Yeah, that’s how the world should be! This also explains why I haven’t been browsing and commenting much on other blogs lately. Without a suitable RSS reader available in Windows it was very difficult for me to keep track of my more than 200 streams without my trusty Akregator. Yeah, I know there is Google Reader but that requires me to do everything on someone else’s server. What I like about Akregator is that it does it’s thing in the background, and it’s an integral part of KDE so I don’t have to “go” anywhere or do anything and my feeds are right there along with email, journal, notes, schedule and all the other great features of Kontact.

Now, for what’s actually wrong with the blog.

1. Media Gallery plug-in doesn’t function. This means that I can’t easily add my photos to the editor.
2. Editor is stuck in HTML mode. Visual editing does not work. Trying to switch back and forth between Visual and HTML in the editor does nothing. Adding something as simple as a “More” break is now a PITA.
3. All the data that defines any series articles is lost. I write a lot of series articles. None of them are linked anymore. This really sucks!

For a photo-blogger like me, this is disastrous. I’m back to using the ridiculously-bloated Flock to post this article, but I can’t even easily add a “more” break in this editor either. I refuse to go back to straight HTML. Sorry, that’s just my thing. So, I’m going to try a fresh install of WP 2.6 and then import the messages back into the database and see if that works. I’ve already over-written the entire server site with the old backup files, but (get this) when I import the database backup (via Cpanel) I get a database syntax error from the file that was generated by WP itself! Go figure! I haven’t messed with SQL since I was part of the Microsoft Foxpro Beta Team back in 1992! Anyway, if the clean install works then we should be back in business. All I’d have to do is go back and edit the series articles to re-add the series data to link them together. Oh, and I have to be sure to copy over all my heavily modified theme pages too. This is sounding more and more like a full-time job – something I’ve managed to avoid for years!t

Tags: blog, typhoon, taiwan, water, flood, submersible pump