I joined Second Life back in 2005 or so. For a while I didn’t have a computer that could do it at all so I only played at friends’ houses. Then I had a computer that could do it, but not well, so I got frustrated and gave up on it. Now I’m back, thanks to aleja, and I’m getting more involved! (This is only in the last few days, even.) In fact, I just bought a home. Yup, I’m now a Second Life homeowner, paying RL cash for a virtual plot of land. Oh well, it’s not much. I did always kind of want a home…I was a total vagrant before. Anyway, here are some pictures of my renewed second life.
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But of course…VMWare Player. Why didn’t I think of this before?

I’m writing this in a draft in Gmail because I can’t remember my WordPress password. The reason I can’t remember is I’m not on my normal computer operating system. raisinbottom emailed me today with questions about Ubuntu, and he mentioned Wubi, so I got all hyped up and spent the evening fighting with it. Again. My big problem, as usual, is the wireless stuff. When I mentioned to A what I was working on, she couldn’t believe it - I have installed and uninstalled Ubuntu at least four times now. I have a love/hate relationship with the damn thing. I was unable to get the wireless working, but I’m jacked straight into the network right now, so I can at least write this while in Ubuntu, save the draft, and go into Windows (where my passwords are all saved) and post it!

Anyway, today’s classes were pretty good. I enjoyed the project we did in Deaf Studies, and I was pleased to see another friend of mine is now in the class. A few other people joined too so it is now getting pretty crowded! More people came into my Linguistics class too, and it’s now huge, but we can’t get a bigger room so we are all jammed in tight in a semi-circle. It turns out one of the visiting students is emerge’s sister, I was tickled to find that out! I had some quibbles with some of the teacher’s opinions…I had asked about Gestuno, and then later I asked about Esperanto…and she tried to compare it back to Gestuno. In reality, Gestuno can be more accurately compared to Basic English, because Esperanto behaves very differently from either of those. She wouldn’t hear of it though - did I mention she’s excitable? Oh well.

As those of you who follow me on Twitter know, I used to have a 1GB SD card, a 256MB SD card, and a 1GB mini SD card with an adapter. The first two were broken (I think by the CatCam, though don’t ask me how) and they won’t take pictures or format or anything. The mini got lost, I have no idea where it is. My Dell Inspiron 1501 has an SD card slot built in, and it accepted all three of these cards before they broke/got lost.

So I went to Microcenter the other day, and they only had a 2GB mini which was more than I wanted, but I bought a 4GB Kingston SDHC card for $30. It works in my camera just fine - the camera says right on it that it handles SDHC - but I’ve just discovered that it doesn’t work in my computer’s card slot. It’s supposed to, other people have gotten other SDHC cards working in their Inspiron 1501 laptops, but this one doesn’t work in mine. I can get pictures off using the good ol’ cable, but that SD slot was awfully handy.

Well, hopefully when I get a 1GB mini card again, it will still work in my laptop. Otherwise I have an SD slot that I can’t do anything with, unless it works with the 1GB card I got as part of my new gBlog job…I bought the 4GB because I wanted more capacity, and A was going to put the 1GB card into her camera, and the 4GB works fine in the camera so I don’t plan to return it, but…

Yeah, hi. I’m a geek.

Nothing is quite as much fun as seeing this on my screen:

Done copying data from Berkeley DB to your SQL database! All went well.

Okay, there are things that are slightly more fun, but it’s always pleasing when a conversion goes well. This is over at Cyber Dyke Blog by the way, where I am using a commercially-licensed version of Movable Type. (I switched to WP over here so I could hide certain posts, not because I don’t like MT!) For some reason the control panel on the cydyblog.net domain, DirectAdmin, wouldn’t let me delete the existing cydyblog_wordpress database (I had used WP there for about two days) and wouldn’t let me do a DROP DATABASE in PHPMyAdmin. So I just dropped all the tables from that database and used its connection information for the MT configuration. The conversion took a while, but at the end I got that lovely line you see above, so everything went well! It’s a little odd seeing tables with the prefix mt_ in a database called cydyblog_wordpress but I don’t intend to actually go into there much anyway, so it doesn’t matter.

I love being a blog geek!

I broke my website today - I broke it bad. But because I am Just That Slick, I was able to repair everything without anybody noticing. Well, I did get one e-mail from a friend letting me know something was wrong, but I e-mailed her back and said something to the effect of “you caught me with my pants down!”

The reason I needed to repair everything was because I improperly tried to move the files in http://www.amanita.net/wordpress into http://journal.amanita.net so I could use the cookies for password-protected posts. (If you’re reading this on LiveJournal, posts that are friends-only on LJ are password-protected on my website.) So I tried to switch and - kaboom! Everything was all screwed up, I couldn’t log in anywhere, and things were Not Good. So I figured I needed to reinstall WordPress. After some fussing with the tarball, I was able to get everything uploaded where I wanted it. In order to make the install go smoothly, though, I renamed my original database - the one with all the config and posts and comments and everything - to etoile_backup. I then created a new database for the journal, ran the WP installation normally, and had a nice mostly-empty journal database. The scary part was dropping that database altogether and then renaming etoile_backup back to what my journal database is supposed to be called. I was a bit nervous that it would break stuff, lose my archives, etc. but everything went smoothly. Oh, and did I mention I was doing all of this database creation, renaming, etc. in cPanel and phpMyAdmin using Lynx? Yeah, I told you: I Rule.

I moved my plugins and my themes over too, and everything seems just fine. Phew! I don’t have the alternate admin CSS that I used to, but I was getting tired of that anyway. Now I just have to find the courage to delete the old wordpress directory - I’m paranoid about that kind of thing. And those of you who have my password for posts - it should be working now.

I had a very nice, relaxing weekend. We saw Mad Hot Ballroom on Saturday; it wasn’t as good as I was expecting but it was still a fun movie. I got very drunk on Saturday night simply because I was at home with those who love me and I just felt like it. Now I know that (vodka + cranberry juice + orange juice) x 3 = drunken Meredith and I didn’t even have a hangover. I think I have only been that drunk once before, and I didn’t get sick then either. This doesn’t mean I’m going to make a habit of this - usually a regular wine cooler or two will give me a pleasant albeit short buzz. But I was in a safe space, and it was fun, so I went for it.

We did not go see fireworks yesterday, because neither A nor myself are fond of big crowds and/or loud explosions. We saw War of the Worlds yesterday with A’s dad, and it wasn’t too bad. I hadn’t been to a weekday matinee in a long time - tickets were only $6.50! At night we just stayed home and relaxed, and tried to comfort the poor cats who were all freaked out because of the fireworks that were being set off in our neighborhood. (I think some of what we heard might have been the town’s fireworks display; we are a mile or two from where that takes place and the sound probably does travel that far.)

I have been extremely blog-nerdy in the past few days. My friend Suzanne was having trouble with her Movable Type - it turned out she was still using the Berkeley database, and it likely got corrupted. I think we’ll be able to save her entries, but I’m not sure yet how it will go. Then today I helped my friend Cricket convert her smaller blog from Blogger to WordPress - and I managed to do this using only Lynx, because for some reason I can’t get to her site from my work! It was great to see her so excited at getting the little blog converted…tonight I am going to convert her main blog and then see about tackling a Haloscan comments conversion too. We’ll see how it goes!

I realize I haven’t been saying too much lately - either in comments on others’ sites or in my own journal. I’ve even started memes and then not finished them! (Mom and Suzanne, yours are coming.) But I’ve been basking in the glow of my three new geek toys:

• New laptop (including new OS for me to experiment with)
• New Sidekick (I can browse porn on this thing! or, um, news.)
• Katamari Damacy (it does make my thumbs hurt after a while)

So please forgive me for being somewhat out of touch. Once I get used to these toys I will be more aware of the outside world again!