GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

HAAA!!!

SO: dumped the MarsEdit data folder like I said I was gonna, launched the new install of ME, and BEHOLD—it works again! O frabjous, frabjous day! Will wonders never cease?

Update! More wonders, miracles, and marvels: just as I was hitting “Send to blog” on this post, another email from Daniel at Red Sweater popped over the transom, with several more suggestions. Turns out, Daniel is actually the Big Bossman at Red Sweater, which I hadn’t known before this very minute. Many, many thanks to my boy D for great tech support and person-to-person customer service. If you’re blogging on a Mac, you really need to hustle over and grab a copy of MarsEdit for yourself. Trust me, you will NOT regret it.

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Publick notice

Still working on getting MarsEdit up and running properly again, after an extended e-mail exchange last night with a very nice and helpful Red Sweater (purveyors of MarsEdit, among other software offerings) tech-dude who put me onto some excellent ideas from the crash-log data I sent him that I would never have thought of myself, crash logs being no more than so much gobbledegook to me.

Hell, I usually don’t even read the things, really; being on a Mac, I haven’t had a great deal of exposure to ’em over the years. Not at least since the rise of rock-steady and reliable OSX from the smoldering embers of the old pre-Intel PPC chip and OS 9, alternatively known to legions of frustrated, embittered Mac users as “OS Crash.” Which derogatory nickname, believe you me, was well-earned.

Last night/this morning around 1:30 in the AM, Tech Dude sent this:

In the crash log that came through separately, it seems like MarsEdit is having trouble gaining access to the data folder in your home folder. If you haven’t already tried this, the first thing I would try is restart your Mac and hope that “resets” something. Also, is there any chance your disk is very full? That can sometimes cause problems with accessing data reliably.

Daniel

Hrm. After several bootless reboots (heh—sorry) yielded no joy, I checked and saw that my HD was slightly past 2/3rds full, so today I’ve been beavering away at consolidating files and reorganizing folders, transferring everything I can to Flash drive sticks and deleting the originals from the machine, and such-like geekish finger-bangery.

Next up, I’m going to trash the MarsEdit data folders mentioned in the above email; inexplicably, there are four (4) of the danged things, HUGE folders (several hundred megs apiece), each of which seems to be an exact replication of the other three. Then, I’ll uninstall MarsEdit and do a fresh re-install of a brand-spanking new copy I downloaded late last night—the idea being that on first launch, the new install should create a brand-new data folder for itself, and VIOLA! problem solved, hopefully.

I’m leaving the ME Preference Pane in place and as is, since it includes the unlock key-code (or should, if it’s set up like other 3rd-party PPs I’ve had occasion to deal with over lo, these many years) I obtained back when Barry’s generous donation financed the purchase of a gin-yoo-wine Oaf-Ficial MarsEdit software license. ME is by far the best WP blog editor for Mac I know of out there; the idea of losing it, particular after having set up a cpl-three dozen custom macros and handy-dandy keyboard shortcuts, just sickens me.

Hell, I keep trying to use those shortcuts and macros with this infernal native WP editor, hitting them two or three times before I realize that dammit, my comfy accustomed writing routine just don’t work up in here. It’s infuriating, that’s what.

Happy birthday AGAIN!

This time, toooooo meeeeeee

So I had intended to run—rerun, more like—a few of my most-loved YewToob vids, which I was rocking out to at housecat-alarming volume whilst enjoying the first adult beverage I’ve had in quite a while, seeing as how A) today I’m 64; B) I had one hell of a trying afternoon; and 3) what the hell, just because I can.

In celebratory mood, I fired up my preferred 3rd-party blog editor, MarsEdit, but the blasted thing kept crashing on startup. Kited the full crash-log report to the Red Sweater folks, then finally stooped to the piss-poor and grossly irritating WP post editor to type this up. Dammit, dammit, dammit. More to follow, if I can force myself to go on staggering along with this unbearably schtoopid WP interface.

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Publick Notice

After running across it courtesy of everyone’s favorite visually-stunning placental mammal’s joint (it’s a service used by Whatfinger News, mentioned down at the bottom of Ms Sarcastica’s post), I’m experiment with a new donation route: Donorbox, which handles CF memberships at a low, low monthly rate, powered by your choice of either Stripe or PayPal. It can be found over in the right-sidebar “Shameless begging” section, but the box-title seems not to be showing up for some reason or other. Oh well, I’m workin’ it. Should any of y’all miscreants feel generous enough to give it a whirl, do let me know how this new thang works for ya in the comments here, ‘kay? Thankee much…

Publick Notice

Why yes, I have been just sorta stalling, putting off undoing the Coop-O-Ween makeover until the much-anticipated yearly arrival of good ol’ Scrooge Picard, why do you ask?

Actually, what with the Christmas lights already popping up all over the place around these parts, I’m thinking I’ll go ahead and get cracking on the annual CF Christmas conversion, even if it is a bit early still by the traditional standards for such things. Expect screwups, erratic blog behavior, and general kludginess, folks.

Update! Well shoot, that went a lot faster and easier than I thought it would. Now for the neverending process of bug-hunting and repairing…sigh.

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Publick Anooouncemente

All posting, including tonight ’s Eyrie thang, will be pushed back until either later tonight or possibly even tomorrow. Heading out in just a bit for the BCHS football game to check out my daughter’s performance, then bringing her back home with me afterwards for the weekend. Big doin’s which I’m very much looking forward to, back with y’all soon as I can be.

Update! Well dammit, that did not go at ALL as planned. First, my friend Zach got hopelessly lost on the way down to pick me up; called me, tried to tell me where he was while the wife and young ‘un talked all over him in the background, and I couldn’t make heads nor tail of where the bleedin’ hell that boy might be, since I’m way out in the boonies and not just terribly familiar with the area my own self. So, he finally gets straightened out somehow, makes it to my dismal shack, and we proceed to hightail it with all due haste up to Bessemer.

On arrival at the high school after much tail-chasing, recrimination, and assignation of blame, we try to find an entrance to the football field (we could see from the road that the game was already well under way, just couldn’t see a way to get in and parked and all). No helpful signs or arrows or anything along those lines, mind, that would apparently have made this business entirely too easy.

We drove slowly through an open gate close behind the home-side bleachers where we could see several cars parked up. Some quasi-official dood hustles his fat ass out, flags us down, and informs us we ought to go back around to the main entrance. Which has a handicapped ramp, see. Which, in my current sad, crippled condition, is not optional. Which condition Official Dood had noted, bless him.

So we did that thing.

We drive to the main entrance, park up, unass the vehicle, and go up to the front doors as told. We try each of the four doors; all locked, natch. As we made our way back out to the car scratching our heads in befuddlement, a young feller opens one of the doors, bellows a hearty halloo, and waves us inside. We go in and he accompanies us down a long, wide hall, around a bend, and right over to the main office. Wherein a white-haired, security-guard looking fellow (no uniform, but sometimes you can just kinda tell, y’know?) says we should go back around the building to the parking lot we’d just left, wait by the line of parked buses for him to join us, and he would be out in a jiffy to personally guide us to exactly where we needed to be.

By then, Madeleine’s role in the evening’s festivities had concluded. She had arranged with her band director to duck out early with us so’s we might get her on back down to chez Hendrix at a reasonable hour. So as we were ambling over to the bus line wondering just what the fucking actual fuck, here comes my kid walking towards us from the far side of the parking lot. She caught our frazzled attention with a big smile and a wave, the four of us piled into the car, and we got the hell out of Dodge posthaste.

To tot up the results of this decidedly snakebit foray, then: No marching band halftime show. No marching band music. No Friday night high school football. Much confustication, aimlessness, and futility. Contradictory instructions from friendly folks who were just trying to be helpful. Lots of driving and milling around. Some time spent exploring the after-hours-vacant, dimly-lit corridors of a school building I have no particular fondness for or connection to, other than that my daughter will be attending classes there next year. Then, it was back home again safe and sound for this intrepid if hapless bunch, sadder perhaps but none the wiser for the experience.

All in all, NOT one of my more productive evenings. Ah well, whatchagonna do. Even so, on the trek back to South Cackalacky—chatting and laughing and rehashing events merrily as we rolled past quiescent farms, cheerily lit homes, and closed businesses—we all agreed that, despite none (0, not any) of our best-laid plans for the night having actually come to fruition, the whole rigmarole of a busted-play of a clusterfuck of a shit-circus had still been a lot of fun. We have no plans to do it all again next year.

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Proud papa gloats a bit

Indulge me for a mo’, folks. I know this ain’t exactly the usual profane and objectionable fare you’ve come to expect here, and there’s really not much reason you should care, if any. But dang it, I’m busting here and just can’t help myself. Ladies and germs, kindly allow me to present to you the Bessemer City (NC) High School marching band!

Never so much as heard of Enka, NC before, but it appears to be located just outside the scenic, neohippie doofus-infested burg of Asheville. To avoid nettling those of you who might not be interested in reading further, I’ll tuck the rest of the story below the fold.

Continue reading “Proud papa gloats a bit”

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COINKYDINK!!!

Okay, bear with me a sec on this, if you will. In this past Thursday’s Walt Garrison obit, we have this:

Garrison’s pro football career started before the NFL merger. So both the Cowboys and Kansas City Chiefs drafted him in 1966. The Cowboys gave him a convertible and a horse trailer as his signing bonus.

Bold mine, because what should turn up in the comments earlier today but this:

The horse trailer was manufactured by my father’s company: Miley Trailer Company, Fort Worth.

Walt supported a golf tournament recently. When he arrived the folks directing the supporters (mostly ex-Cowboys) to their parking area the attendant commented that Walt didn’t appear to be dressed for golf… His reply was “hell no! I’m here for the PARTY!”…. He was a blast to be around that day.

Now see, there are all kinds of reasons why this makes me giggle like a little schoolgirl upon finding a pony under the tree on Christmas morn. First, a little more backstory.

Yesterday, I received a user-registration request for one SmileyFtW, which got me wondering right away; see, years ago a mechanic at the old H-D shop on S Tryon named Smiley rebuilt my 71 FRLH Shovelhead motor gratis after it had shit the bed not long after I bought it from said shop. HM! I wondered. Could this possibly be Smiley the mechanic, a good friend of mine since the late 70s? What are the odds?

Now bear in mind, several years back I had heard from another Harley-mechanic friend of mine that Smiley, poor fella, was in a bad way; he’d closed his own independent Harley shop and was in the hospital, laid low by some rare form of cancer or other, not doing too well at all. So no, it didn’t seem at all likely that this SmileyFtW personage was my Smiley.

Then the comment was left, and I looked a little closer at CF User Smiley’s nick, noticing that it didn’t say “FTW” (Fuck The World, in the time-honored biker parlance), but rather “FtW,” with a lower-case “T,” doubtless adding up to Ft Worth. 

S Miley, of Fort Worth, home of the Dallas Cowboys as well as the venerable Miley Trailer Company.

I ask again: what are the odds?

My ex used to ride me now and then thusly: “Why don’t you just shut that stupid website down? It doesn’t do you a damned bit of good, nobody cares, you don’t really make any money off it. It’s a waste of time. Just shut the damned thing down already!”

This latest crazy-wild slice of cosmic serendipity, from a line 22 years long of eerily similar incidents, that’s why. Though it may seem like much ado about very little to normal people, I don’t see it as a waste of time at ALL, and straight to hell with what money it does or does not make me. Many, many thanks to you, Smiley, for making my day like you did.

2

Mr Bill gets back

In my big honkin’ Radio post the other day, among a crap-ton of other things I said this:

Mr Bill—a dear friend of mine who plied his On-Air Personality trade in unforgettable fashion for many years at WRFX in Charlotte (99.7 FM), after which extended star-turn he made his escape to the Florida beaches—used to gripe to me about the new radio-station production process all the time; he positively HATES it, as do all the other DJs I know. There’s a very good reason for their disgruntlement, one I can readily understand and sympathize with completely.

…I just called my homeboy Bill, a solid CF fan of long standing, to let him know about this post, and will text him a link to it when he gets back to me (Bill keeps busy enough that the first call is usually just the opening gambit of the process; after a day or so’s wait, he’ll call back). Let’s see if he shows up here to enlighten us further on this whole mess, and perhaps correct any errors or clear up any misconceptions on my part, both of which are always a possibility. I do hope he will. Bill, your thoughts will be most welcome, buddy.

True to his usual form, Bill did indeed hit me back right away, whereupon we got ourselves into another of our talk-a-thons, albeit this one not quite as hours-long extended as they usually tend to be. Nutshelling his remarks on the BHRP, and I quote: “You completely nailed it, buddy!” Said that he didn’t find my having a good grasp on the issue at all surprising, since I had in effect spent quite a few years working in radio as well, if in a left-handed kind of way.

Made me feel really good to know he thought I’d gotten it right, I must say; when it comes to radio, Bill has definitely been there and done that, and knows whereof he speaks. In fact, he reminded me of something it didn’t occur to me to bring up in the post: He got in on the ground floor of the radio-automation wave, which was already on its way to becoming A Thing in the lattermost days of his WRFX tenure.

We covered some other needful ground, during the course of which he promised he’d try to somehow wangle a little time to comment further on the post, which naturally I swore I’d hold him to. In fact, should he be able to get around to it I’m thinking that, rather than let his remarks languish in the comments section, I really need to give him the old main-page treatment with a freestanding guest-post.

There was also a good bit of bopping me over the head regarding a resumption of work putting a CF podcast together, which…well, I mean, y’know, damn.

Oh, and he also regaled me with some extremely intriguing tales of his days working a part-time DJ gig at ATL’s venerable and beloved Cheetah club when he was residing in The City Too Busy To Hate (“South of the North, yet North of the South”). Which was another thing I hadn’t known about ol’ Bill, the lucky bastige. “Yeah, you remember the Cheetah, right? On Spring Street? You been there before, right?” I had to confess that, when I lived there, it’s just barely possible I may have hit the Cheetah once or twice my own self. Not as a DJ, of course, nor in any other official capacity.

A-HENH!

More on these matters as and when they develop, folks.

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Strange doin’s

Looking like the Friday Eyrie post is gonna be a little late, I fear. I was texting with a good friend of mine just now, and we got to talking about how bad girls are the only kind worth having, so I suggested that he and his wife Holli—DEFINITELY a bad girl, one of the best I know—ought to read my old Tough Chicks post, linked in the Greatest Hits section above. I clicked over to it myself, just to make sure it was still there and that the code wasn’t corrupted all to hell and gone, when what to my wondering eyes did appear but an unexpected mystery-glitch: the main text is in red all of a sudden, for no good reason I can see.

Went through all the other Menu Bar links and sure enough, every damned one of them is the same. So I’m trying to suss out what the devil might have brought on this sudden red-shift; I know for a fact it wasn’t that way a week or so ago when I made another addition to the Mike’s Iron Laws page, but damned if even that one ain’t all in red now too. Weird, weird, weird. So instead of completing the Eyrie post, I’m gonna spend the next cpl-three hours trying to chase down just what exactly might be going on with that, and correcting it.

Apologies for the Eyrie delay, but this is exactly the sort of thing that can keep me awake all night, lying there staring at the ceiling trying to figure it out. If you happen to click one of those Menu Bar page links and it looks different to you, be sure to let me in the comments, ‘kay? Back in a bit…

Update! PHEW! Fixed it, although I’m not quite sure how I did it, what the problem was, or why it popped up out of the blue like this. After Viewing Source in my preferred browser and closely inspecting the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink mess the WP-functions script makes of the “head” HTML for an “a href” tag inadvertently left open or something—my prime initial suspect, since I have active-link text set up in the stylesheet to display in red—I dumped a few lines of superfluous-looking code from the “Give till it hurts” area, inside the “body” tag of the Single Page template, and hey, presto! All is back to normal and copacetic, near as I can make out. Probably tomorrow for the Eyrie, or perhaps early-early in the mawnin’.

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Publick Notice

I’ve had a few queries about my snail-mail address for the sending of Fall Begathon contributions, from folks who don’t have any electronic means of doing such, or just don’t feel comfortable about using ‘em. No, I have no intention of posting my home address on the blog, for reasons which should be obvious. But if that applies to you, contact me via the thinly-disguised email addy under the “Correspondence” header over in the right sidebar and we’ll get it all worked out in suitable fashion.

Also, the response so far to the Little Richard poll has been lopsidedly in favor of me doing the post, so I’ll get cracking on putting that together soon as I’m able. Gonna be a pretty arduous task, honestly; there’s a lot to tell, and I can only hope I remember all of it. Sadly, after doing a bit of searching, my 2017 obit for the late, great Pat DiNizio seems to have vanished from internet history with nary a trace, thanks to the über-destructive Rooskie hack of the site around that time. Too many years of writing went up in smoke from that maleficent intrusion, which just annoys the living shit out of me.

Meeting Pat a week or two after the Little Richard shows—and utterly humiliating myself by not realizing who it was I was talking to and pretty much rudely blowing the man off, then having to crawl over and beseech forgiveness for my bare-knuckled arrogance and stupidity once I’d realized what I’d thoughtlessly done—was one of those unlooked-for offshoots I mentioned the other night, one of surprisingly many. Ah well, whatcha gonna do.

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THEMES, forsooth!

After further problems cropped up last night with the Techozoic theme I’ve spent way too much time trying to make work, I finally gave the whole mess up as a lost cause and implemented the trusty Coop-O-Ween theme a bit earlier than I usually would. That ain’t necessarily a bad thing, I don’t think, and I hope y’all CF Lifers will agree. After that: the highly-anticipated return of dear old Scrooge Picard, a holiday favorite.

With that, guess what’s playing even now on the classical-music radio station? Just this: the theme song “Walking In The Air” from the Brit rip-off of Frosty the Snowman, The Snowman. Coinkydink? I think NOT!

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More theme hijinks

Barry has informed me that we now have some commenting issues with the previous theme, instigating an early changeover to the old Coop-O-Ween one, which now seems to have issues with displaying the sidebar widgets. Working on that now, expect hilarity to ensue. Testing, testing, one, two, three…

Continue reading “More theme hijinks”

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