Insert some joke about “Pirate Cat” here.

I’ve decided to do what all the cool kids are doing and bake my blog (with butter octopress ).

Like Matt Gemmell - I didn’t need all the features that wordpress provided, and while I’m not sure that it was all that opaque–the fewer moving parts I have to maintain, the better.

Moving was relatively straightforward. I had to modify exitwp to use html2text_file instead of html2text to stop html2text from wrapping–and breaking–strings over 80 characters (thanks to this comment from James Ward). I also needed to convert double newlines to double br’s (all…the…way) in order for the paragraphs to be there–I had always let wordpress convert double newlines to paragraphs (pointer also thanks to James Ward). And I had to run it all on Ubuntu, because OS X wasn’t all that happy about things. But once that was all done, it was a piece of cake to get set up.

I apache alias’d my old wp-content uploads, and rewrite the /feed urls to /atom.xml - but other than that, it seems to be a drop-in replacement.

I’m using comments through disqus - but the comment to post ratio is pretty low, so I don’t know that I’ll keep them - but all the old comments have been imported there for now.

So there might be some things that don’t look right, or aren’t linked right. I’ll fix them eventually. So if you see something, say something.

[Update] Comments. meh. Send me a tweet, or google plus, or email, I think that will work out best

More from Eastern NC…

Today was one of those days where I do and say things that are the antithesis of good career advice.

So that means, of course I’m going to give some appropriate career advice.

DO. If your dog poops on the floor, clean it up. This is of course, a given. Everyone agrees with this, if you cause a problem, fix it. If you break something, fix it. If you can’t fix it, find someone who can. There’s not universal practice of this, but there’s pretty much universal agreement that it should be done.

DO. If there is dog poop on the floor, you cannot ignore it. In fact, clean it up. This is where things get hard. Who wants to clean up other people’s dog poop? Of course you can say “it’s not my job”, “it’s somebody else’s problem”, “I have my own poop to clean up”, “I don’t want to get stuck cleaning up poop all the time”. All true, and we’ve all said that. In the best of organizations, you might get recognized for cleaning up poop when you didn’t have to. In most organizations you’ll just be asked to muck out the barn. But here’s the thing. The more poop you clean, the more you learn about poop. The more experience you have, the better you are equipped to solve the next problem. I can’t tell you how much my career has benefitted from seeing something that wasn’t right and trying to fix it. Yes, I’ve had to clean up a lot of poop. But I’ve learned a lot in the process.

DO. Recognize when your dog is going to poop on the floor and handle it before it happens. This takes experience. See point #2. In good organizations, people will recognize that you can do this. In normal organizations, no one will care, but you’ll have to clean less poop.

DO. Recognize when other’s dogs are going to poop on the floor and handle it before it happens. This takes even more experience. See point #2. Sometimes, particularly in mentorship situations and with small out of the way rooms, you can let the other dog poop, but you should be there to keep the dog from going into a main room, and you should help clean it up. In great organizations you’ll be recognized as a mentor. In normal organizations, you might gain an appreciative colleague that will help you out when you’re dog sitting. Either way, there’s less poop to clean up, or you’ll learn more about poop.

There’s a debatable caveat here though. If you don’t have a trust relationship with the owner of the dog - you will not be liked. Especially if they think their dog only poops butterflies - you will not be liked. It’s even possible you’ll be blamed for causing the dog to poop. I don’t have any good answers for this. Sometimes you have to warn about things anyway. Sometimes maybe it’s just better to let it happen and hope that they don’t ignore the poop on the floor. See #2

DO NOT. Under no circumstance, should you proclaim, loudly or otherwise that THERE IS POOP ON THE FLOOR. And definitely do not say one word about HAVING TO BE THE ONE TO CLEAN IT UP. There’s great temptation in this. Particularly if you warned it was going to happen. I have failed at this far too many times. It’s getting better as I get older, but you’d think I’d learn one day. No one wants to hear about the poop and what you are doing with it.

The summary:

Do shit. Know your shit. Don’t talk shit.

That’s my blinding glimpse of the obvious advice for the day

My colleagues in Extension computing throughout the nation started an annual tradition sometime back of celebrating what are usually the best of the worst (or the funniest) stories throughout the year that happen to them or their colleagues (or their clients) in computing.

Being computing professionals, they appropriately call them the “404 awards”. Usually because in the moment, someone’s intelligence and/or sanity has gone missing. I don’t usually feel like mine are funny enough to tell, but I certainly have my share of 404 (and 500) stories.

But every so often, there’s a 200 OK.

I have a friend that I’ve known for over 20 years that is a captain and chaplain in the U.S. Army. We haven’t talked much in a long time, and earlier this year he deployed back to Afghanistan.

The other day he dropped me a note. He and his wife were scheduled to have a Skype call this weekend - and something was broken with Skype on her Windows 7 computer. I don’t do much desktop support, and it’s been years since I supported anything on any version of windows - and I’ve never met or talked with his wife. But in 20 years, I don’t think my friend has ever asked me to do anything like that.

I fired up Windows 7, downloaded Skype, then downloaded it again when I realized Microsoft and Skype have versions all over the place, got a few details, and headed to the forums. She had already been through a whole bunch of things that she had found searching for a solution, and had done a lot of homework on it already, but it still wasn’t working

There wasn’t anything definitive that I found, but I had some gut feelings about it. So another email or two with some details and some ideas on just walking back to square zero with one of Skype’s updates to something that was still in beta (or the “garage” they call it). I wasn’t sure what was going to fix it - but I had some steps and a plan and I was already readying an old Mac laptop as a fallback.

And in the evening, I got an email back - the opening line was “HALLELUJAH!!!”

I didn’t really do much. Certainly there have been other computing problems this week that have been more complex, that I worked harder and longer at finding a solution to. But they didn’t feel as good as this, and it’s been a long time since I had that “this is what I was meant to do” feeling.

I’m sure next week I’ll rm -rf a server again. Or blow the release of an app. Or jump to some conclusion about what isn’t working and break what is.

But today wasn’t one of those days.

Today was 200 OK.