Category: Housekeeping

Comments gone wild!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Possessed by devils, are we?

A quick housekeeping note:

Some of you are seeing your comments on posts multiplying like parasites in a Taco Hell salad. I’m looking into it and will be tugging on the coat of some “Happiness Engineer” here directly.

I asked Herself to post a comment and she did so without issue, using an M1 Mac Mini rocking Big Sur (yeah, I know, OTBJ) and some equally aged edition of Safari. We didn’t get any duplicates, triplicates, or quadruplicates of the comment, nor was she presented with a “continue reading” button after posting, which Longtime Reader of the Blog Steve O’ suggests may be the trigger for comment duplication.

She was not posting as a subscriber to the blog, just using her email and a screenname.

That’s all the intel I have for the moment.

In the meantime, while we await Wisdom, maybe commenters should ignore any “continue reading” buttons after posting and hit their browser’s “back” button instead.

And please be patient while waiting for a comment to appear. I’ve noticed some sluggishness from WordPress lately and attributed it to our ridiculous Internet connection, for which we pay far too much in a town with a national lab, a university, and all manner of other outfits that require something with more git-up-and-go than dialup AOL.

Could be that all these bells and whistles WP has been adding lately has caused something to go awry.

• Addendum: Still waiting on MeatBased® support here. A.I. speculates that “theme-level behavior” may be our problem. This would not surprise me, as this is an old theme, to which I switched after the even older theme started showing some behaviors that would get it punched in some of the bars I used to frequent.

I may have to go to manual approval of comments for a while, so if anything you have to say seems to be a tad slow on the rebop, why, you can blame Your Humble Narrator.

Your call is important to us

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Don’t touch that dial.

The Proprietor is replacing a keyboard rendered inert by forehead dents, likewise an external display unimproved by its short flight across the office, and sucking lozenges to ease a throat scratchy from screaming.

And all this is despite having enjoyed a news fast since putting the computer and Himself to sleep Sunday night, the beginning of a state of willful ignorance that persists, yea, even unto this gloriously subfreezing morning in The Year of Our Lard 2025.

Please continue to hold.

Sour note

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
“We should get $2 mil’ for this gig. One for the snatch, the other for this cool ransom note.”

I hope none of yis paid this tab.*

March has been heavy on various home “improvement” projects, visitations, landscape maintenance, a decline in the healthful and refreshing outdoor exercise, an abnormally spastic conga line of nightmares in the headlines, and an accelerating oscillation between exasperation and ennui that eventually led me to declare — and mind you, I’m quoting from memory, which is an unreliable source in the best of times, but it seems to me that these were more or less my words — “Fuck this shit.”

When even I find my musings unamusing, concerning perhaps, possibly even actionable, and yet the only place to run is off at the mouth, well … it’s time to batten the gob. Tick a lock. Zip it. Nobody wants to hear that shit, not even me, not even for free. “Tell it to Anne Frank,” as Jim Harrison’s titular character in “Warlock” was said to quip to those who whined about life’s difficulties.

So, yeah. An extended period of the shutting the fuck up seemed prudent. You’re welcome. We now return you to our usually scheduled blog, which is already in progress.

* Sorry, no refunds. Yrs., etc., The Kidnappers.

Gray Christmas?

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
If it’s rolling downhill, why, this must be the valley.

The weather wizards have been spot on lately. When they say “a quarter inch of rain,” they do not lie.

In fact, if anything they seem to be hedging their bets a bit, because our widget reports we got something like .39 inch overnight. And it’s still raining.

I will never be smart. But at least I was not stupid yesterday when I decided to go for my first bike ride in 10 days instead of settling for another plodding hike or p’raps daring to risk a short jog.

As I said, the wizards have been batting a thou’ lately, and when yesterday started looking like my only option to ride without mudguards and rain kit for the foreseeable future, I got right after it.

Before the Snotlocker Surprise paid me a visit I’d been planning to check out some upgrades I and the Two Wheel Drive boyos had made to my old Soma Double Cross. After replacing its chain, chainrings, and cassette while trying (and failing) to accurately diagnose and resolve an annoying skipping issue that occurred under load, I finally discovered the actual cause, which was that its ancient Dura-Ace freehub had gone to its ancestors.

Resurrecting the freehub was beyond my limited skillset, and even the pros at TWD shook their heads in disbelief, as though I’d dragged in a pennyfarthing and asked whether they stocked a 53-inch tubeless-ready carbon disc wheel.

While it was possible that some eBay velo-troll might be squatting on a stash of eight-speed D-A hubs, they mused, it might be simpler (and quicker) to rebuild Captain Retro’s wheel with something, uh, newer? Given the choice between cheap and handsome I went with the latter, a stylish Velo-Orange, which goes nicely with the other shiny bits.

What the hell, it’s my second-oldest wheelset, an Excel Sports Cirrus with Mavic Open Pro rims and DT spokes, and it’s been a faithful companion. So we gave it a new heart and it ticked along nicely for a gentle hour in yesterday’s dwindling sunshine.

Speaking of shiny new bits, you may notice that I pulled the ol’ presto-change-o on the blog this morning. I took down the custom header, a scenic photo with the “Mad Dog Media” moniker, and replaced it with a smaller logo and a text header, which makes it possible for me to add a small additional overlay of snark without having to deploy any fancy-schmancy photo-editing software.

Sunset for Kubrick

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

The sun sets on our old WordPress theme.

Thanks to everyone who tooled around the dimly lit, undermanned, and poorly maintained corners of the Innertubes to inspect and comment upon the options for a virtual urban-renewal project here at the DogS(h)ite.

I think I’ve touched all the bases, repackaged the necessary bells and whistles, and preserved all data for the Permanent Record. And thus, sometime today or tomorrow, I will probably tell the WordPress Blog-O-Mat 9000™ to knock down this old hovel and erect in its place a Shining City on a Hill.

Or maybe it’ll look more like rattle-canning a fresh coat of camo’ on the old single-wide, hoisting a new Anarchy flag, and raking up 15 years’ worth of dessicated dog turds. I tell the neighbors they’re Art, but they don’t believe me, about that or anything else.

If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a great deal of difference. I anticipate a round or two or three of Whac-a-Mole, but the plan remains to hawk the same old hooey, just out of a new window, minus the bullet holes and duct tape.

If it all goes horribly wrong, well … let’s not think about that, shall we? You’ll probably be able to hear from me without need for a computer, browser, or Innertubes. (“Gaw dam cog sug muh fug sum bidge. …”)

But if you can’t hear the caterwauling, leave a message at the New Wheeled Order sandbox or email me at maddogmedia (at) gmail (dot) com.