A while back, I purchased an issue of Make magazine. What’s odd is that it is something by O’Reilly without an animal on the cover. However, what it lacks in cover animals, it makes up with general geekiness. Anyway, when I purchased a subscription online, I selected to receive the next issue rather than the current issue since I already owned it. However, the current issue proceeded to arrive on my doorstep. Being busy with more important things, I decided to simply give away the extra issue, which ended up in the hands of Charlie. Figuring I was just going live with not getting an issue of my subscription, I suddenly got the following email today.

Thank you for subscribing to MAKE. In reviewing our files we realized that we began your subscription with the current issue (VOL 3). You requested that we start it with VOL 4 (which mails in October 2005).

To make up for our error we have added an additional issue to the end of your current subscription. As far as the VOL 3 that you received, please keep it with our compliments.

Thank you again for your support. We appreciate your readership.

It isn’t often that one of these things works out without some sort of long phone conversation or email exchange.

We are having a cube move at work at EOD tomorrow, so I’ve been organizing my cube a little bit more each day. I realized today that most of my “organizing” is throwing stuff in the trash or recycling bucket. The last box of comic book stuff that I have at work is going home and staying home, which will leave me with maybe one box worth of stuff and my Shuttle PC. I then started pondering whether the fact that I seem to have less and less in my cube means that I am on my way out of the company or that I’ve just gotten tired of boxing up my stuff when I move cubes every few months. Are the two mutually exclusive?

In a previous post, I talked about how the move to WordPress simply left the image links pointing to photos1.blogger.com. When I was clicking on images in WordPress on zibbler.com, I was getting some random errors talking about a failure to retrieve the image from the cache that were coming from the blogger image server. After a little bit of trial and error, I realized that if I viewed the image first using zibblog.blogspot.com, I could view it by clicking on it from zibblog.com. My only explanation for this is that the webserver for blogspot is reading for img tags as it serves up the page and makes those images ready to be served up. Images that are on blogspot pages that haven’t been looked at for awhile, therefore, wouldn’t be in the cache. It would be interesting to know how they’ve structured their serves to know exactly what this is optimizing around, but it isn’t hard to guess a few schemes where this makes a lot of sense. This will make writing something to pull down the images a little more tedious, but it still probably not too bad. However, for the moment, the zibblog will remain here.

On an only somewhat related note, I’ve been playing around with the “DreamHost Control Panel”, and I’ve got www.coveringdistance.com/zibblog pointing at the new zibblog. In all seriousness, despite the fact that I put it in double quotes and italics, the DreamHost admin features have been really nice. They put a nice gui around a lot of good features while still allowing you to do whatever you want. I used their automated install for WordPress and it worked really well. I’d highly recommend it for anyone wanting to set up a permanent domain without too much trouble and still have a good level of control.

In my search for the domain name that screams “Zibbler!!!!”, I’ve settled on CoveringDistance.com. It works as a running reference and it embodies some of my opinions on life and the zen of running. It will be the final home of the zibblog and all things zibbler. I’ve got some ideas for non-blog content that I’ve been wanting to put up for awhile, so we’ll see how it goes. Thanks to all of the suggestions from friends of mine that included

• s.az
• shawnoftheneb.com
• ilikepastries.com
• zellerziggurat.com (based on a random joke about my opening up Zeller’s Ziggurat Bar & Casino some day in Korea)

In between waiting for my development server to redeploy and restart (anyone that has worked with me knows how long that can take), I’ve been playing around with the migration from Blogger to WordPress. I found a nice tutorial with some updates to the standard import. It works by having you modify your blog entry template and set up your blog to deploy to your wordpress installation. It had problems about halfway through the deploy transferring with sftp, so I switched it to normal ftp and it went through fine. There’s a few little things I’m probably going to change before the final move, but you can look at the results at zibblog.com. The biggest problem is that blogger has some nice support for uploading images. However, all my images are now on their server and I need to figure out some way to slurp them down and rewrite the links. I may just need to write some php or something since that is what the wordpress importer is written in.