Migration

Most of the people I know have LiveJournal accounts but since 2004 I have had my stuff on Blogger. With all the action happening at one place, I was being left out on what was increasingly the frontier of Outer Blogistan. Thus began my search for a way to migrate from Blogger to LiveJournal. Now, I simply could have created an account and started blogging but that would leave four years of posts somewhere else. I would need to find a way to copy all of my posts from the one to the other.

For that, I found Blog2Blog, a terrific little application that will take all of the postings from one and copying it into the other. The problem was, for whatever reason it didn't work for me. It would get 500 postings into my 600 posting archive and fail with an error; "Unable to Fetch All Entries." I installed it on another machine and had the exact same error in the exact same place which meant that there was something on one of my postings that was conflicting with the software.

I contacted the author and he was able to very quickly find a bug. Two weeks later he set me up with a new version of the software and it worked. Mostly.

The first time I tried uploading the postings to LiveJournal, it stopped mid-way through with an error. I thought it was more a conflict with something else my pc was doing at the time so I ran it again and it completed without issue.

Except that I now had about a year of double-posting. I've had to sort through and delete a bunch of entries. I also need to go through and do some other edits (such as tags, which didn't migrate) and figure out how to change some layout things but, essentially, I am now on LiveJournal.

Bicycle Love

She really, REALLY loves her bicycle. NSFW and care of Urban Velo.

http://urbanvelo.org/hmm/

Internal

Last night we went out to Rock Bottom at the Waterfront in Homestead. I had wings and the pepperoni and sausage pizza. For three hours or so this morning there was an unpleasant rumbling of gases in my lower intestines. And to make matters worse, I thought of an "Alien Chestbuster" analogy that, while apt, was not quite what I wanted to be thinking about all morning. Especially since the discomfort was in my bowels and not my chest.

And all that implies. . .

Webcomic quote of the day

I don't follow Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures very closely but I really liked this quote noted after the comic:

The best thing about enemies is you are usually not the only one they have.

Wrong Turn Down Google StreetView

Found on Google Earth Blog.

Monster insects!

Brought to my attention by Zooillogic over at ScienceBlogs.

The 5 Most Horrifying Bugs in the World

Building up a tolerance

Yesterday seemed like a slow day at the Helpdesk but when I looked at the numbers I saw that I took 76 calls. Not slow at all. In fact, looking over the past couple of months, my average call volume is 73 for a day.

And what is a worse commentary on the skewing of my perceptions was a look back at one of my earliest blog posts from 2004:

As of noon I have taken 42 calls, which is about the number I get on a normal day. 3.5 hours to go.

In four years, the call volume that I consider "normal" has nearly doubled.

Recovery

It's been eight weeks since I fell and broke my hand. It has healed significantly but I haven't been riding my bike in all that time so I don't know how much doing so might aggravate things. I can still feel that my hand is damaged and will probably wait until the temperature rises into the 30s before I pull out the bike and start riding again. when I do, I'll have to change the gear cassette again. Just before my fall I had changed the chain at 1000 miles or so. Doing this is supposed to limit wear on the gears but it didn't work this time. The new chain slips in the highest, most used gear.

In the past, I've gotten 2000 miles out of the gear but I changed from a freewheel to a cassette on the bike shop's advice to extend the component's life. In fact, it's life has been halved and my efforts seem to have been wasted.

Why is it that my old Schwinn Sierra ran for years when I only changed the chain once a year and almost never changed the freewheel and my newer Giant Cypress needs the chain and now the cassette change twice a year? My only guess is that the metal they make components out of now is crap.

Been there. Done that.

I'm not usually a meme follower but this one came up and I thought I'd give it a try.

Ten+ things that I've done that you probably haven't done.

I earned my Eagle Award in the Boy Scouts by completing 5 merit badges in the 2 days before my 18th birthday.

I become a parent at age 19 and went on to complete college.

I fell out of a truck onto a highway at speed and suffered only a cracked skull.

I have installed and regularly used an operating system other than Windows. (Ubuntu Linux)

I willingly identify myself with "America's most hated and distrusted minority"; atheism.

I have napped flint and become marginally proficient with an atlatl.

I participated in a job interview that was essentially a spontaneous
recreation of the interview scene in the beginning of "Blade Runner."

I have ridden my bicycle from Pittsburgh to Washington DC. . . in two and a half days.

I was recruited my the Mayor's Office to perform Christmas carols in Pittsburgh subway stations. . . in Klingon.

I think that's only nine, but that's what you get.