Hey all! How've you been? Whatcha been up to? I've been playing Freecell. My streak is currently at 168 wins. Fantastic.

I have also been buying toys and DVDs, as usual. Lately I've been on a Transformers kick in terms of toys -- in the past week, I have added four new ones to my collection (bringing my TF count to a grand total of six, or eight if one includes Bootleg Prime and a Go-Bot I have had since I was four years old). I think I will probably stop with them whenever this Megatron is released in a month or so, though. I also picked up a few TMNT figures at Wal-Mart this weekend -- two because they were reduced to $2 each, one because it came with a TMNT PC game. The game is kinda crappy.

I picked up way too many DVDs yesterday -- The Goonies, Team America: World Police, The Last Samurai, Secretary, Meet Joe Black, and Lost in Translation. They were only $5 each, but that's still more than I like to spend during a given outing. Seriously, I am not buying any more DVDs until I have at least put a significant dent in my current queue. Knock on wood.

So, now I will briefly review the movies I have watched thus far this year in an average of five sentences or less. (more...)

...when this streak finally ends.

BUT IT HASN'T HAPPENED YET MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

In other news, I still haven't figured out what was wrong with the server that made the blog go down and the comment notifications stop working (gotta say that 1and1's support concerning those matters has been decidedly unhelpful -- that is, nonexistent). I did, however (after nearly going nuts and implementing many, many failed attempts), discover a workaround for the latter problem in the form of the WordPress SWIFT SMTP Plugin. Barring some kinks that I haven't yet encountered (which wouldn't surprise me), I should once again receive e-mail alerts to the blog when they are posted. Not that that affects a whole lot on the readers' end, but it may enable me to respond to comments that require responses more swiftly!

I hope all is well with you!

I wanted to preserve my glorious winning streak with a graphic:

Fantastic.

Hey there. If you tried to visit yesterday, you probably got a database error. I still haven't figured out what is up with that. I think what was going on is that the database server was being moved, but it seems to be back now and the site still wasn't working. It's up now, mind you -- because you are reading it now -- but that is because I created a new database and uploaded the old content to it using my most recent backup (which, to the best of my knowledge, contains all of my recent posts, though a few comments may be missing). I e-mailed my host admin about the problem and was hoping to wait for a response, but my site not loading really, really bothered me so I had to try this. Hopefully they'll at least let me know what was wrong with the other server.

You'll also note (or not, since the change shouldn't really be noticeable on your end) that I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 shortly before the unexplained period of downtime. I don't think that has anything to do with the problem -- the site was working fine before I went to sleep late Saturday morning, the Scary-Crayon blog doesn't seem to be experiencing any analogous difficulties, and it's clear to me that they did something to the database server because earlier it was registering as having 0 MB in it despite clearly containing data -- but I suppose it's possible that the new WordPress install is somehow corrupting the database. Time will tell on that front, but in the meantime I'll be backing up my content much more frequently than normal (which admittedly wasn't all that frequent; maybe once every couple of months or so).

Also -- and again it's possible that it's something that got changed in WP, but I'm largely convinced that it's related to a server change because it began inexplicably on January 24 (before I upgraded WP on the 27th) -- I am no longer receiving notification when users post comments. I checked the mail logs and found this error: smtp server didn't accept RCPT To: command, replied "550 mail from 74.208.16.2 rejected: administrative prohibition". I'm not entirely sure what that means (aside from the obvious) or if I can do anything about it to fix the problem, but I'm doing some research and have posted on the WP support forums to see if I can't get around the difficulty. Natch, any info you have will be greatly appreciated.

Here's hoping Wesoteric doesn't die on us again! 😐