Will Work for Swords

I woke up to a frantic-ish e-mail that the web site is broken. Nobody on our end had touched anything in weeks, so this already chapped my hide, without even knowing what the problem was, yet.

After investigating, I found that it's due to a database connection error. The login is incorrect, and the error that's being thrown is:

Could not connect: Access denied for user 'cp_dbs'@'agent02.com' (using password: YES)

The "agent02.com" isn't supposed to be there, I figure, but I can't find anything in the .htaccess or the config files that would be adding it to the login. I've blown the better part of my morning trying to work this out, and now all I can do is pray that the support staff at the webhost has some idea of what happened to make this suddenly break.

This is a potent reminder of why I never, never want to be a sysadmin.

EDIT: Yes, it's fixed now. Irritating thing is, the webhost fixed it using the very first solution I tried. D: What the crap? Sometimes, I hate you, Internet.

Yes, in spite of everyone and their mother's attempt to derail me with Things I Have To Do yesterday, I successfully found time to make friends with the ol' XBox again. I'm finally out of freakin' Lothering! Yes, I'm the slowest gamer on the planet. Morrigan disapproves. But, I intend to have more free evenings at my disposal in the near future, so I *will* get through this freakin' game. I have others I need to play!

Also, I don't think I've mentioned it here, but should you want to be friends on XBox Live, leave me your screen name, and I'll add you! (probably better that way, given my sporadic console gaming endeavors)

I also had a sort-of-date via Skype, earlier this evening. It was stunningly awkward for the first couple of minutes, just by virtue of the fact that it was on Skype, and you can thusly see each other, but not completely. My wild gesticulations went outside of the webcam's view more than once, and we had a couple instances of one of us pointing at something in the background, and then realizing that the other couldn't see what was being pointed at.

Other than that, however, I wound up having a great time, and I didn't want it to end, when it came time for me to log off and leave for the evening's activities. And just, wow. I had what was, more or less, an extended, face-to-face interaction with a person in another city. Realizing that blows my mind a little.

It's official: I live in the gorram future, people. And I think I may be spending a fair bit more time on Skype in the coming weeks.

I've been wanting a nice protective case for my futurephone for a while, but haven't fallen in love with any of them. I want something attractive (of course), but also distinct, so I can easily differentiate my phone from others. And, I also wanted a case that doesn't add a lot of bulk, which a lot of them seem to.

BUT! I have just learned that I can create my own GelaSkin, and this looks like just the sort of product I'd be looking for.

The million dollar question is: what photo should I use on the thing? I can't even begin to decide, so! Here's my Flickr feed. What do you think?

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In other news, I am totally slammed with work. I did manage to enjoy an evening out last night, but today is kicking my ass pretty hard, and for this entire week, everyone seems intent on lobbing last-minute changes and requests directly at my head.

I'm probably going to spend my post-wushu Friday evening doing wedding proofing, instead of anything even remotely relaxing, which, feh. Tomorrow is derby, more proofing, and karaoke. Sunday, at least, should be a relaxing bit of outdoorsy time, but jeeeez. I'd really like to not have all these things piled onto me all at once.

Well, onward and upward, I guess. Things are good, but sometimes it's easy to forget that, when I'm working my ass off like this.

Yes, I am now the proud owner of an iPod Shuffle. I randomly won it at an event drawing, and it took me *forever* to get the thing, but I finally received it yesterday.

I wasn't really aware of the current design for the Shuffle, so I'm freakin' amazed by how tiny and nondescript this thing is. If I'd seen one lying on the sidewalk before getting this one, I would never have thought to pick it up. Well, okay, maybe I'd have picked it up if it was one of the funky-colored ones. But the one they sent me is gray, and I'd easily miss that.

What's even more nuts is that this little device that's smaller than my pinky holds 2GB of music. Now I have to make playlists... if y'all have any ideas of things I should listen to, suggestions are always appreciated!

In other news, a grilled cheese sandwich with bacon and apple butter is magically delicious. I'm in a massive soup-and-sandwich mood lately, and the furnace at home being busted is only contributing to that, I'm sure. I really need to start eating well again, though. Tomorrow, yes. Definitely.

I think this is the first time I've actually wished I lived near LA, because I WOULD SO GO TO THIS: Open Casting Call Auditions for New Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Motion Picture. Just 30 seconds of nanquan, and I'd terrify them into picking me, y'all. Bwahaha!

But seriously, I was a Ninja Turtles NUT when I was a kid; I think I'd pee myself at the opportunity to do martial arts for a TMNT movie. And I don't even like these "updated" versions of old cartoons. I saw a bit of the rehashed animated show and kind of hated it, but hey, I could let that slide! Wushu + Ninja Turtles = WIN.

In other news, I think it's official: I'm actually using Twitter. Damnit. XD

I think I've made my peace with it, though. I can't really chat at work, so Twitter fills that void a little. And my friends who aren't so active on other social networks use Twitter regularly, so that's a big motivator. I don't receive updates on my phone, because honestly, having my phone go off every time someone tweets would drive. Me. INSANE. I like having the option of ignoring my phone when I need to decompress. AND, I still hate Twitter feeds that are shipped to people's blogs.

I think that I'll always prefer more substantive blog-type things to Twitter, though. I've been Livejournaling for 10 years now, and I really don't feel compelled to stop. There are people whom I'd love to see on here more, too, but I realize that barfing your mental musings, at length, onto Teh Internets isn't as easy or important for them as it is for me. :)

So, should I start a Twitter for the photography business? It seems to be The Thing these days. I'd have to maintain the thing, though, because Boy has yet to post anything on our photography blog, and is really not into social networking in general. So he'd probably not give a crap about keeping up a Twitter, either. ;p

OH YEAH, it looks like we're going to the Beerfest for a bit tomorrow, after I get done with wushu. And then a bowling birthday party for our go-to makeup artist friend. Sunday is gaming, and I'm hopefully bringing a fresh loaf of sprouted wheat bread to the session.

Sleep will happen somewhere in there, too. It REALLY needs to.

OMG Facebook apps. WHYYYYYY. I don't know how any of you guys get anything done, with all these friggin' Facebook apps. The only one I bother with is the Li'l Green Patch app, and that *already* takes more of my attention than I'm comfortable with. BOO-URNS.

I'm thinking about seeing a specialist about my Achilles tendon, since it's not getting better on its own. I'm getting pretty sick of doctors, though. I also really don't want to waste the time going in, just to have them tell me, "stay off of it," or another similar response equivalent to, "sorry, we can't do anything to help you. Kthxbye."

Okay, enough complaining! I'm tired of complaining about my stupid body. Moving on.

I'm not the only one who's expressed this, as of late, but it does bear repeating: I am, so far, decidedly "meh" about Dollhouse. I really, really want to like it, because it's a Joss show, and he's likely to take the show in a wonderful direction, if he's given the chance! Buuuut, eh. The first three episodes didn't exactly grab me. I hope it gets better.

My gaming group begins this weekend! It should be fun, and the whole group sounds really excited. I'm kind of mentally blocked on one of my characters, though, and I kind of have that feeling I used to get when I did design projects for school, and had to force creativity on someone else's timeline. Booooooo. That's nobody's fault, though; creativity hasn't been coming easily to me, as of late. Spontaneous creativity is still easy enough, but not the kind that requires planning and crazed amounts of forethought. :) Well, you can't be burning your engines at 100% capacity all the time, right?

Anyhoo, here is a picture. Ben set up the lighting while I was at wushu, and once I got there, we took turns shooting. I did the shooting and processing on this one. I like how the post-processing came out :)

( +1 pretty dress )

That's all!

Yet another reason why I love Teh Internets:

The opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics was a few days ago, and I didn't see it. I don't have a TV in my house at the moment, because we're moving. We only get maybe two very fuzzy channels up here, anyway, so even if the TV had been here, I couldn't have seen the opening ceremony. I also had a family reunion to shoot early the next day, and I was too tired to scare up access to a TV.

I heard, the next day, that there were 2008 people doing wushu in unison as part of the opening ceremonies! And I'd completely missed it! Obviously, that made me a sad panda. SAAAD PAN-DA.

So how cool is it that I just watched those 2008 people doing wushu, (LEGALLY!) thanks to the good ol' Internet?

Pretty darned awesome.

I'm sad today. No particular reason... well, perhaps there is a reason or two, but nothing sudden or overwhelming.

The UO wushu posse is coming up this weekend, so we'll be training for a bit tomorrow, and possibly hitting the coast on Sunday. We have a client meeting on Monday, so I'll probably take that day as a Productivity Day, which is fine with me, because I'm actually feeling the itch.

In other news, I'm working on a photography blog for our website, and I already have a plan for how to spruce up the homepage; I just need to commit it to pixels. It's kind of silly that I'm all motivated about a homepage redesign, because I've been hearing a lot of compliments lately about how much people like our website! That makes me a happy monkey. BUT, that doesn't mean that the site can't be better... and it's going to be raaaad.

Oh, and if you happen to be paying any attention to the LJ Advisory Board voting, I'd encourage y'all to vote for cambler! I know basically nothing about the other candidates, but I'd swapped messages with cambler on another networking site before ever finding him on LJ, and had a great impression of him from that. Since then, based on reading his LJ and using some of the other projects he's worked on, he strikes me as a smart, aware, and qualified guy who would take the position seriously, and make sure y'all are well-represented.

And, well, this isn't exactly a motivator for me, but if you like b00bs, he also happens to be a glamour photographer in his spare time. Hurhurhur.

Anyhoo, the grindstone currently is sending a "Missing You" greeting card to my nose, so I'd better get back to work.

Taking a page from brad:

My work at The Job involves using Microsoft Outlook. They run a Microsoft Exchange Server, and it handles e-mail, calendars, conference room reservations, the whole bit. So, I'm pretty much required to use Outlook, it seems.

Problem is, I like having my e-mails sorted by project, so I can keep track of everything, separate the general message from the project-specific, etc. I don't see a good way to do that in Outlook, though.

Anybody know how?