KaiSchaller.com

It looks like I just missed the rain. The above image is a picture I took from the front porch just before I went on my semi-regular walk around the neighborhood. The days here have been lovely lately.

My best friend is getting married on Saturday. I can’t believe we’re all grown up… but I’ll continue to enjoy the fact that we’re all still young adults!

With the promise of a new apartment looming on the horizon, Jill and I have been whipped into a furniture-buying frenzy. Neither of us have much actual furniture, so we’re essentially furnishing most of the new apartment from scratch. Some things we have acquired thus far:

• Reclining black leather sofa
• Dining room table with stools
• Glass and black metal TV stand

We’re going to make a trip up to at least one of the Illinois IKEAs this weekend, and maybe both depending on if all of our items are in stock at the one in Schaumburg. Things that we will likely purchase at IKEA:

• Bed frame
• Headboard with hidden storage shelves
• Coffee table
• Dresser

Luckily Jill’s parents offered to pick up the IKEA tab, which will be incredibly helpful when you factor in all the other costs of moving. A big thank you to them, and hopefully I’ll be able to post some pictures when the time comes!

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, but I’ve been a bit busy. The story: my Internet connection was recently upgraded to 10mbps/1mbps (down/up). Without further adieu, some screenshots:

I’m officially writing my first post of WordPress 2.5. Happy Cog definitely helped tighten the admin interface, and gave it that “clean” look. I haven’t noticed much difference in functionality, but then again, I don’t usually go past the usual simple write-and-post process.

The reason for writing this post is that I wanted to share with you something incredible that happened over the weekend. Don’t get too excited; it’s not that great, but made my jaw drop nonetheless.

I went home to St. Joseph to give my mom her birthday present — a new MacBook. She’s been putting up with a clumsy Gateway laptop for a while now, and the problems were starting to mount. After continually singing the praises of OS X, my dad and I both chipped in to buy her a Mac to alleviate these problems.

One recurring theme was that her printer would just stop working for her with the Gateway. Lo and behold, we plug it into the MacBook and it’s ready to go in 3 seconds flat; printed a test page and it worked great.

Since she still needed to use the Gateway for her office, it was time to figure out what was going wrong. After some basic troubleshooting I uninstalled the printer software and drivers in order to start from scratch. We plugged the printer in to the USB port and the New Hardware Wizard appeared, as expected. Also expected was the “No drivers were found” message that appeared on the next screen as well as the “Would you like to search online for drivers?” prompt.

Now get ready…

For the first time in my many, many years of using Windows XP, the internet search for drivers actually worked. Printed a test page and all was well.

Mind blown. The end.

You’ll notice that all of the pictures that were previously in various posts are now missing. This is because of an FTP anomaly when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. For some reason Transmit (an FTP program for OS X) defaults to “Overwrite” instead of “Merge” when uploading files and directories that already exist on the server. As a result, it first deletes your existing data, then replaces it with the new files.

Fail.

Don’t panic, the site is simply in a state of limbo. I will have it restored soon.

Truman’s home page features the following photo:

I can only assume that lamp cost $75,000 dollars.

My first day of work at Paradigm New Media Group (hereafter referred to as PNMG) is behind me, and I’m very happy to say that it’s everything I wanted it to be. An open, creative, fun work environment with friendly, entertaining and like-minded people makes a world of difference.

Also, I have a new theory: you can tell a lot about a company by how they name their servers. Examples:

• Truman State University names their servers after elements and precious metals (hydrogen, silver, etc.)
• My previous, cubicle-rich employer picked seemingly arbitrary letter and number combinations (QXL87, etc.)
• PNMG uses comic book characters.

You tell me who you’d rather work for.

There are some odd things going on with my WordPress installation. The two main issues I’ve noticed are

1. I am unable to upgrade to the latest release, even when I manually overwrite every file via FTP and
2. My theme seems to randomly reset itself to the default

I’m a little spooked. Are there such things as web-poltergeists?

Update (01/19/08): Turns out I was making a rather silly mistake. I was copying all of the new WordPress files into my root directory instead of the appropriate /blog directory. Oops! That might explain a few things. We’ll see if the crazy behavior now subsides.

A quick update:

I’ve accepted a web developer position with a company in St. Louis and will start working there in the new year. This also means I need to brush up on my ASP, since they’re running IIS and the like.

Finals week is upon us and I find myself with little desire to labor through it. But alas, I must. Thank goodness it’s over soon.