That being said, I don’t expect to make the transition right away because I want to do a bit of research about different blogging platforms. I may end up using WordPress, but I need to better explore proper caching because I’ve had some challenges with getting caching and Nginx to fully cooperate. I’ll do another post here with a link once I’ve started the other blog with the address and details.

Update: It looks like the caching plugin was causing the trouble. I have deleted it out of frustration, so I’ll just have to post really crappy content to avoid making my blog appear on Digg or a similar site. I also deactivated the Ajax Preview plugin because it was not working right. It would add the preview button, but clicking it did nothing. Now all my visitors will just have to be perfect and never make a single mistake in their comments. No problem…

I had to buy a wireless adapter, so that I could get online. I bought an overpriced Netgear USB adapter, thinking USB would be more likely to work without a hassle in Linux. Well, I saw that the system was aware of a device being connected in the syslog, but that’s about as far as I got. I had no way to get online. I suspected that ndiswrapper might solve the problem, but I couldn’t exactly download it.

I ended up installing Windows on my older hard drive (for once I was glad that XP doesn’t notice SATA drives because I knew that meant it wouldn’t screw up Linux). I have been thinking about getting a Windows partition set up again for a while because a lot of the jobs I have looked at require experience with various Windows-only programs.

Everything went as well as can be expected with Windows. The fun part was that the software from Netgear that is supposed to manage the wireless connections would not connect to anything. It did all sorts of buggy things but never even accidentally worked. The really fun part is that it interfered with the Windows program that manages wireless connections. If I disabled Netgear’s software, the Windows software would sometimes not see any networks, sometimes do that pointless “limited connectivity” thing, and sometimes kind of work. It was also wonderful how every time I restarted my computer the Netgear software would come up and make things not work. I eventually uninstalled it, which made the adapter useless, so I reinstalled it and picked the option to use the Windows network manager. I’m not sure why the drivers aren’t separate from the connection manager.

It will probably be a while before I am posting regularly again, but I’ll get back to it at some point.

Another thing that I’ve been meaning to get around to is reviewing this post of 100+ Awesome Open Courseware Links for Artists, which was shared with me several days ago. I looked at a few of the links and was intrigued, but I haven’t had the time to go through any of them in detail. Regardless, I thought I ought to share it with my readers in case they have an interest.

Anyway, that’s it for now. I still have plenty to do, despite having such a productive day.

I hope to have some time this weekend to do a post about how the internship is progressing (in short: it’s exhausting, fun, and exhausting). Of course, I also have my countless hobbies and plenty of tasks that need to be done, so we’ll see how the weekend goes. This past weekend was not as restful as I had expected, so perhaps this one will be more relaxed.

With the few spare minutes I have here and there, I’ve been trying to do a little more sketching. I picked up some charcoal Thursday and played around with it a little. Hopefully I will start to feel better soon, so that I can continue to experiment. At some point, I’ll probably put my sketchbook online, so that people can flip through it.

Regardless of whom my readers wanted to win the election, I’m sure nearly everyone is glad that the presidential campaigning is over. Bush and Cheney won’t be around too much longer, so that is certainly reason to celebrate.

Anyway, hope everyone is well or at least better than I am at the moment.

I have also updated the spam blocking plugins that I use, so let me know if there is any trouble with comments (or anything else). Hopefully they will reduce my daily workload, since I’ve had a lot less time to spend on computers lately.

One last thing I’ve noticed is that the new version of WordPress seems to be stuck telling me that one of my plugins has an update (via a “speech bubble” above the plugins link), but none of the plugins actually show updates available on the plugin page. Updates are so rarely pain-free these days….

Since you bothered to read all that, check out this YouTube video of a man cheating death. It’s pretty crazy!