Seeds of Wisdom: "Dogs come when they're called; cats take a message and get back to you later." --Mary Bly
I'm baaaaack. Did you miss me?
As usual I am doing too many things at once. I've been helping a local reporter set up a blog. He was fired by our local "Shopper" paper for digging too deeply into local politics. These little "Shopper" papers - the only source of local news in many cases - have been gobbled up recently by a regional media giant. I'm not naming names because I don't want to be sued. They have been leaning quite heavily on anyone who dares to speak out against them by unleashing their mega-crew of lawyers.
I see a disturbing trend here with big company bullies ruling the playground and running things the way they see fit. A lawyer I know told me that an opposing lawyer recently told him. "I know my client hasn't got a legitimate complaint, but we'll have your client's kid's college fund, his life savings and his house before weeven get to court."
A sad state of affairs indeed! If you want to read about one reporter's struggle to unearth the truth, go here.
I've also been trying to get Moveable Type set up on my own web space, since Blogspot is down so frequently. I know I can host a Blogger blog on my own space, but I figure "in for a penny, in for a pound," - I'll try to tame the wiley CGI application (sorry if any non-tech people are bored by this, but it's been occupying much of my mind and time lately).
The web host where I have cyber-kat.com started out as a small fish - a nice local company. They got eaten by a larger fish, which in turn got eaten by a very large fish (quite possibly a whale.). The large fish is focused on large businesses, naturally, so small guppies like myself hardly make a ripple that they'd notice.
They prefer their customers to use "trouble tickets" when they need tech help, even if you're not having trouble. It took me 2 trouble tickets (ignored), three emails and two phone calls just to find out what version of Perl they were running. The techs that handle the email inquiries had no clue what I wanted, so they "escalated" (bizarre choice of word, IMO) my inquiry to their administrators. I got an email from the administrator asking me to call. I did.
He asked what I wanted. I told him, "just what it says in my email - I need to know what version of Perl you're running."
"You don't need us to do anything?" he asked.
"Just answer my question," I replied.
He didn't know what version of Perl they were running, but promised to find out and get back to me. He did, but the whole process took several days.
As did my attempt to get them to install db_file and my inquiry into whether they support cgiwrap or suexec. In each case I had to provide more information because they didn't understand what I wanted.
I am now attempting to get them to change permissions for the db directory. We have exchanged several emails (I've given up on the "trouble tickets"), and two faxes. Such fun!
Anyone want to take bets on whether I get MT installed before my "lease" runs out in October <g>
The other thing that has been occupying my time of late is my new PC - 1.8 gig Pentium 4, Win2000 and new flat screen monitor - sweet! I love getting a new computer, but I hate dealing with reloading software, getting all my settings and customizations back in place.
So that's what I've been up to.
Posted by Cyberkat at May 8, 2002 8:55 PM | TrackBack