Brian's Blog

I just finished the last Harry Potter but last week. While nothing can replace The Lord of the Rings in my heart I have to say the series wasn't bad. I found myself feeling a little sad that it was over already. The first five books were pretty good and easy to read. I think I liked the last two books most though because they turned a bit more serious, some what dark, and less "kid book like" than the rest.

I don't want to say anything else just in case I might spoil it for anyone who might not have finished it yet. Suffice it to say the series was an enjoyable read. Plus now I can understand what all the Harry Potter junkies I know are talking about.

It seems that there was one data file that keeps track of the total comments on a given post was missing one line. I'm not sure how that line went missing but I've put it back and the comments work again.

Thanks Ricardo for pointing out that the error I thought was a catastrophic one really wasn't. It pays to have friends that are developers.

I just heard that today is Buy Nothing Day. Apparently there is a commercial that MTV refuses to air about it. Oh my, something too controversial for MTV? Who would have thought it was possible...

It seems like a good idea. We do consume WAY to much here in the United States. Hell, we were told to go out and shop after 9-11 to give you an idea of how important consuming is to us. Well, most of us anyway.

Don't get me wrong, I consume plenty. Being a geek and into technology it's darn near impossible to not spend on things I don't really need. Even so, I do try to keep it down a bit. I haven't upgraded my main computer in over 5 years. All the rest of my systems are 2nd hand (and working wonderfully thanks to the wonders of Linux). We don't have cell phones except for the one I have provided for by work. We drive our cars into the ground before we buy another one. We only buy cloths when we need to replace worn out or out grown cloths. No closets full of shoes for us. My youngest daughter wears my oldest's out grown cloths. We don't have cable TV. I could go on, but you get the picture I'm sure. Still, we could do much better if we really tried. Sometimes I feel a bit guilty about that. I know I'm such a hypocrite...

Anyway, observing Buy Nothing Day isn't that big of a deal for me. Today is, after all, Black Friday. It's very rare that I go shopping on a normal day but you couldn't pay me to go out in the rude chaotic crowds today.

For some strange reason the comment system I use just decided to spontaneously quit. I'm not sure why but I get the following fun entries in may Apache error log:

[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Illegal character in prototype for main::linkformat : $formatstring at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 632., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/
[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Odd number of elements in hash assignment at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 177, line 301., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/
[Sun Nov 18 19:25:18 2007] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/local/apache2/cgi-bin/reblogger/reblogger.pl line 182., referer: http://rignesnet.tzo.com/

To be honest, I haven't really put to much time into troubleshooting this but, as comments are mostly a luxury I've just removed them for now in the hopes that I can take the time to fix this in the near future or change over to another blogging system.

It's not like I've been all that faithful in posting as I should anyway.