BeMused

Last night, Sarah and I went to see the Big Apple Circus. It’s a one ring circus, and is one of the better ones, if not the best, that I’ve been too. When I was younger, my grandmother took me to see The Ringling Bros. Circus, and I was so excited I probably wet myself. Three big rings! High wire trapeze artists! Clowns! Lions and Tigers and Bears, oh my!

Well, it was the Lions and Tigers and Bears (oh my!) that actually turned me off the big circus. Animals like that are not meant to be caged and forced to stand on platforms and jump through burning rings of fire. I went when the legendary Gunther Gebel-Williams was performing. He did his act with kindness and respect towards the big animals. Later in the show when another performer was doing his bit with the cracking of the whip and yelling, I noticed Gebel-Williams off to one side of the cage, sitting down and scratching a jaguar through the bars. The jaguar looked like my cat does when getting scratched, just simply content. No other animal trainer that I saw that day treated those animals with the kindness and respect that he did.

After that, I refused to go to any circus where they had big, non-domesticated animals. And this is where the Big Apple Circus comes in. They had one horse and a dog show. The rest was all performers. And it was wonderful. The one ring makes it intimate and pretty much ever seat is a good one. They were safety conscious (none of this trapeze without a net crap) and interacted with the audience quite well. They are also involved with the community, and according to their website, they are a “not-for-profit” performing arts institution committed to kids and their families”

In short, it was simply a wonderful way to spend an evening with my daughter.

These are a few of my favorite things…

I thought I’d take the time to jot down some of my favorite programs, for both Mac and Windows. I’ve been using both platforms a lot lately, and I’ve come to appreciate some programs that I have been using and relying on, so I thought I’d share what they are. I’m sure that there are several other apps out there I’m not even aware of, so feel free to let me know what your favorites are.

Read more

This past Wednesday, Sept.14th, my dog, Dan, ran out in front of a car and was hit. My wife called me at work and as I pulled up to the house, she and my son were leaving with Dan in the back of the car to the vet’s.

Twenty minutes later my son came into the house in tears. Dan had died on the way and never really had a chance.

He should’ve lived to be an old hound dog. It’s not fair that his life was ended by a three and a half-ton SUV. I always pictured him resting on the front porch, grey muzzle resting on his front paws, snoozing in the sun, dreaming of chasing rabbits. Not to have his last few minutes of life end in agony.

Naturally, the kids were upset, but kids being kids, have bounced right back. The wife and I are having a much harder time. I actually came into work a bit early this morning to write this, knowing I’d probably get choked up. And I am. I miss my dog. He used to sleep under my feet while I was watching TV and would sneak into my bedroom at night and curl up on my side of the bed. Knowing he’s not here makes me feel horribly guilty for yelling at him for stupid things like barking, or damn near breaking my arm while on the leash, trying to going after a squirrel.

So goodbye Dan. You’re no longer on the leash. Go chase those squirrels and rabbits and bark your head off with pure joy. You’re a good dog. I’ll miss you.

Well…that was relatively painless.

At least as far as the Wordpress move is concerned. While cleaning up my home directory, I inadvertantly deleted my Gallery directory and all the pictures I’d uploaded. That was fun. So I spent some time re-uploading all the pictures only after I re-installed Gallery.

Now, if I can get the Wordpress Gallery plug-in to work, I’ll be SUCH a happy camper.

Well…Shad’s Pad is moving at least. I’m going to be moving it to a sub-domain of my other site, and by doing this, hopefully, it’ll clean up some of my crap (you should see my home directory. Stuff everywhere), as well as making this whole Wordpress Gallery plug-in easier to configure. Apparently it has problems with the /~shad/ bit in the url.

Besides, I get tired of typing the ~. I always miss it and end up tabbing somewhere else.

So, the new url will be http://muse.harleyroads.com. DNSis taking a bit to update (as always) and when it does, I’ll post a redirect here. So you can either update your bookmarks (all three of you) or just let it redirect you when the new sub-domain is up. Hopefully, this will encourage me to work on my long-neglected Harley site as well.

Along with WordPress, I recently installed Gallery as well. I had a heck of a time installing it; every time it’d do the system check during install, Gallery would report back that it was missing several files (180 at one point!). No matter what I tried, I was always missing files. When I loaded it on my powerbook (which runs it’s own webserver that I test stuff on), it was working fine. As soon as I uploaded it to here, however, I ended up missing a bunch of files.

After getting to the point where I was missing “only” six files, I just went ahead and completed the install. And you know? It worked. I have a full functioning gallery2 install now.

Go figure.

I’m still trying to figure out the WordPress Gallery2 Plug-in. I haven’t managed to figure out to feed it when it asks for the “Relative Gallery2 Path” and/or the “Path from web document root”. I thought I knew what those were, but it still fails when installing. Who knows, perhaps Sarah will drop a line and tell me how she got hers up and running (hint hint). Or maybe I’m just retarded.

I’d laugh if it had something to do with those six missing files from the original Gallery2 install.

Regardless if I get it working or not, I hope to have some pictures from my recent trip to share with you all. Stick around!