And we hit the all star break with a splutter, and a die. Typical Leafs fashion. Against another team from another state that shouldn’t have a hockey team–and this one’s got two. And they say the NHL isn’t broken.
Hell. Handbag. This team. There are just no other words. None. At all. At least it wasn’t 6 1? Yeah, sure, let’s run with that.
And so begins part 1 of our downward spiral. Ow.
I’m actually sorry I ended up missing this game. I hear it was several varieties of wicked nifty cool. Well, for us, anyway. Now why can’t every game be like this? Oh. Right. Toronto. Nevermind.
Just when you thought your team’s found the bottom, they go and invent this. Rumour has it only 2 players actually showed up–the rest kinda sorta stayed off the ice. Okay, might as well have. No wonder it’s taken me until now to post these. even a week later, this hurts bad.
Does anyone remember when we actually used to beat these guys on a fairly regular basis? I mean yeah, so now we only play them once every year or two. This used to be the team we’d warm up on before getting stomped by Vancouver or something. Ah well. I’ll take the point.
I just have one question. How does a hockey team based out of Phoenix, bleeding money out the ears and bleeding talent out everywhere else, come up with an ass kicking and lay it on a team from what’s supposedly the land of ice and snow? I’d really like to know how that works. Yeah okay, so they have that one guy coatching. Gretsky or whatever. It’s Phoenix, for crying out loud. They don’t get to win. Except, apparently, when they do. Dammit.
I will always get a kick out of how fun this game was to watch. Particularly since this is probably the only time this year we’ll see the Leafs actually win 4 in a row. Sucks, but whatcha gonna do? I’m gonna do this.
It just randomly occured to me, as I was plowing through various things that have been piling up while life was busy throwing us curve balls, it’s been exactly, as in to the day, two weeks since I’ve actually posted anything up here. And probably longer than that since the anything had actual content. Oops. Publishing don’t number 1, and I did it. Oh well, you’ll have that. And the worst part of it is, the two weeks in question actually stood a chance at being somewhat exciting. If by exciting you mean a small rolercoaster of fun.
Where to start. Big news in the nowheresville household, we had our eye on a larger apartment and moving back to Ottawa. Well, back to Ottawa for me–Shane has never actually had the good fortune of living there, specificly. So we had the apartment lined up–the lady showing it to us had us sold within the first 10 minutes. We filled out the application. Then, we sat around here and waited. The application ended up not going through, which made things very interesting–note to readers, if you’re looking to make a major move like this and you’ve already gone ahead and set things in motion to have services moved/activated on your moving day, watch out for that quick 180. It’s real hard to hit the off switch when they come back and say you can’t actually have the apartment. Or maybe that’s just a Rogers thing–anything’s possible. We ran into that problem when the phone call came in that we didn’t actually land the apartment. We have a pretty good idea *why* we didn’t land the apartment, and while yeah it sucks, we know for next time. Too bad, too–it was a wicked awesome apartment.
Fortunately, since we look for bright sides on this here blog when we can, the apartment falling through means it doesn’t complicate our return from yet more planned events in the past two weeks. Shane had originally planned to drop in on his girlfriend at the beginning of February, but situations ended up coming up that sort of necessitated he be down there now. I’m still on schedule for bothering Jessica, who has actually managed to update her blog more than once this month, at the beginning of the month as initially planned. We were originally going to come back from our respective vacations on the second of March and promptly pack the place up for moving, but now we have a little bit of flexibility re: when we come back, just in case things decide that falling sideways while we’re down there is the order of the day. It also gives me a bit more time, if necessary, to help Jess with her own move at the end of February without having to worry about shooting back up here for mine. And, since I like not being attached to a deadline, I can presently put a questionmark on my return date–we shall have to see how things play out.
The fun doesn’t stop there, however. In list format, with explanatory posts to come when I have more brain power. Because presently, this caffeine thing isn’t working for me anymore.
Related: Mixed in with the last couple weeks’ fun helping of funness were multiple large doses of snow. And yes, an extra side order of snow. I’m selling it for cheap. Want some? Please?
Now, let’s see how many of these hockey posts I can crank out before I go fall over. And later today, or tomorrow, a metric ton of mockery. No, I’m not kidding. I’m looking at two pages of blog material over here. And now I actually have time to post it. This might get very unpretty.
I’ve been dabbling in the more involved server admin business for the past while. One of the things we’ve been experimenting with for the better part of a month is the firewall provided by ConfigServer. It’s halfway decent for what it does, as long as you’re not trying to do anything too involved–like, say, get certain functionality native to WordPress to actually, you know, work. Like, for example, trackback/pingback functionality. So, since we had absolutely nothing else planned whatsoever tonight–hi, oh my god cold, we figured we’d either fix CSF or break Shane‘s blog. Turns out we did neither.
According to ConfigServer’s software, which I have taken to not trusting after our most recent discovery, inbound trafic on all the ports we needed to be open was possible. As was outbound. Except for that tiny little part wherein it sort of wasn’t. That lead to some pretty interesting problems in the neighbourhood of him actually being able to receive trackbacks/pingbacks. Since blogging in general, and WordPress in particular, is primarily focused on the whole community/conversation element of it all, that posed a very small problem. We fiddled off and on with it for a few weeks, and eventually for reasons of trying to scrape together a few dollars, we decided to start the process of migrating him away from that server and to my arangement over here. After breaking things in that department in all kinds of new and interesting–not to mention very very creative–ways, we thought we’d play with seeing if that fixes the outstanding issue of tracking back. Hence, if you hadn’t figured it out, the test post from earlier. And wouldn’t you know, the damn thing up and proved us both idiots. First try, it did exactly what it was supposed to. The only *really* major difference? The server the problem blog’s on isn’t running ConfigServer’s firewall–and won’t be, if I can possibly get away with it. Aside from that? Same server configuration, more or less, with a few extra mostly irrelevant bells and whistles I don’t actually use but hey, they’re cool.
The moral of the storry: If you’re running ConfigServer’s firewall, look for alternatives. If you’re not, keep it that way. It’s bad for you. Stay very, very far away from that program–particularly if you, or anyone you’re hosting/maintaining the server for, plans on running a WordPress blog. They just do not like each other and I think the relationship’s pretty irreparable. Now, the search begins for alternatives.