While trying to downgrade my laptop from Vista to XP (Vista is still, even with SP1, just not ready) using the ‘XP recovery disc’ that Sony gave me, I kept getting an error upon trying to boot into the DVD. The following is a transcript of what must have been quite an ordeal for the tech support guys to wrap their narrow little minds around.

Almost forgot to mention that there were five to ten minute pauses between responses. These people couldn’t have been able to type any faster than 5wpm or something. Or maybe they were spending too much time with the troubleshooting manual. Either way, you could see my patience disappear pretty quickly. (more…)

I’ve been having problems with my CoppermineSC plugin slowing this site to a crawl — page requests would take up to 15 seconds! I’ve since gone through the plugin and stripped out everything I don’t use, and streamlined a few of the database queries. Things are running much more smoothly now that I’ve dropped over 50% of the code base!

I’ve also had issues with my WordPress database encoding. Many of the characters were coming up in very funky ways. I’ve gone through by hand and changed them all to the current encoding scheme. If anybody has any problems viewing the site, or sees a few characters that I’ve missed, please email me!

Not bad for a couple hours work.

I thought it was the geo-coding stuff that I added a while back to provide my maps and locations, and whatnot… but it was the upgrade to the latest CoppermineSC plugin that did me in. Months of messing around with this thing trying to figure out what was slowing it down so badly. I’ve disabled it for now… so no images, just the tags, until I get time to optimize the code.

Not that I’m really writing a lot for you all to read, but some of my not writing was the fact that it would take forever to login — ten minute logins tend to make things hopelessly time consuming; hopefully that will change.

[UPDATE]: I should add that the gallery is still available… and will be throughout this issue with the plugin. Oh and two thumbs way the hell up to the Firefox crew for putting a spell checker in the browser! Brilliant, but why’d it take someone so long to do it? I know it’s not for the lack of the idea, it’s probably the most requested feature by anybody who does enough writing online.

I finally got my dot com back. So we’re officially back on danegardner.com instead of dot net. I only had to wait a year for those ass-holes to drop it! Must really piss them off that I bought it two days after it hit the market… can’t hold my name for randsom anymore jerks.

If you have ~any~ issues at all with the transition let me know so I can fix them.

A few years ago I purchased airline tickets to Maine to visit family at what I thought was a decent rate. A week later I happened to be looking on the same website that I bought them on and noticed that the same exact flight was fifty dollars cheaper! A week after than it was another twenty cheaper still!

If you’ve bought enough airline tickets you have probably experienced the same effect. Airline prices fluctuate, and unless you follow it for a while on your own, you’ll never really know when to buy and when to wait… until now. I Stumbled Upon the website FareCast.com which predicts prices to and from most U.S. cities based on it’s historical costs over the last couple months.

For example: Roundtrip airfare to Kahalui, Hawaii (Maui island) is as low as $358 for the same week that I was there last year… but FareCast is telling me (with a 75% certainty) that the price will go down, and that I’d be better off waiting. Though looking at the 66-day lowest-price history I can judge that it probably wont go down more than just a few dollars… so instead of risking the loss of a good fare altogether to save just a few bucks, I’d buy right now… with confidence!

I’m going to keep an eye on a few fares to see how accurate this thing is… but it seems to make sense, and since it has relatively transparent data for the last two months, I feel I can trust it more than the wild guessing system that I used before this.