The Ekpyrotic Universe

I like to think of myself as a good singer. I know there are other people who enjoy my voice, but I wonder. Am I a good singer or just a really good mimic? When I sing it is usually along with a song and I can hit the notes and intonation accurately, but how would I do on my own? At Karaoke or in Rock Band I sing it exactly like the recording, is that singing or just mimicing?

Saturday I made baked, breaded haddock. Simple and delicious. It lasted as leftovers until today. I may have made too much.

Tonight I made grilled tuna steaks. Simple and delicious.

Fish, you are now acceptable as part of the regular dinner rotation.

I have to get back in the habit of making entries here. I've been very busy: with work, moving, social activities and my own projects, but I still value this blog.

Here are the mashup titles of the movie descriptions I posted with links to the imdb for each. I don't much like the new imdb format.

1. After exploring alien ruins, bringing back to Earth a robot and a scientist's daughter, they discover human's are now slaves of another species
   Forbidden Planet of the Apes
   Forbidden Planet Planet of the Apes
   
2. A man on death row with the power of healing others discovers that his last meal is people
   Soylent Green Mile
   Soylent Green The Green Mile
   
3. A pet gorilla, raised in Africa is brought back to the States where he is exploited until he teams up with Billy the Kids and other outlaws. Though they try to provide justice in a murder, they're hunted down by the law
   Mighty Joe Young Guns
   Mighty Joe Young Young Guns
   
4. Though imprisoned in the 1700s, she uses her magical powers to escape and love changes her into a good person, then she rides around having adventures with her Orangutan
   I Married a Witch Way but Loose
   I Married a Witch Every Which Way but Loose
   
5. Two reporters, once married, fall in love again while chasing the same story. Later, she switches bodies with her daughter.
   His Girl Freaky Friday
   His Girl Friday Freaky Friday
   It occurs to me now that I should have made this His Girl Interrupted, but oh well.
   
6. A white lawyer defends a black man in court in the South in the 30s, years later he tries to keep his sons from revealing where his money is to 3 strippers in the desert, not knowing the women are cold-blooded killers
   Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill A Mockingbird
   Faster Pussycat Kill, Kill To Kill A Mockingbird
   
7. A couple of army buddies become entertainers when they leave the service, meet 2 women entertainers and take the train to Vermont to save their old general's in. Sadly when they get there, one is shot in the eye with a Red Ryder BB Gun.
   White Christmas Story.
   White Christmas A Christmas Story
   

Some friends are playing a game where they take two movies with a shared word in the title and describe the merged movie. Your job is to guess the movie title. I am terrible at guessing the answers, but once it was mentioned I couldn't stop trying to think of movies. I feel bad posting new challenges when I can't think of answers, but here goes anyway.

1. After exploring alien ruins, bringing back to Earth a robot and a scientist's daughter, they discover human's are now slaves of another species
   
2. A man on death row with the power of healing others discovers that his last meal is people
   
3. A pet gorilla, raised in Africa is brought back to the States where he is exploited until he teams up with Billy the Kids and other outlaws. Though they try to provide justice in a murder, they're hunted down by the law
   
4. Though imprisoned in the 1700s, she uses her magical powers to escape and love changes her into a good person, then she rides around having adventures with her Orangutan (Emily says I should mention there's a homophone in there)
   
5. Two reporters, once married, fall in love again while chasing the same story. Later, she switches bodies with her daughter.
   
6. A white lawyer defends a black man in court in the South in the 30s, years later he tries to keep his sons from revealing where his money is to 3 strippers in the desert, not knowing the women are cold-blooded killers
   

Some of these are likely too obscure, but I love the movies.
I've seen this game before, I only remember it because of the great Logan's Run Lola Run title.

I've created a blog to talk about music. It can be found at You Call That Music? The title is more what I expect people say to me, though I'm sure I'll excoriate something I've heard from time to time. Currently I'm talking mostly about my iPod, but I'll be talking about bands too.

I have created a blog to talk about databases, programming and design. I didn't think my lj blog was a good place for that and I have my own website, so I created a blog there.

If you have any interest in those topics, head on over. I still need to change the appearance, make a header image, maybe get a better name and more, but it'll be fun to try.

The site is SQLServer and Other Development

I know most of the people that might chance across this don't give a damn about football, but I have to say this somewhere. The pressure they put on Reggie Bush that ended up forcing him to give back the trophy he was awarded keep reminding me of how they stripped Jim Thorpe of his medals. It is utter bullshit and everyone who ever received a Heisman should give it back in support of Reggie. I could go on about why, but I'd likely be yelling to myself.

I tried quite a few times to set up blogging software on my website. Thanks everyone who made suggestions. Unfortunately, every time I tried something, my hosting provider said "we don't support that" or "we can't do that".

So goodbye to 1and1.

I've switching providers to one that has PHP under ASP, has all the latest versions, unlimited space and throughput, supports Wordpress, Dot Net Nuke and more and is half the price of 1and1.

Hello Arvixe. I'll let you know how they work out. One thing I like already is that they have 24 hour on-line chat support. 1and1 didn't.

Arvixe is $5/mo for ASP and $4/mo for Linux.

I've been thinking about starting a tech blog. I've got some things to say that either other people in tech might find interesting or at least have figure out how to do certain things that could help other people trying to do the same things. I've also stumbled across some undocumented problems and have worked out the solutions, often with the help of very hard to find comments elsewhere on the web.

Even if no-one finds any interest in all of that, a tech blog would still be helpful to me in allowing me to have one place where I've stored all this gathered information.

I figured I'd use WordPress, it is fairly popular, seems robust and has some features I'd like to use. I have http://www.thoughtstream.com and I'm not using it for anything other than email and some file storage at the moment, so I thought it'd be a good place to host my blog. I could make it a subsection of the site if I ever start using it for other things again. I'm a Microsoft developer, so I have Thoughtstream hosted on a Microsoft platform. When I start developing for it, it'll allow me to use my knowledge of ASP.Net to make my site.

I looked up how to install and deploy WordPress on my site.

It ONLY uses MySQL.

My site has MSSQL. (SQL Server)

Did I mention the primary tech I'm going to blog about is SQL Server? No? It is.

After some research, I found that there's a way to host WordPress on a Microsoft Platform! Hooray! (details are here)

I contact my webhost to see if the package I have with them has the required software.

The response

Since you are under a Microsoft Business package, Wordpress will not run on this. All the system requirements of Wordpress are only supported in our Linux hosting packages.
You will need to switch your package to a Linux package.

Now, I'd mentioned I wanted to install Wordpress, but I'd specifically asked if my site had II7 or above
PHP 5.2 or above
SQL Server Express 2008 w/Tools or above
PHP Driver for SQL Server v1.1 or above
URL Rewrite 2.0 or above

and they didn't say a thing about any of those.

I tried again with

Wordpress will run on a Micorosft package if I have the criteria I listed in my email. I do not intend to switch to a Linux pakage, if you do not provide what I've listed, I'll either use a different blogging software or a different host. Would you please tell me what OS is running on my server, what, if any version of PHP, what version of SQL Server and if it has URL rewrite?

The response? (I'll bet you can already guess)

Wordpress will only run in our Linux Packages since Wordpress requires PHP and MySQL. Our MS Packages has MSSQL and can only cater ASP, ASP.Net only. Our advise to the customer is to change your package from Microsoft Package to Linux Package if you really want to use Wordpress.

I tried again, more explicitly this time

See the above link, Wordpress can run on SQL Server and IIS. Whether or not Wordpress will run on your system, I'd still like answers to the questions I asked. What version of IIS are you running, what version of SQL Server, do you have any Php running under IIS?

Finally a better response

Your server is Microsoft Server 2008. It is running MSSQL 2008 as its database. Also, PHP is not compatible on your server. ASP, and ASP.net are compatible.

So at least I now know the OS and version of SQL Server, though not the subversion. SQL Server has several different types.

The part about PHP? That's simply wrong. They may not offer it, but PHP isn't all that hard to set up under IIS, I've done it myself.

So now I have a choice.

1. I can look for a different provider, one that has the specifications I need to run WordPress on a MS platform.
   
2. I can look for different blogging software that runs on an MS platform. If anyone reading this has any suggestions, I'd appreciate them.
   
3. I can get a new site with Linux just for the WordPress blog and figure out how to embed it in an ASP site.

What to do?