Seth Kinast’s Blog

I finally sat down and ripped my code apart to make it possible for me to manage my WordPress installations via SVN. Sure, it was a boon when I started diff’ing the files rather than trying to change by hand, but this time around it took me less than 5 seconds to update to WordPress 1.5.1.2. The power of SVN and version control.

You can do this too, and the good news is that it’s not hard. This tutorial will walk you through the basics of setting up your blog to pull from the SVN repositories. You can use this just to update, or you could start running bleeding-edge code and help develop WordPress!

Read the rest of this thought »

Slowly but surely, I’m getting a lot of stuff accomplished, and it’s refreshing to be able to mark things off, slowly but surely.

[X] Play piano for wedding

I was the pianist for Eric Ducommun (Kristen’s big brother) and Faith Harris this past weekend. Drove up with Kristen and her parents Thursday for the wedding Saturday. Mr. and Mrs. Ducommun are just the nicest people ever, if a little quirky sometimes. I worked like mad to prepare pieces to play, because the book I hoped to play out of was nowhere to be found, and my teacher didn’t have it either. But thanks to the magic of chording I escaped just fine. The wedding was beautiful and so was the bride… and so was Kristen, who was a bridesmaid. She was sick all weekend though, so we didn’t have all that much fun hanging out together. Oh well.

[X] Call Samsung

Yep, it wasn’t the video card, it was my LCD monitor! Luckily I figured that out before I sent in the card. So I called Samsung with much chagrin Sunday, expecting long holds, Indian people, and long trials of explaining that “Yes, I am sure the monitor is faulty because I tried the computer with a new monitor &c. &c…” So I called up, the phone rings, and I’m immediately connected to someone who, although foreign, speaks excellent English. Five minutes later, a new monitor is on the way to my door (overnight prepaid shipping), along with a prepaid label to send the old one back. Quality!

[_] Call Dell

Oh I’m not looking forward to this one. I can never understand the techs, they give me the runaround, all that. But I need to do it soon.

[_] Computer Jobs

I have some every day, it’s great! At $30 an hour, the money is pouring in. And I’m just getting paid to play. My two today were pretty easy, except one of the families had a Compaq (bad decision) with Windows ME (worse decision). It crashed every time we tried to connect to the Internet… and it was a fresh install! So I finally gave up and installed Windows 98. Perfection. No crashes, and just as fast.

[X] Presents

I got some things for some people. That’s all you need to know.

[_] Scholarship

Gotta do that tomorrow. The Heritage Scholarships are due by June 1st IIRC.

[_] Pre-Med Club Website!

It’s coming along slowly but surely; you can see it at http://oupremed.com. In my humble opinion, it looks ever so much better than the current one :angel: The beauty of this one is that it’s 100% WordPress powered, CMS-like. You don’t need to know HTML to make new pages or edit existing ones. And yes, it looks a lot like my blog. If Amyie wants it in two weeks, she’s gonna get some stolen code good thing stealing from yourself is legal.

I’m finally home for the summer! My car was packed so full, it was nuts. I seriously could not have fit one more box in there. Maybe a little bag, but only if it were squooshy.

I got home and discovered a few profound truths:

• The item you want is always in the last box you think to look in and unpack.
• Stuff doubles in size, weight, and number while in the back of your car.
• The one time you can’t see out your rear-view mirror is when you really need to.
• Audio books on tape are just the best driving invention ever. The four hours flew by.

I unpacked a lot of stuff downstairs and then got around to unpacking my desktop. Mom and Dad took it home a few weeks ago. Bad news: the screen stayed on for a few minutes, then went into what I assumed was powersave mode. But, uh. It never came back on. Ugh. Find MSI website, find RMA stats. Three-year warranty. When does it expire? In fifteen days. I’m so lucky.

Lappy with bad USB port, Compy with dead video card. Ew. Now where did I put that 16MB ATI Rage PCI video card…

I woke up this morning and had a call from the Behavioral Psych office. Apparently I am a better video game player than the other 149 participants and so won $80! That was a nice bonus to getting the psych credit for sure. Armeck would be proud Speaking of which, I just got my psych grade back yesterday… 100.8% Now if only I could do that well in all my courses; I’m a bit leery of CS because I need an 82% or so on the test and I’m not altogether sure what I got.

I was walking to the ZAP room today for my ZAP pizza party (Mark is leaving, how sad is that?) and couldn’t remember where I put my bike. I thought it was west of my dorm in the rack… but no, it wasn’t there. I just walked to ZAP. On the way back I walked past the lockers… and there was my lock on the ground. Somebody took it. Good thing it was only a $19 bike (although it did have $15 of new tires and tubes on it) and Mom and Dad paid for it :angel:

Sam and I went last weekend to Wal-Mart to get boxes. We got meat boxes. They are good boxes. We put the boxes together and now I must tote them back to my room and finish packing before Friday night, when we are going to load my truck. Then load Sam’s truck Saturday morning. Then go home. Then sleep, but wait I can’t sleep because I have to practice piano for the wedding and it’s next weekend and then after that go to Florida oh but I wanted to sleep but what no sleep oh okay Florida it is but I need to make it so Dad can print questions from AcademicFlash when yesterday but I need to practice and then after Florida comes Mexico but don’t forget to practice and please can I just sleep now

There’ve been a couple variants of the Tosser virus going around Honors and Walker 4. It likes to send messages like

hey check out this

to everyone on your buddy list. Pretty easy to remove, but insanely hard if you don’t know how. I have been winning various gigglies’ favor by fixing their computers for them

Not fixing a couple of them though… *shifty*