More uninteresting crap… Now from England!

Last week before we left for Athens we decided to try a different local restaurant.  We went to On the Thames, a place appropriately enough on the Thames in Bourne End at the recently redeveloped marina.  They have an interesting menu.  I had the Roast Wildebeest Steak, Sweet Potato Dauphinois with Kangaroo Sausages… two new species to add to my personal carnivore scoreboard.

Mini review:  A very tasty and enjoyable night out.  If it ever stopped raining their deck would make a great place to have a meal and watch the river flow by.

anything with AC.

It’s 95F+ and full sun.

Oh, and we still stupidly ignored the heat only to find the Acropolis closed due to strike.

Flight was only marginally delayed.  Hotel is very nice and comfortable.  Two glasses of wine and some fruit brought to the room after we checked in was a nice touch.  Free internet too!

We could see the Acropolis on the hill as we approached our hotel…  expect a crappy camera phone picture soon.   We’ll get some quality pictures tomorrow when we have time to explore.

Now for some souvlaki…

A few months ago, Textdrive was killing my lighttpd processes daily, thereby also killing my Typo powered blog too. At the time I didn’t want to move hosts, so I moved my blog to WordPress. Exporting my content from Typo was non-trivial (Textdrive also helpfully kept killing my export attempts after about 10 seconds for using too much CPU… sigh) and I was busy so it got sidelined.

Last night I decided to give it another go. In Rube Goldberg fashion I used a long chain of dubious techniques to get my stuff imported. I used a Mysql dump of my Typo blog as a starting point. I grep’d the relevant lines, tweaked the SQL, and imported it into SQL Server. Looking at WP’s built-in import capabilities it looked like LiveJournal had the easiest format to mimic, although it was XML. SQL Server’s FOR XML AUTO, ELEMENTS was handy… a simple query spat out a file close enough to LJ’s format. A quick once-over with some regexes to convert embeded \n’s into real carriage returns, and it was ready for import. 437 posts imported. Exciting!

Hopefully, this will be the last time I need to do this for a while.

It took me a while to figure out why my feeds were not updating.  I use Feedburner to manage my feeds.  It was not picking up any of my new posts even after trying to manually resync the feeds.   On a hunch I changed my feed source from mark.denovich.com to mark.denovich.org and “voila!”  Feedburner must still be caching the dns info for my .com address.

Deb is a much better travel blogger than I.   I encourage you to check out her site.

I just installed Flickr Photo Album for WordPress.  This is the one to have.  It does the usual sidebar dealie…  but where it really shines is when you are composing new posts.  It makes your most recent photos available to insert when composing a new post.   It’s as simple as clicking the photo you want.

The above photo is the next in series of an obscure running joke among some work friends, posing with umbrellas.

The switch from Textdrive to Dreamhost worked.

So far the transition has been nearly painless.  Hopefully that will be the last of the 500 Server Errors thanks to Textdrive constantly killing my lighttpd processes.  Good riddens.