Hot!!!!

Currently 84F, should go up to 95F today. I am so glad I am sitting in an A/C’d office. In the meantime, some pics from the winter time:

Blogspot to WordPress

In an act of clangorously ineffectual defiance I switched from using Google’s Blogspot to hosting my own blog using WordPress software. Now I feel cozily secure and delude myself of my self-importance. 🙂

The transition went relatively smooth, Interner Planners is a great hosting service with a very good control panel for the site which allows setting up popular applications very quickly. The only problem I have encountered was importing the old posts from the Blogger into the newly established, WordPress-powered epitome of inconsequentiality.

In particular:

WordPress suite has a set of plugins that allows user to import their blog from various formats and services, such as Blogger, Yahoo360, LiveJournal, and many others. Unfortunately, after installing “Import from Blogger” plug-in and running it, my excited self ran into this error message:

Could not connect to https://www.google.com

There was a problem opening a secure connection to Google. This is what went wrong:

Unable to find  the socket transport “ssl” – did you forget to enable it when you configured PHP?

Some googling lead me to this article. Which describes the problem and has one simple solution: export to XML and import into the WordPress. Unfortunately, there is a downside – the images will stay on the blogger, list formatting is off and couple other minor annoyances. This was not exactly what I was looking for, so I tried to come up with an alternative solution.

I decided to do it in a more complicated way (as always, your obedient servant seeks no easy paths!) After much thinking, reasoning that wordpress.com would probably have their ssl enabled, as well as porting from WordPress.com to wordpress should be easier, I created an account on wordpress.com and imported the content from blogger using the same plug-in. Then, I exported the XML file from the WordPress.com and imported it into the WordPress. The images were moved, lists preserved. Labels became Categories.

So, technically, my blog moved: Blogspot -> WordPress.com ->Wordpress.org Oh, and btw, the accounts in WordPress are permanent, you will not be able to delete them, so just be prepared to delete all the posts.

There were some additional adjustments I had to go through:

  • Fix tags and categories.
  • Fix Fotki.com (another great service, and they are not paying my for saying this, btw) widgets, which were not imported at all
  • Fix some of the pictures – they would show 100% zoom, which made them look too big. Technically speaking, I should probably upload smaller versions of them, but I am too lazy, so I simply scaled them down

The first impressions of the WordPress Suite are quite positive. There are definitely more gauges to look at and adjustments to make, but it looks quite impressive.

back in the saddle (and/or this site)

I completely abandoned this blog yet again – there is a lot going on in my life right now, and I have a feeling the next few months will have a big impact on my life. So, to catch up:
I am now a proud owner of a blue 2004 Yamaha FZ6.
I bought it at a very reasonable price in the beginning of July and I’ve already put 1.5k miles on it. I absolutely and positively love it! There is the beauty

Even before I completed the purchase, I joined www.fz6-forum.com. This is one of the best online communities I’ve ever seen! The amount of information is astounding and everybody is very helpful.

Of course, the first thing I did was to start getting accessories and mods:
Givi V46 Topcase with brake light repeater and a back-rest for the passenger- for touring and commuting.
Gorilla Alarm – yeah, I learned my lesson. Sure, it will not stop a determined thief, but at least it will scream
Centerstand – gotta have one, especially for maintenance.

Speaking of maintenance, one of the things I had to do was replacing the head bearings on the FZ. I have a feeling the reason why PO was willing to part with the bike at such a low price, was the need to replace them (the bearings). Oh well, $25 for the bearing kit by All Balls (ironically, the new bearings are roller bearings, not ball bearings) and a day of work, which lead to my learning quite a bit about the machine itself.
Here, FZ6 half way through the “surgery”. The patient’s pulse is stable, the body is partially suspended from the ceiling by straps (this is why one needs a centerstand):

And the only way I learned what I needed to do and (more importantly) how, was, the FZ6-forums.com I can just hope to contribute my fair share to this great community.