meta: September 2004 Archives

Plenty of stuff out there that I've been thinking I might comment on, but for whatever reason, I just haven't worked up the energy to put a post together. I've been thinking over the past couple of days how strange it is to be on leave. This is the first regular season semester since 1994 that I haven't been teaching, haven't been attending committee meetings, etc. And the result is that my academic biorhythms are all messed up.

I know, I know, we should all be so lucky. But it's not as though I'm not still working. I'm a handful of pages away from finally having a full draft of the manuscript, and the last couple of weeks have been a real grind in that regard. I've really had to force myself to write every day. Part of it is that I'm still getting used to that kind of writing pace--my personal process is more like think for a couple of weeks, then write for a couple of intensive days, then think some more. Writing every day has been much more of a challenge, and not one I'm anxious to repeat for some time.

The ironic thing is that, although I've fallen off a bit lately, that's exactly what I do here. But when I look back through a couple of months' worth of posts, I see my preferred rhythms peeking through my everyday writing. I can only be so serious so often--I admire those who can be serious more often, but that's not me. I don't have the language to distinguish between the different kinds of writing that I do here--all I can say is that, every so often, I feel like I'm Writing, and in between those times, it's more of a lowercase w writing that I do.

All right. Time to stop staring at my navel and instead to start staring at my manuscript...

I finally figured out the problem, and in fact, it was a little of both. When the server melted down, and our folders were restored, the backup was from a time before I upgraded to MT3.1. As a result, the MT2.6 installation that I had wiped from my account was back. I've kept a few of the older achived entries, so as not to 404 other peoples' links to them, and so, when the comment spammers hit, their comments were triggering 2.6 rebuilds of the entries and the indexes. And all of my 3.1 files that shared filenames were being overwritten as a result. I wasn't losing data, but my index pages and style sheets were being "restored" to their 2.6 versions.

The solution? Re-delete MT2.6, and go through the old archive pages, removing the comment forms. Now the spammers have to get through my active Blacklist installation, and even if they do, the rebuilds will come from 3.1.

(It makes sense to me, even if it's painfully obvious to some, and cryptic to others. I'm happy.)

For some reason, the restoration process keeps reverting my blog files to their August state, pre-upgrade to MT3. This is not pleasing me one bit, but I think I've ruled out a number of possibilities. And so, if you visit this page and find that it's got my old page design, that's what's going on. Every time that the pages get "restored," I basically have to go in and rebuild the site through MT.

And I'm 99% sure that this is a meltdown/restore issue, rather than having anything to do with the fact that I've upgraded. The two events coincide, but the problems associated with each have been separate.

At least, I think they have.

I'm not exactly sure what happened, but the long and short of it is that, for a couple of days, I haven't had access to our MT installation. No posting, no comments, no pings, nothing. And no small amount of panic on my part, which proved to be unfounded. Should be back to normal, and fully upgraded, shortly.