Jaharmi’s Irreality renewable hyperlinks with 0% transfat since 1999

Yes, I forgot to renew my domain. Yes, that became a real pain very quickly when I realized what the repercussions were.

For future generations, I suggest not having to deal with this when:

• you want to switch domain registrars
• you want to switch DNS hosting providers
• your goal is to save money
• you have never switched either registrars or DNS hosts for any domain before
• your domain’s WHOIS records are severely out-of-date (mostly because, through a comedy of errors, your host won’t let you update them)
• most of your administrative e-mail goes to a now-defunct mail address whose inbox you cannot access (I’m looking at you, .Mac, with your costs that went from $0 to $99/year in one year, and your vexing lack of forwarding)
• the rest of your administrative e-mail goes to an address in your expired domain (“because that’s the one e-mail address I’ll always have control over! Not like that .Mac account, no!”)
• you forgot that the reason why you didn’t switch domain and DNS providers earlier was because of the WHOIS hassle, and you just blithely plunged ahead with it
• you’ve waited until the day the current domain hosting provider has cut off your service (“hey, why can’t I connect to anything in my domain today? Er … ah … hm … oops. Maybe I should Twitter about this.”)
• you have to converse with the support organizations of at least two companies, and one of them is losing business
• you have better things to do with your life.

Lesson learned.

Anyway, it looks as if the long electronic nightmare of jaharmi.com being offline for Web and e-mail purposes has now ended. I can see this site. I can send and receive e-mail.

Good day.

It appears that I have successfully upgraded the site from Drupal 4.7.6 to Drupal 5.1.

Contrary to some others’ experiences, I was able to go directly between those versions without stopping at 5.0 in between.

I have had the urge to adjust the automatically-generated paths that Drupal’s Pathauto module provides for each story I post. Today, I took a quick look at Pathauto after some brief Web searches on this topic, and found that making changes was remarkably easy.

New articles I post to Irreality will now have a default path that corresponds to the year, month, and day, followed by the article title. Therefore, I can predict that this article will end up being at “/2007/05/03/pathauto_and_custom_paths.”

Thanks to the facilities in Pathauto, I’ve also generated:

• supplemental paths for already-existing stories (without replacing their old paths right off the Web root)
• index pages for each segment of each path, such as the years, months, and days
• news feeds for each new index.

It wasn’t obviously to me how to do all of this upfront, but the power of Drupal is really growing on me as I learn more tidbits like this.

The cold snap we’ve been experiencing, which has kept us below freezing continuously for several weeks, has me concerned.

Our new sump pump normally pushes water out into the storm drain channels on our side of the street. Under ideal conditions, this results in water flowing down the channels across the entire width of our front yard, to the storm drain grate on the far side of our driveway.

Since then end of January, this channel has been pretty much a solid block of ice, around four inches thick.

The water has, in the last week, spilled out more into the street. It is pushing a few feet across — maybe a quarter of road’s width. I did some bailing to keep the water from pooling at a high level and backflowing into the bubble pot. Eventually, I surmised, that could lead to the whole pipe from the basement getting frozen. The only thing saving it from backing up into the basement would be the emergency release that would let water spill out all over the ground near the house.

So, I decided to attack this problem in earnest. I bought my first pickaxe and tried to chip away with it. I’m out of shape, and it was tough to break through that much ice. Over the weekend, I finally made the breakthrough, and had a complete channel dug between the sump pump pipe’s bubble pot in our yard, and the storm sewer grate.

Now our neighbors know us for my pickaxe. Grin.

I was hoping this ice channel would last a few days. Since it was narrow and relatively free of slushy debris, I hoped the water would flow freely and more quickly than it did in the wider channel normally provided by the concrete underneath. As the sump pump did its job, though, I could see water moving, but new thin layers of ice were also forming.

Sadly, the free flow was not to be. By Monday morning, the ice had refrozen almost up to the previous level I’d chipped away. By Monday evening, it was overflowing even that — somewhat of a blessing, since that meant that it was still flowing, somehow.

While chatting with one of my neighbors, I found out that we probably have a spring behind our house. This makes sense, but it’s not comforting. We probably have the lowest basement on our side of the street, so we depend upon the entire system for our sump pump to be working. Thank goodness for the new battery backup, which we needed during a power outage caused the recent ice storm in January.

Well, I better get back to bailing out our little pond, and perhaps some chipping.

I’ve been having problems trying to order several neat horizontal LED night lights for the basement from Pegasus Associates Lighting and I don’t know what the problem with their Web store is. Unfortunately, after several attempts, it’s just not working—and I haven’t had a chance to call them at their 800 number. I really want to get those lights because they are the most perfect ones I’ve found for my particular application.