Daniel Slaughter

My girlfriend’s, Martha’s, parents bought me a racing jersey along with gift cards to various places (Meijer’s Gas Station, Rivertown Crossings, Movie Theatres). This racing jersey is pretty nice. I was not expecting them to spend that much on me. I had assumed they bought me clothing because it was wrapped in one of those boxes you would get with clothing in it. Here are a couple pictures, taken with my LG VX8600, that show me in my gear:

Ain’t I fancy?

Martha’s Sister got us a gift certificate to Applebees, and her mom bought her a gift certificate to the Comedy Den. I suppose dinner and entertainment is on them this year! =)

I bought Martha a Rubiks cube because she had mentioned she wanted one a while back. It was one of those random presents you get someone because you don’t expect them to guess it. Anyways, at Martha’s Christmas party they were having the pass around game where you each select or steal a present from someone else. The present I managed to get contained another Rubiks cube!!! Which is sweet, because I stole Martha’s and wouldn’t give it back.

From my parents I got assorted clothes and a Ronco Dehydrator. This dehydrator will come in handy for making delicious dehydrated fruits and assorted jerky products. I have yet to use it, but I will let you know when I do.

I think that’s pretty much it for now. I have two more Christmas parties to go to this week, so I’m sure I’ll have more to report when those are done.

-Daniel Slaughter

I went to The Verve Pipe concert at the Intersection Saturday night. It was pretty sweet. Here are some pictures of the concert I took with my LG VX8600:

I have a movie that’s in my cell-phone’s .3g2 format. I’ll find a converter and then post it for you to see in the future. It is 45 seconds of The Verve Pipe’s “Colors.”

Until Next Time,
Daniel Slaughter

Today, just for fun, I searched Google.com for the term “Daniel Slaughter” and found my site first in the 1,210,000 results returned.

Oh what a beautiful Christmas present!

The one (literally),
-Daniel Slaughter

I purchased a Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL from amazon.com. This router is pretty good, it has excellent options and good output distance. I needed to go from the house to the shop (~100 feet). The signal does a good job going through two foundation walls and through the outdoors.

This gives a Low-Good signal on my laptop, however, it does not work well with the network cards I purchased. In the shop it was getting No Signal to Very-Low. To the computers in my room, I get a Low-Good, ~75% Signal Strength, ~%90 Link Quality (so there is no problem there). There must be some interference or something near/in the shop.

I was at the mall today and went into radio shack just to check out if they had any cheap name brand (Linksys) cards that might get a better signal. They had a USB connector with a -$40 instant rebate for $20! So I purchased it, installed it, and the shop is now getting Low-Good signal.

Now all I need is to call Charter, w00t,
Daniel Slaughter

Why is it…
written but not writting?
command, comma, commend, but not comme?

You know that feeling you get when you get to the end of a deodorant stick, and the plastic pieces slice small scrapes into your armpits?

Well, I just experienced that with chap-stick.

And this picture really has nothing to do with it, other than I think it’s funny.

The response I got (which I assumed):

“Hello Daniel, The reason it charged you as soon as you made the change is because when you change the billing cycle or selected plan, the changes reset the cycle and the effects are immediate. I’ll go ahead and wipe out the $70.01 that is owed on the account, as this was simply an honest mistake. If there’s anything else I can help you with, please let me know! Thanks! Christian”

The good news is that I do not have to pay $70.01, thank you Dreahost. w00t!
Daniel Slaughter

I logged into Dreahost today to register thewlbl.com through them for hosting (my current host is about to expire). So, while I was in there I started playing in the account settings page. I went to the page that shows me how much my billing cycles are because I was curious what it would cost me next year. I changed the term from 1 year to 2 years because they said I would get 20% off. After changing it, it billed me $140, so I changed it back. It now says I owe them $70 (even though I’m paid in full). I’ve sent them an email and I am waiting for their response.

Wish me good luck,
Daniel Slaughter

The other day I was trying to find a new @gmail.com email account. I’m sick and tired of explaining to people what “wmasterme” means: everyone is a little pervert! In my search for a new name I found that daniel.slaughter, dan.slaughter, danielslaughter, d.slaughter, dslaughter, and of course slaughter was unavailable. I was appalled at my findings and discouraged that I was no longer a unique individual. So, I thought to myself, what if danielslaughter.com was taken? I quickly whois-ed the site, noticing it wasn’t registered I took it into my arms.

And then I was thinking about creating a wiki-like site where users could post comments on the pages I created. But… why? Why not just use this fantastic, already created, little application called WordPress? I had never installed it before so I set out to do so.

WordPress’ website proposed it would take me 5 minutes to install it on my server. I assumed not, but went ahead with it anyways. The following are the steps and encounters I had when installing WordPress:

1. Download and unzip the WordPress package:
This step wasn’t too bad, I’m on dialup and the files are compressed, so this 622KB file took about two minutes.

2. Create a database for WordPress on your web server with a MySQL user:
Again, an easy step… I had previously today done this for one of my classes to host a PDA Bank Application, so I knew exactly where to go in my host’s admin. This step took another two minutes.

3. Rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php:
I think that took less time than writing out this sentence.

4. Open wp-config.php and fill in your database details:
Less than 30 seconds to complete this step. Good, so we’re maybe 4.5 minutes into this 5 minute process.

5. Upload wordpress to your web server:
Uh oh… Let’s just say dialup sucks. I dragged and dropped the files onto my web server, brushed my teeth, went pee, and still had time to watch the 8 minute file transfer complete. We have obviously now exceeded our 5 minutes by 7.5 minutes.

6. Run the WordPress installation script on your server.
Two steps, and I pretty much just hit next, this took maybe 30 seconds if I wasn’t picky.

And we’re done! As you can see, if I was not on dialup WordPress would not have taken 12 minutes to install. Perhaps WordPress should have a disclaimer that their proposed speeds are based on your internet connection. Oh well, 12 minutes isn’t bad.

Until next time,
Daniel Slaughter