At any rate, there is now.  I have accepted a job at a large public university in Georgia, and will be moving there on March 12.  I’ll be living about 45 minutes northwest of Savannah.  While I’ve already announced this in other not-fully-public forums, I have yet to put something out on the inter-web in a fully open manner.

Basically, the job is the next step up from the one that I currently do.  I’ll be supervising a few people who work as Resident Directors, and will be doing some other stuff, too.  The area is nice, and the school has a really good ‘vibe’ to it, but it is a little bit in the middle of nowhere.  This isn’t terrible, but it will be an adjustment from living in Oakland.

This is something that is both exciting and neat, but also sad and a bit scary, too.  I really like living in Pittsburgh, and I suspect that it will always be a target area for me in future job hunts.  Right now, however, there just doesn’t appear to be any ‘next step’ positions for me here.

As some of you may have noticed, things haven’t been operating quite so smoothly here for a little while. Sometime around the middle of November, the database that runs the site went BOOM! Not being a database expert, and being unsure how to fix the problem, it took me a while to get around to getting things all back up and running. Fourtantely, I was able to finally get things back up and running.

So, what happened? Well, I had been using a WordPress plugin called Firestats. The purpose of this little plugin is to track your site statistics: hit counts, recent visitors, pages visited, recent referrers, popular search terms, and other things of that sort. Well, this program was a 0.9.8 beta release, but it had gone through several revisions, and looked to be ready for use. Too bad it wasn’t. After working fine for a few weeks, the program eventually managed to entirely mangle the WordPress database. As Jeremy said, “Now you’ve learned a valuable lesson about using beta release software.”

Once I finally decided to get started on fixing the problem, Jeremy pointed me to some docs on how to fix MySQL databases. The problem is that due to the way my hosting is set up, it didn’t seem like my account had permissions to run the proper programs on the database tables. After much stalling and frustration over a week or so about this, I finally looked around my directories and found a database dump from July, the last time I had upgraded WordPress.

After taking a dump of the current (screwed up) database, I nuked it, recreated it and imported the July dump. One of the tables in the July dump, the wp categories table, had become corrupted though. What I ended up doing is cutting the categories table from the recent dump, which I was pretty sure was ok, and pasting it over the table in the July dump. I then reimported the new spliced dump. It worked. I threw up my hands in victory and cheered so loud my undergrad-neighbors probably think I’m a crazy old man.¹

The problem with using the July dump, obviously, is that it would only have posts up until that point. This was a total of about 12 posts. Since that time, I’ve made about 27 more. Well, forunately for me, all of the more recent posts were still in the corrupted db that I dumped, they just weren’t in the proper format any more. I’m now in the process of going through the dump file in a text editor and retrieving the posts ‘by hand’. I’m a little more than 1/3 of the way done with this process. It shouldn’t take me that much longer to get the rest in. I’ll have it done sometime tomorrow, I think.  The down side is that it looks like I have lost any of the comments that were  made after July.  While this is unfortunate, at least I was able to save the most of the other things from the corrupted database.
What does this mean for you? Well, nothing really.. unless you’re reading this through the Livejournal feed. If that’s the case, then you’re probably going to get my last 10 posts all at once on your friends page. I apologize for that, but there doesn’t seem to be much of a way around it. Hey, at least it will give you a refresher.
So, stay tuned for the complete restoration of theantidj.net along with the much awaited conclusion to the “To Ohio and Back” story… coming this weekend!

________

¹Who am I kidding? I’m pretty sure they thought I was a crazy old man already.

The theme is based of of this dude‘s Ice theme. Once I get it all up and running I’ll get a proper credit-where-credit’s due page up for my variation of it. I like the theme, but I am planning on tweaking it out a little. I’ve already made a new background image.. based on a photo I took all by myself. 10 points to the first person who can guess what is pictured.

If you’re reading this on the Livejournal feed, please check it out at theantidj.net so that you can check out it’s hotness.

Your feedback is welcome. No, it is actually actively requested. Thanks.

Clearly I couldn’t allow myself to continue in such a sorry state, so I did the only reasonable thing. I bought a new toy. Behold my new keyboard and mouse, the Logitech S 510 Cordless Desktop:

So far, the set up is working out quite well. There were a couple bumps in the road at the begining though. The software packaged with the package didn’t support Firefox as a web browser, so none of the hot key features worked to launch things in Firefox. Also, I couldn’t configure the tilt wheel to perform the ‘forward’ and ‘back’ browsing features in the browser, either. The Logitech website, however, had an update to the software, and now everything works fine with everyone’s favorite memory-hogging browser.

The range on the keyboard is pretty good. I can use it to control iTunes’ behavior from across the room. The photo viewing hot keys are pretty useless. Why does someone need a dedicated “rotate photo” button that only works in the windows photo browser window? If I can get the zoom and rotate buttons to work in The GIMP, though, then they might be more useful. My only other complaint so far is the scrollwheel mouse button. In order to activate it as the middle mouse button, it needs a little bit too much force to be comfortable. Trying to click it also frequently ends up in triggering one of the tilt wheel buttons. This will probably get better as I get more used to the feel of the mouse.

In other news, I’m starting the process of redesigning this site and making it not so….. black and green. I’m probably going to use Jeremy‘s Cereal Port theme as a starting point, as I want the content area to resize. This is something that most WordPress themes, such as my current one, fail to do.

The plan for the night? Well, I’m about to have some dinner, and then there’s a little gathering for my former fellow RD / newly promoted supervisor. As of today, she’s officially ABD.

Ok, food time.

Why has the mighty theantidj.net been so neglected by its creator? The answer is simple. The AntiDJ is gone. I last stepped behind the decks 7 months ago at Flux, while back in CT for winter break. Prior to that, I did a guest spot at Ceremony in July of 2005.
As for my own DJ rig, I haven’t touched it in well over a year, except for moving it over to my new apartment.

When I first moved to Pittsburgh, one of the things that I worried about is that I would miss my weekly time in the DJ booth, whether at the club or on the radio. I did miss it at first. But after a while, after getting settled in Pittsburgh, working at the University, and finding some new interests, I found myself missing the DJ thing less and less. These days, I’m not even really interested in going out to the club too frequently anymore.

I guess what it comes down to, is that people’s interests change over time. From 1998 – 2004, I was playing some form of electronic, goth, or industrial people every week, at times, 2 – 3 times a week. DJing was my main recreational activity. Now, I really have no interest in such things.

The basic jist of this post: there is no more AntiDJ.

So what becomes of this site? Well, I keep it of course! I’m not going to throw away a perfectly good URL. I will start updating this again, just as a general blog. I’ll probably talk some about music. But I’ll probably talk more about my persepectives on my field of work, on other stuff, and of course, Poker.

So, stay tuned, dear readers. There’ll be some more content here soon.