MatthewValitalo.com

Another year, another blog post, I guess.

So before I went into work yesterday, I decided to run a full scan on my Windows 7 machine in Security Essentials. It was just some sort of feeling, and it turned out to be a boon. When I returned, it found some PHP backdoor script in my WordPress backups.

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Looks like I haven’t posted anything in a… yyyyeeeaarrr… huh. How about that?

It seems only like last week that I gave that bear to Jill (‘Marcia’ has since given me permission to use her real name :P). What an interesting year it’s been since… You see,  about that time I had listen to Daft Punk’s The Prime Time of Your Life and really took the lyrics in. I started taking the song as a motivator, telling myself that “This is the prime time of your life. Now. Do it today.”

So I did it; a week later, I asked Jill out on a date. (continue reading…)

So a few weeks back, I was browsing reddit (‘sup guys!) when I came across this bear:

I just knew I had to buy it. So I did. (continue reading…)

Ah, the new year quickly approaches. Old dreams are burned, making room for new goals and aspirations. This cool weather is so life-affirming and energizing; I don’t recall another time that I wanted to accomplish so much. I suppose I’m starting to put away childish things (mainly mindsets).

I’ve moved this site to DreamHost, and so far it’s pretty fantastic. I’m not even day three or so of my free trial, and I’m already sold on this new host. Unlimited domain hosting, bandwidth, diskspace, SQL databases, FTP/shell users (shell access! YES!) and a bunch of stuff for under ten bucks a month for two years. If you’re interested, I can create some promo codes to get you a discount on new accounts. Otherwise if you’ll say that matthewvalitalo AT gmail DOT com referred you, that would be awesome, ’cause I get monay. <3

This is awesome that I can host unlimited domains too. I also have wundersprockets.com hosted, but that’s just going to be a sandbox so I can play around with/teach myself some PHP. Oh, anyway, enough geeking out.

Firstly, I want to tell you how my Christmas Eve went. Oh, how I hate working holidays at a grocery store. (continue reading…)

This post brought to you by Mighty BOB! I need to back up my data more often. 😡

So picture this: It’s four minutes to close while you’re working at a grocery store. A customer comes up with all the items she wants to purchase in a cart. After ringing a sizable amount of items, the total is around $270.00. She writes out a check, and we follow policy of making sure her phone number and such is on the check, and I feed the check in the machine as per usual. An error message displays in the register, simply that we cannot accept the check. The closing manager of the night says she thinks she remembers that with this particular error, the check can only be accepted if it’s for $150 or less.

The customer does not have another method of payment. So, we start voiding all sorts of items to try to get the total down. Most of these items need to get back, as many are either cold or frozen items; luckily we have someone to take care of these items.

We spend approximately 20 minutes or so doing this, and we finally reach a total of less than $150. The check is finally fed into the machine! Joy!

Same error. 🙁

Unfortunately, since the customer didn’t have another form of payment, the whole order had to be voided out. Apologies for the convenience, ma’am. Here’s a number you can call to try work out a solution with your checks.

Then there was the last customer; I’m so glad. Almost time to finish up the work night. There were two or so items that this customer pointed out having an incorrect price. Now, customers do deserve to get the prices that are advertised, but… sigh. It’s 30 minutes past closing. Please let us know without sounding agitated; we would like to get home too.

Once finished with a few purchases by associates and getting the register situated, around three of us or so needed to get the rest of the items back on the shelves or freezers, which took about 15 minutes more.

Yeah, this was definitely how I wanted to spend my Saturday instead of going out of town to see someone and have some fun at the local fair. 🙁 That’s a rant for another day, though.

Sorry, I needed to vent.

Oh! And the moral of the story is this: Please use a card or cash when purchasing things nowadays! Please avoid using checks, thank you. 🙁

Aagh!

Okay, so I don’t know if it’s the boredom of sitting around the house for too long, but certain songs have been looping in my head for the past few days. Right as I am typing this, Daft Punk’s Human After All is occupying my mind. Other times of the day, other tracks from the same album (also called Human After All) just take the same place, and it’s almost driving me to the madhouse.

Listening to the album doesn’t help for long. I get distracted for a bit, but eventually the album runs out of tracks and it starts all over again. Apparently my mind isn’t getting tired of it. Listening to other music isn’t of much help either, as I’ve now added another song to this pesky loop.

It’s a good thing that I don’t hate this music, but that actually may be the problem. I don’t know what to do to get this to stop. 🙁

Anyway, maybe some good karma will swing my way if I share the album with you. Here, you can at least get a taste here: http://www.last.fm/music/Daft+Punk/Human+After+All

So, I logged into my WordPress to find that there was a new version available. Neat. Since I can’t unzip remotely on my hosting, I couldn’t do the autoupdate and had to download the update, unzip it and upload every single file and directory one-by-one. The first time I did this was when I first set up WordPress here, and I didn’t have a problem (except finding out about the little unzipping problem). But tonight proved to drive me further into insanity.

I fired up FileZilla  and queued up all the files like normal, and it went smoothly at first. Probably at the final 200 or so files though, some of the transfers were reaching 100%, but they ultimately failed. Whatever, reset it and re-queue them up. I had to do this a handful of times until two files remained left. After about a half hour, those things just kept doing the same thing over and over, reaching 100% but with the transfer failing. What the crap? Reset, requeue. Reset, requeue. Lather, rinse, repeat. Argh!

So then I opened up Windows Explorer to connect to my FTP server. The transfers worked without a hitch.

Way to drop the ball, FileZilla.