Asymptomatic

My writing queue is a mile long, and a year overdue. I've got ideas aplenty, a paradox of choice, and an imagined readership (not in its quantity, but its consistency) that demands perfection.

I've just noticed, moments ago, that the blogs I most enjoy reading these days are short. Three paragraphs convey their entire message. Most of the time, the message is a simple impression. You read it and you feel... a certain way. It's like sense memory -- a whiff of a stranger's prose puts you in a familiar place.

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For anyone who's notices some misbehavior on this site, I'm working on getting Asymptomatic moved to a different host.

The host it's currently on, unixshell, is fine, except for the fact that they're inconsistent with their ability to provide new hosting, and they're not all that keep on backups. I lost a lot of data over the summer that I'm not happy about, but is probably more my fault than theirs. Still, that they don't offer automated snapshot backups or a separate backup location as an add-on service is a potential problem.

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Sorry, gang. Some doofuses are sending spam comments into my server (and a few other things, it seems) at a rate that's too fast for Apache to keep up. As a result, Apache just seems to hang and become unresponsive.

Unable to detect when an incoming request is a valid commenter before passing the request on to WordPress' comment processing system, leaving this unchecked takes down the whole server within a minute or two. There's nothing to do about it but research the incoming requests and, in the meantime, disable the comment form. Rather, the thing that processes the comments for WordPress.

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I have no notes from my meetup in New York with the friendly WordPress bloggers there, but I will get to writing about it eventually. There's a topic I need to dance lightly around first.

This site has always been my own ramblings and unfocused entries. This isn't likely to change. What I do need to adjust is what I care about and how it affects what I write.

I started this site to dump my writing onto. A few days ago, I wrote something about the potato people living under my front porch - a short work of fiction - and got many messages from people wondering if I had gone crazy. Well that's really what the site is supposed to be, you know? Writing. Of whatever quality and substance.

I also stopped using my own home-grown blog/CMS software because I was spending more time maintaining it than I was writing. Ironically, I became very involved in WordPress development after switching. While I see it necessary to write about things that matter to me - blogging being one of those things - I really should concentrate on what I love about what I write, even if I'm writing about something that I hate. Perhaps I should focus on those things on my own, rather than worry about what other people are writing.

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Ok, I'm writing this again, hopefully for the last time.

Last Thursday, a RAID controller on the server that hosts this site went bad and took out the entire server's data. As far as I've been able to determine, the site data is completely unrecoverable.

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