October 14, 2005
New server
Migrating to a new server (again). May experience some down time this weekend.
Saturday update: I should be back and running as normal now. Please let me know if you run into anything out of hte ordinary!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 11:45 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
New server on the way
I'll be migrating to a new server over the next few days. Hopefully it won't be all that painful - just need to figure out how to transfer the DB and the rest, I'm hoping, will be easy. If the site, or Jim's, looks to be down when you visit, please check back in the next day or two.
Hopefully, the new server will put an end to the lag time you've seen while commenting. In fact, it should already be better because I've already moved some things over to the new server, which lightens the load on this box. I'll get back to regular blogging as soon as possible.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 16, 2005
I was tagged
What time did you get up this morning?
6:30 AM
Diamonds or pearls?
Diamonds
What was the last film you saw at the cinema?
Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith
What is your favourite TV show?
Toss up between Dallas and Knots Landing
What is your middle name?
Troy
What is your favorite cuisine?
Whatever Grandma's cook'n
What foods do you dislike?
Thai, Somali
What is your favourite crisp/chip flavour?
Usually original / classic, but will sometimes opt for Sour Cream'n Onion if I have to pick something.
What is your favourite CD at the moment?
The Garden State Soundtrack
What is your favorite song?
Oh too many. It seems like I say, "Oh that's my favorite song ever" at least once a day. Love old school Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, etc. Currently liking Coldplay and more folky-stuff. Never: Country, Rap, Showtunes.
What kind of vehicle do you drive?
VW Jetta
What is your favourite sandwich?
PB&J, Ham, Grilled Cheese with tomato. Do burgers count?
What characteristics do you despise?
Cockiness, hatred, tendancies towards blind judgements
What is your favourite item of clothing?
My rhinestone tiara
If you could go anywhere on vacation, where would you go?
NYC
What colour is your bathroom?
White
What colour pants are you wearing?
J. Crew jeans in a dark blue with prefaded thighs and knees
Where would you retire?
Laguna Beach, CA
What is your favourite time of the day?
Whenever I can get some "Me time"
What is your most memorable birthday?
This past one - 26 years
What's the last thing you ate?
A fruit & yogurt sundae
If you were a crayon, what color would you be?
WTF is this? I'd be lavendar, of course.
What is your favorite cartoon character?
HeMan, G.I.Joe
What is your favorite flower?
Orchid
What fabric detergent do you use?
Tide
Do you wish on stars?t
No
What is your shoe size?
10.5 - 11
Do you have any pets?
Just Peves
Last person you talked to on the phone?
Chris
What did you want to be when you were little?
A Kenwood Housewife
What are you meant to be doing now?
Lying in a ditch
What do you first notice about someone?
In guys - their arms. In girls - their voice.
What was your favourite toy as a child?
My General Lee pedal car
Summer or winter?
Summer, duh.
Hugs or Kisses?
Hugs.
Chocolate or vanilla?
Chocolate
Living arrangements?
Roommate
When was the last time you cried?
The day before I went into treatment - about a year and 4 months back.
What is under your bed?
A few dust-bunnies.
In how many cities have you lived?
2 Metro areas, but technically 4 cities.
Favourite movie of all time?
Magnolia
Mountains or beach?
Beach
Full names of your potential kids?
Don't plan on having any, so I've never thought about it.
What is your usual bedtime?
It varies. Sometimes it's 2:00 AM, sometimes it's 11:00 PM.
Tag, you're it:
Joe
Chadfox
Wanda
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:21 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
May 24, 2005
More will be revealed
Please ignore the current mess of a situation in the Gallery. PHP sucks ass - and not in a good way. In the meantime, please entertain yourself with this site. If you're not in the biz, you'll think it's funny. If you're in the biz, you'll think it's sad but true.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:33 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
May 08, 2005
Call your mother
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 28, 2005
Miscelaneous Entry
Addicting game to waste your day away.
Locate actual cell phone towers!
Sprint
TMobile
Verizon (though not as cool as the other two)
Fiddy-cent jewelry that's hipper than hip.
Make your own DVR - I'm just enough of a geek that I may try this ;-)
Somebody took it up the poop-shooter ...
Let it Be is closing down it's retail location, but will continue on the 'net - read on:
Open email from Let It Be owner Ryan Cameron:
When I was a kid, my mom used to tell people that I learned how to read off the labels of the 45s my older brothers had passed on to me. While it did not provide an extensive vocabulary, by the age of 5 I certainly knew who the Beatles were and their song titles. Later I progressed to LPs (again, passed on) that I wore out beyond recognition with that cheap little phonograph that my parents had bought for me. I was hooked and I never turned back.
Music has always been the background to my life. I knew when I was young that I wanted to work in a record store, and just after turning 16, I was. I wound my way through, working at various stores, knowing that someday I would own one of my own. In 1987, my dream came true. I've always strived to have the best store possible. Over the years, many co-workers have passed through the doors (Paulie, Sam, RIP). I credit them, as much as myself, for making our store a success over these years. And of course our customers who have supported us in surviving retail for 18 years.
Over the past 5 years, the music industry has changed dramatically. What did not change was our desire to maintain a great store despite the changes. Music was always our concern. No bongs, incense, refrigerators, etc. Just music. Who knows how the music world will change in the future, but there will ALWAYS be great music. There will always be great record stores (virtual or brick and mortar). Independent record stores are the lifeblood of the industry. I encourage anyone reading this to support indie stores, as they are ground zero for the music community.
Let It Be Records will be closing our doors on or around June 15th. A redevelopment of our block has led me to the decision of whether to relocate the store, and I have decided not to do so. There are many reasons for my choice, some personal, some business, but it is my choice. Even if we stayed until the full length of our lease next year, I had already made the decision not renew it. I've owned the store for almost half my life, and feel I really need to change gears. I will be concentrating on my mail order business of rare vinyl and CDs, based at www.letitbe.com. My co-workers will go on shaping the local music scene in their own ways. Many are DJs who spin their musical favorites regularly.
Thanks again to all the customers over the years, all my co-workers, the bands/musicians who have supported our store with in-store performances, my parents & family, my wife Kellie (owner of Via's Vintage Wear-24th & Hennepin), and my dear departed dog Calvin. I couldn't have, and wouldn't have done it without you.
Let It Be,
Ryan Cameron
Owner
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:12 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
April 10, 2005
Free iBook my ass!
Ok, so a while back I put up a link and image in my sidebar advertising a free ibook. It was some scheme I ran across on somebody else's blog and I said I would try it out and report back on my findings.
Well ... here's what I found:
NOTHING
The gist of it was this:
1. Sign up for a free iBook
2. Complete one of several online offers - some of these costed money, others were free.
3. Get 18 other people to sign up for their free iBook and successfully complete an offer - same offers mentioned above in step two.
That's it - sounds easy, right? Well here's what my experience was:
I signed up for a credit card offer. I was approved and they sent me a new card. Then I went back to the website to see if my status was changed from 'not having completed an offer' to 'having completed an offer.' It had not changed - the site was still showing that I needed to complete an offer in order to be elligable for my free iBook. I checked the FAQs, which stated it sometimes takes a couple of weeks for your offer to show up as having been completed.
So I waited.
One month later my offer "still had not been completed." What a joke. So I began reading through the FAQs again and noticed there was a manual option to click if "you had completed an offer, but it wasn't being reflected on the website." So I clicked that, was prompted as to which offer I completed, I specified my offer, and nothing happened.
So I waited another month.
In the meantime five other folks had signed up with the program through my link. Mysteriously none of them had completed offers either.
It's now been about 3 months since I completed my offer. During that time I've just become frustrated with it, and it's 12k extra that my blog visitors have to download with the iBook image. I've now removed the image and given up any hopes of my free iBook. Ah well, I guess I'll be sticking with PCs ... the Gods don't like Macs :-)
Posted by SparklesMpls at 12:22 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
April 08, 2005
Blogger recover feature
To my friends in the nether using Blogger for their posting habbits, you know how frustrating it is to take the time composing a post, only to hit submit and get an error - now your post is gone.
A couple of days ago, Blogger announced a "recover" feature that auto-saves your entry as you type. Good news here.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:17 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
March 22, 2005
It's for a good cause...
Please tell ten friends to tell ten today! The Breast Cancer site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily to meet their quota of donating at least one free mammogram a day to an underprivileged woman. It takes less than a minute to go to their site and click on "donating A mammogram" for free (pink window in the middle). This doesn't cost you A thing. Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily Visits to donate mammogram in exchange for advertising.
Here's the web site! Pass it along to people you know.
www.thebreastcancersite.com
Posted by SparklesMpls at 10:34 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
March 19, 2005
My site was hacked
... still trying to get things back online.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 12:35 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack
February 10, 2005
Damnit, Damnit, Damnit
Okay, so I installed the MT Blacklister plugin. This is a good thing, because it'll stop 95% of the comment and trackback spammers.
Unfortunately, in the process of despamming my blog, I inadvertantly deleted ALL comments.
Oh well, now I know.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 08:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2005
The new me
I finally had some time to put my new blog in order. After installing Movable Type a couple days ago, I knew that putting together a look for the site and integrating my gallery wouldn't be as easy as dragging and dropping. But now it's done! Well, almost - I still have to put together an 'about' page for myself, but I did get the gallery working in the template!
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 12, 2005
Hello Movable Type!
I've made the big jump to Movable Type. After many frustrating nights trying to get it installed I finally emailed my hosting company looking for help. Turns out that my MySQL server wasn't actually adding the new user I was adding with the admin tool. Who'da thunk?
I'm now looking for a template, or maybe I'll get really crazy and try to create one myself. In the meantime I'm going to go through all of my previous entries and clean them up, as the import of my old blogger.com data wasn't without it's own small flaws... the largest of which is that my comments will probably be gone forever :-(
Posted by SparklesMpls at 01:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 22, 2004
Updated friends list
I finally got around to adding some additional friends to my list on the right - please visit them, too - they're superheros :-)
Posted by SparklesMpls at 03:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 25, 2004
Combining hosts
I'm moving my site over to another host so I can rid myself of an unnecessary bill - don't ask me why I signed up for a second host. Okay, it was to try out this nifty webstats package that didn't end up being so nifty afterall. Anyhow, you may see an older version of the site for a short period of time. Don't worry - nothing's been lost and the world isn't going to end :-) Everything will be back to normal within about 24-48 hours.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 06:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
YEAH!!!! I'm on my new host
I'm back and things should be back to normal :-)
Posted by SparklesMpls at 06:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 13, 2004
I got a new photo gallery
I am so proud of myself - I actually installed a
href="http://www.andiamsomebody.com/gallery/albums.php">new photo gallery on my own! It makes it super-easy to manage a photo library online - LUV it.
Otherwise, I'm totally sunburned after my 3 hours at the pool today. I'm going to go try to get to sleep.
Posted by SparklesMpls at 06:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
