Everybody back in the pool!

Trust me, it's funnier if you know what's been going on the past 24 hours or so.  The short version is that those of you wanting to jump the gun and position yourself for the goofy madness that is the Quarto unveiling can go to the registration page and sign up to be a registered commenter.

("But, Mom, do we have to?")

Of course not.  But it means that I'll be a sweetie, and run the nifty little script that marks your old comments as belonging to your new account, thus tying your personal info provided in the comment to the contact information in your account.  (In other words, change your contact info in your account, and all your old comments reflect the change.  Databases kick ass.)

Once I move 'cat.net to Quarto, this means that you'll also gain editing privs on future comments, as well as the old ones that I link to your account.  Those who don't register are stuck with their typos; the rest of you can pretend that you actually got it right the first time.

So, about this "everybody back in the pool" thing.

See, I hadn't meant to throw everyone out of the pool in the first place.  Last night I ran Gareth's lovely little conversion script over my entries and comments (six hundred of one, a thousand of the other—we're pretty wordy around here) and discovered a couple of glitches in how entries were being imported.  At the time, I had two sites set up on Quarto; a site for testing the conversion of domesticat entries and a site full of randomness that was being tested on Quartography.

(That's where all my Quarto-related code will be posted, just to keep that mess separate from cat.net.)

When it came time to delete the old entries from the cat.net testbed and try things again with the modified conversion script, I did the deletion from the command line because it was quicker.

Quicker, yes, but the problem came when I mis-typed the SQL command and hosed every single entry from both sites.  I stared at my monitor (lower lip quivering, preschool-fashion) wondering why in the world The Powers That Be felt it necessary to allow that one stupid SQL statement to have no errors in it.

Most of the time, I'm saved by my own stupidity; I'm generally not competent enough to cause serious damage.  But my practice of late seems to have honed my destructive capabilities, and there I sat with no entries and no comments whatsoever.

Frell.

So I deleted everything, and started over from the install script—thereby discovering more things that needed tweaking.  (Rule 1:  always work from your most recent version of your install script.  Does wonders for the finished product.)  Broke more stuff.  Did more lip-quivering.  (Didn't help.)  Fixed the code.  (Helped.)

A bit more work today, and I got things back where I needed them to be.  A couple of variables that I thought were superfluous turned out to be really necessary; their addition, plus other bits and pieces of work, made life much better.

So, about the pool thing?  I ended up having to hose the test sites, and I kept having images of someone yelling "Shark!" and everyone bailing out of the pool.

Anyway - do your registration thing.  The kitties will beam happy thoughts in your direction if you do.  Soon enough, you'll get to put your registration bits to good use. 

In the meantime—have fun, fellow swimmers!

(P.S. - I let friends have the first crack at the low user numbers.  Sorry, guys; the single-digit user_ids were gone in about five minutes.  It's doubles and triples for the rest of you…and the day that this thing starts to matter, I'm crawling under my desk and NOT coming out.)

Comments

I'm going over to the deep end, who wants to join me?

Out of curiosity, how do we find out what number we are? :)

Ask? :) The single-digit users are... ...me ...Edmund (my test account) ...Jeff ...Donovan (I know him; you guys don't) ...you, Jess ...Noah ...Will ...Jeremy ...Sean userids will become more obvious later, as I get more functions going. For now I've changed the edit-yourself page so you can see your user_id. Took about five seconds to implement; can't hurt.

So I didn't even get a single-digit number? Curse work. Curse it. Of course, now I need to go back and undelete the email with the funky pass ... I thought this was a throwaway reg. :(

Amen Geof. Oh well, maybe I'm in the teens.

CANNONBALL... I just jumped into the deep end. I hope that I didn't displace too much water...but you never know. Hey....whats that floating over there in the corner.....ITS MR. HANKEY....wait...no it isn't. That's just Spade's Baby Ruth. Enough of the juvenile witticism...back to work for me.

Work??? We don't need your stinkin' work!

Yeah, I'm hoping I at least made it somewhere in the teens. Can we yell stuff about life being unfair?

Ah, for once I get lucky. =) Maybe I can sell my user id for a good sum on eBay in a few months. Take a good look around and savour this - mark my words, once you unleash Quarto on the world, things around here won't ever be quite the same. (Hopefully for the better, of course, and not the worse. =) But it *will* change.)

I know. We've fired some pretty long emails back and forth on that very subject. What was sad was that I was sitting here when the comment-notification email for your comment came through...my immediate reaction was: "I'm going to be a lot more worried when things actually WORK!" *heh*

Yep. We'll then get the legion of ass-kissers that will just praise Amy to the skies. -retch-

I'm hoping the complexity of the display functions will scare everyone away. I am worried about that sort of thing, though. From what I can tell, it happens to just about anyone crazy enough to write a CMS. The thing is, I like cat.net just the way it is right now -- me, and a small group of folk I've come to care greatly about, throwing words back and forth at each other because we enjoy it. Quarto is not a thing to be praised; it is a thing to be used. It's a TOOL. I'm hesitant enough to let it out at all (with good reason, I think) because I know perfectly well that 99% of the popularity this site will receive as a result will be for the wrong reasons. The best thing about Quarto is that once it's stable, I can get back to writing. That's why this all got started in the first place. But what's a drop of water in an ocean of compromise? (There are about three people who read this site who will get that quote. The rest of you -- don't worry about it.)

*pssst* hey, kid! yeah, you... come here a sec... you see this? you know what that is right! thats a SINGLE DIGIT USER ID! mah very own... they werent easy to come by back in the day. had to be pretty fast on the draw... *sigh* those were the days, fastest right click in the west... But Kid, they say... that it prolongs life, cures all ills and turns any metal into gold. Some even say *lowers voice* it makes people _listen_ to you! but I dont believe a word of it... tell you what kid... you gimme that snazzy pair of puma's your wearin' and ill give you my coveted single didgit user id? fair deal? say, you wouldnt want to top up your side of the deal with a pack of smokes and a bottle of mouthwash would you? fair's fair eh? have fun with it kid... oh! and WHATEVER you do, dont forget: dont get it wet, and never EVER feed it after midight! you got that kid! now go on, get outta here! ... ahh hell, benson and hedges? man I I'd sell my left arm for a pack of Camels... hmmm... not a bad idea.

Will, it'd cost you an arm in the States to buy a pack, to be sure. Well, the fawning on Noah's site has gone over to his photography work. While it's certainly worth fawning over, what really gigs me is all the superficial commentary that people make, especially when Noah is pouring out his very soul on his site and getting back, well, fluff. But this is a rant that I've had before. I don't want to see the site of a person that I care about very much become some simplistic appreciation society. I mean, hey, I'm a big fan of Amy's, but really ... dig in yourself and offer something back to the person who's offered so much to you. Thanks are simply not enough. /end rant

Thanks, Geof. ;D You're quite right, actually (as I was recently writing to Amy about this very thing). Compliments -are- nice, don't get me wrong, I AM grateful for them - but that's not what I'm after (though I fear the impression is otherwise, scaring off many people who *would* give deeper comments because it may look like the fawning is all I want). A thoughtful response - not necessarily complimentary or critical, but one genuinely from the heart, or at least articulating some form of intellectual and/or emotional response to the actual photo or entry being presented - is the best compliment that anyone can give me, anyway. And unfortunately, I do think I lost a lot of that when I released Greymatter and became a "big deal" (blech!) ... but the thoughtful stuff does still make itself felt often enough to keep me going. Anyway, as for domesticat.net - all of us that cared about dc.n long before Quarto was a $twinkle in Amy's $ENV_BODY->$eye will continue doing so long after the Next Cool Thing has come along (right, guys?) - and in the meantime, 98% of the new flood of folks may care about it for the wrong reasons, but that just means at least 2% more will come along caring about it for the right ones; it can't close any doors that are meant to stay open, and it can only open new ones. The whole experience did bring some great things my way - and as for the bad things... well, you've always been much better at dealing with b.s. than I have. ;) (whew!)

You're welcome, Noah. I wrote that as much for you as Amy, for all of us, really. That way, if the madding crowd of fawning masses shows up, I'm going to point them at that exact rant and go tell them to attempt aerial fornication with a rolling fried dough toroid.

Oh, and did I mention that I have UID #21? See, 21 and over is legal. :p

To quote Dante "But Im not even supposed to be here Today!" This quote has no relevance to this post or my spelling, i just felt the need to say it.

I have to laugh, because I just referenced Clerks in an article I just wrote for UAH's student paper. :)

...and since this turned out to be the last cat.net post written on Greymatter, I just wanted to come back to it once more and pay my respects - maybe sigh, but just a little - and smile. 'cause I'm silly that way, you know.