Flickr Weirdness

I noticed this morning that the Flickr display in the right sidebar wasn't working. No idea why really, it was working last night - I even saw it update with the new pictures mentioned in the last post. Anyway, I uninstalled that plugin and found a different one that works. (I replaced flickrRSS with Quick Flickr Widget.) I think the Flickr list should be displaying just as it was before but if you see anything amiss let me know.
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Hulk Fucking Smash!

A few weeks ago I thought to myself, "Hey self you'd better upgrade your WordPress install pretty soon - it's way old." And myself said right back, "Sure, put it on the list, but it won't be easy. The last time you upgraded the sidebar got all screwed up. It will take a least a few hours." Them both of myselves went off to PAX and managed to be out of town as the Wordpress exploit hit over the holiday weekend. (grrr.) Sure enough the site got teh haxx0r3d while I was away. I believe it is fixed now, but a side effect of that fix is that all of the users got nuked away. Your comments were retained, but you'll need to create a new user account in order to post comments again. And since it's a new account I'll get a new moderation request and your comment will be queued until I approve it. Isn't this fun? I think I got everything back into the sidebar but that turned out to be a little tricky, and I didn't have a great template to work from. Let me know if I missed anything. (There are some new bits I turned on while I was in there, but I'm more concerned if anything has disappeared.) On the upside with a more modern install I can start looking at changing the theme. I want to A ) make the display wider, and B ) have a left sidebar so I can balance the page a little better. UPDATE: Oh yeah, this will finally kill off the "Tim's Snarking Post - with Comments" feed that I've been threatening to kill for ages. Since it never worked right really anyway. If you have that feed in your RSS you'll want to update to the new feeds in the sidebar.
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Death of the "Combo" Feed

Does anybody use the RSS "Combo" feed? It's supposed to provide the fulltext of the articles with the comments and then if somebody posts a new comment the article is marked as "new" again. It's never worked that well and it makes upgrading WordPress more janky than it should be. I'm seriously considering killing the combo feed so if you like it I'd advise speaking up soon.
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It's Incredibly Terrible And Bad

Oh hi there! Are you still out there reading this? Wondering just what happened? Well, a bunch of stuff really. One part is that I went from "not all that busy" to "Oh shit there's another fire over here" in like a week. Work got busy, I had a personal coding project that required attention, and so forth. Also, I have to say the D&D campaign has progressed and I've moved more from fiddling with the mechanics of the game to world-building and adventure design. Which doesn't sound that related but that seems to be drawing from the same writing inspiration well as blogging. Or possibly just drawing from the same time well, I'm not 100% sure. And then lastly I was on vacation last week, so that was out. Having said all that, the blog can't die so I'm back baby! What did I miss? There's been some gaming: GTA IV downloadable content (The Lost and Damned), GTA Chinatown Wars (for DS), and in the "older games I just got from Gamefly" I have Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2. I don't know if people care to talk about any of those - speak up if you do. I played some Chinatown Wars mulitplayer yesterday and was highly disappointed - two DS units, next to each other in the same room and we kept getting random disconnects. Just to confirm it was the game and not cosmic rays, or broken DS hardware or something we played a "known stable" game (Worms) and it worked fine. So I currently believe the multiplayer in Chinatown Wars is "shouldn't have been approved for manufacture" level buggy, which is really disappointing. Television seasons have been finishing like crazy. Dollhouse gets to come back, and I'm still debating if I'm willing to keep watching it. I didn't like any of the characters and found most of the stories dumb, contrived, and full of plot holes. At a very fundamental level I think the show is demanding more from an actor than Eliza Dushku can bring. The show would have been a complete wash (hah! see what I did there?) If it wasn't for the (spoiler alert-Wash dies-I did it again!) really stellar performance Alan Tudyk brought in. I grabbed the Lost season finale via iTunes and watched it on my laptop while on vacation. I should probably watch it again before making up my mind. In general I think season five was very strong, but the finale definitely had some issues. I'm still counting down until the start of the final season of course and it is possible I was just super-tired when I watched so maybe I'll like it better on a re-viewing. I haven't watched the season finales of Fringe or Heroes yet. Heroes is probably on my personal bubble there with Dollhouse, this recent "Hey let's rip off the X-Men" story line has been weak sauce. I'm not even (nor have ever been) an X-Men fan but man even I know everything this story is doing was done way better 20 years ago in the comics. (Blog Title from MC Frontalot's "I Hate Your Blog". I also considered "You ain't logged in an a month and a half", but that's a bit too much on point.)
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What the hell?

OK, I did something moderately stupid today and found out that Time Machine was screwing up, which made everything worse. Here’s what happened: I messed up a database today on my web server. “No problem,” thought I, “I’ll just fire up Time Machine and restore my MySQL data to a point earlier today.” So I did that. Hours later I noticed that my blog had reset itself to October 8th, eating four comments and three posts. After a lot of messing about I’ve come to this conclusion: although Time Machine claims to have backups of this data between October 8th and today it doesn’t. Luckily, I have all the posts and comments in other data stores about. So I’ve reposted the three posts, and I’m about to restore the comments. Sorry for any confusion! While I can make this almost seamless, there may be some oddities in the RSS feed.
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