Author: Wil

I’ve written a post at Card Squad which may be of interest to WWdN:iE poker readers.

If I adhere to the "it’s just one long session" philosophy, I am
still way in the black . . . but for the last thirty days, I am
seriously in the red, and poker just isn’t very much fun. In fact, I
haven’t picked up a deck of cards, or logged into PokerStars in almost
two weeks, because I am so sick to death of losing. It’s frustrating,
it feels like a waste of time, and it’s hard to go into a game with a
positive attitude.

The experience is uncomfortably similar to the long streaks of fruitless auditions I’ve experienced the last several years. Attitude is an incredibly important part of success, and it is sofaking hard to let past defeats go, and face each new deal hoping for the best, ready to play to the best of my ability. It’s easy to fear that I’m a lousy player who got lucky, or even worse, just another mediocre player who isn’t able to realize that he just isn’t that good. 

Wow, that’s a perfect metaphor for auditions, too, I just realized. I have to go think about that for as long as it takes to smoke a cigar.

If you’re interested, my post is called Riding Out the Bad Times.

My friend and fellow ACME-ite Greg Benson is one of the funniest people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. If you saw ACME Love Machine, Greg played Dave in my William’s Tell sketch, and he also wrote and played the title character in Let’s Gab with Saul Bernstein.

He has a production company called Mediocre Films ("They’re better than they sound"), and one of his super-short films (1:39) is a finalist in the Amazon.com Tribecca Film Festival. It’s called Coming Home. I don’t want to tell you anything else about it, but I will tell you that I didn’t rate it five stars because Greg is my friend. I rated it five stars because it’s that good — it made it to the top five out of 297 films for a reason, after all.

So if you’ve got a minute and thirty-nine seconds . . . well, plus the time it takes to click the link and sign in, then you watch the film and vote on it . . . okay, so if you’ve got two minutes and ten seconds, I  don’t think you’ll regret taking a look at Coming Home.

A big problem with the upgrade was trying to switch from a SQLite to MySQL database. To do this, I had to export all my entries (easy) and create an empty MySQL database (also easy). Then I need to reconfigure movable type to look at the MySQL database, instead of the SQLite databse (super easy). Then I rebuild my blog, delete the old SQLite database, and have a Guinness to celebrate (pending.)

Still with me?

Okay. So here’s the problem: my export file is 37M, and the server tiems out when it’s trying to import that file. I didn’t know what to do about that, and all this week, I haven’t had the time to figure out a solution. Luckily, Jay told me that I can break up my thirty-seven megabyte text file into as many smaller text files as I want, and import each one. They won’t overwrite each other (which is what I thought they’d do), and when I’m done, I should have a fully functional weblog.

However, thirty-seven megs of plain text is a ton of data, and I don’t have time to cut it all up, upload, it, and repeat that process probably ten times or so. I probably won’t have time until next week. Luckily, I have 26 days remaining before Typepad comes around with a baseball bat and a paper bag.

A quick thought on TypePad: It’s awesome. The interface I’ve been using to update is the nicest WYSIWYG interface I’ve ever used for anything, and the way they let you choose templates and styles is awesome. In fact, if TypePad had existed back when I started WWdN, I doubt I would have ever configured and installed my software on my own server.

When WWdN comes back, expect it to look and feel a lot like this, but without any of the fixed-width stuff.

I hope the MMORPG Nerds have a better sense of humor than the Star Wars Nerds, because this is fucking brilliant.

Click the picture for hot, full-sized action.

(Link via boingboing.)