the World of Webmistress Ming

The more Drupal I do, the more Drupal I love.

To wit: string overrides. A marvelous little module that lets me replace the generic "access denied" message with one more, well, Ming-like.

From here on out, it's invitation-only.

Look what we have here: the blog is back!

Her Geekness has been updating the CMS that serves the site, and finally got time to sort out issues with a balky module.

Can I just say I love Drupal? 12 sites updated in less than an hour; add 20 more minutes to research and sort out the image issues.

Whee! On to the great conversion. Gotta make money to keep this operation online!

If it didn't hurt so much, it could be addictive: riding error logs on a new server.

Think of it as a free-flow fix-it session. Bad links, hotlinking referers, php error messages, missing files, bad config--they all show up in the error log. Hit refresh every couple of minutes, find the problem, jump to Google for the solution, implement it; repeat.

Since I'm performing the sysadmin equivalent of surgery to separate conjoined twins, this will be an all-day process.

But it's fun. One of the best parts of wearing the sysadmin hat.

Twelve years ago, I got a not-too-flattering squib in the local paper. Subject: debut of the Windows 95 operating system. Being one of the only women NOT behind a cash register during the Win95 launch party, reporters homed in on me for a quotable quote--and I gave it to them.

"Oh, I wasn't going to upgrade," I said, "but as time got closer? It's like a drug: you've gotta have it."

My small-town Southern neighbors were not amused.

Today is the capstone day of my life as a switcher: hitting the FedEx tracking site hourly to find out when my new MacBookPro will be delivered.

I'm a woman, friendly, approachable, and very tech-savvy.

This means I am everybody's Geek Friend. New computer? "Hello, FRIEND," starts the phone call. Problem printer? "Hi, buddy--got a moment?"

95% of the time, I show up cheerfully to help my friends with their tech problems. But lately, I'm beginning to think more and more about buying a "No, I won't fix your damn computer!" T-shirt ... and donning the attitude along with the tee.

Today, it was a friend who, despite not knowing one end of her computer from the other, has opened a store on eBay.

Oy.

What else do you say when you spend THREE SOLID DAYS completing a geek metamorphosis ... and within 2 minutes of doing the above, some ASSHOLE is reaching for your content page to complain?

The site in question is Organized Scrapbooks. The weekend in question is THIS ONE, to which I have sacrificed EVERY FRICKING WAKING HOUR to transit the site from php-Nuke to drupal.

I hold my breath.

I pull the switch.

I watch the logs.

I say to myself, "Yeah, but that lamer is a spider."

Maybe only doctor's wives know the phenomenon, but when I came home from a consult with the orthopedic surgeon, and my physician-spouse about broke an arm getting to the computer to look it up ...

I started to sweat.

Premature. Very premature. Instead of focusing on the non-news ("We need the results of the CT scan"), and ignoring the pulse-racing response from a spouse who is suddenly asking the Big C kinds of questions, I'm going to go back to basics.

52-year-olds CANNOT act like they're hot-shot 20-something coders.