Hacking Uncle Ricky
Mind melding with Ricky on a byte to byte basis!
the LZ – keep your head down!
Feb 2nd
This blog has been put in a content freeze!
This will be kind of an open apology about there not being much of anything here. I’ll must likely have this be my latest {and my last for a while!} post so it will be the first thing that most folks see when they come in. I probably should have kept this whole thing private until I learned what I was doing but then I am just a cherry boy so please forgive me if I get in your way. I really am not trying to get anyone hurt.
I’ve spent the last couple of months just reading and finding out what a blog is. I think I can now identify one from say a cat?? Hell, I just discovered that I have some comments that I didn’t even know were there. Will look at them in the next couple of day. I have to string a comm. wire to the house so I’m not just setting in the office waiting for the next tornado on the ground 18 miles away.
I’m still worried that Google is going to send their Google-mo-bile after me ’cause I may be too stupid to blog!
Anyway, please again, bear with me! This is a classic cause of “maybe I shouldn’t have played with the hardware until you knew what the kill radius was”.
My Step by Step Learning Process {1}
Jan 23rd
FROM THE GROUND UP!
Permalinks and web hosting changes!
I just spent the last two days going back over my posts to make sure that the permalinks were working correctly! I also found how to get the blog to come up under my hosting name without the Wordpress sub-directory showing in the address bar. The latter was super easy! Go-daddy had set up Wordpress for me so I didn’t have to worry about the really geeky part of that. They even had a work in progress/under construction type home page set up for me. I noticed that when I logged into Wordpress my blog showed up as being in the Wordpress sub-directory. That’s cool but it’s not how the big boys appear online!
First, the hosting changes
First I went to the General option under Settings in my WP administrative account {The Dashboard, if you will.} I then changed the the Blog address (URL) so it was directed straight to b-ricky.com. I left the WordPress address (URL) alone as that was where Go-Daddy installed the core files for me!
Finally, a compass bearing or the direction of this Blog
Jan 22nd
I started this blog late last year and then the holidays came along. As with most of us I dropped off most everything else and just enjoyed myself. Coming into the new year I reassessed the look and direction of this whole blog thing. With this new category I will attempt to show a measured look as I learn what I’m doing. I made a mistake and started out researching too far in advance of my skills. So I went back and decided to place more effort into the real nuts and bolts of things.
I had the hosting account at GoDaddy.com. It took me quite a while to learn to navigate in their Hosting Control Center. To my eyes their site is quite cluttered. Too much advertising and many other things that I don’t or just rarely require! I much prefer Cpanel on my other hosting sites. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I just had to spend a little extra time with it. My next mistake was trying to rush into putting too much stuff into the site without learning how to run WordPress.
To click or Not to click?
Dec 23rd
Still just muddling along but in my research so far I must admit that I am getting a almost paranoid feeing about opt in boxes and all those other little forms/landing pages. I have always watched software and their insidious little checked boxes to add me to their mailing list for new product offers but am now seeing how many places out there that have the little sign up boxes and are collecting email addresses just flips me out!
Hey! I don’t mind giving out my email address if I want someone to send me something but how do we tell the good lads from the bad? “You can always opt out!”, I hear them screaming in the back of my mind. Yes! There’s that but when about half of them just gets you put on some other ass holes list or just reconfirms your email address what’s a boy to do. Is it only me or is there really a bunch of people out there trying to get me? Oh well, just another fleeting thought. These too shall pass.
Linux – Get IT!
Dec 21st
If you can read and aren’t too afraid of losing your windows setup to some OS from an evil empire then I would strongly suggest that everybody at least try some distro of Linux. Personally I think that Debian is a good applicant! In my opinion it is extremely stable. Provided that is the what you are looking for. They have three different branches or releases that you can install.
The Stable branch will pretty much work as you would expect. I’m sure that you will hit some snags as there is just too much hardware out there for them to cover every mix and match up. i.e. {id est! Not “Internet Explorer”? If I want to copy off someone’s paper, I’m sure going to copy from somebody that I feel has the right answer.
Oh Yea! Once that you’ve gone Firefox, you’ll never go back.
Some of you with Nvidia Cards will have to jump through some hoops and sometimes when you want to get a driver or a plugin to work it seems to be a hassle. After you are done with those little challenges put the knowledge in you pocket! That is where the reading part comes in. I see all too many posts from folks screaming like they were bleeding to death because they can’t get something to work. I know that nobody likes to see it but RTFM can often be your best friend. Hell! If you’re out of practice, read a cereal box. Reading is the cure all for “I didn’t know that”.
Money & Blogging
Dec 19th
It’s out there! We’ve all seen it and from what I can tell there are a lot of people making money off of their blogs. At least I would assume so otherwise why all the little funny {and somewhat annoying} highlighted word and adds. I have up until now imaged that If I wanted to make money with this blog that I needed some kind of product or service that I could offer.
Damn Sam! I’ve already got a couple or three full time jobs, when would I have time to put together a product and/or a service. I’m not rich {am kind of pretty but that may just be Mom’s brain washing} famous, a genus and don’t have a powerful position so whats a poor boy to do? I do have a mind just bubbling over with random crap so for now that’s what will be my forte. I’m gonna just keep bubbling over. I’m not sure that anyone cares but hell, it tickles me almost to death just to be writing this stuff down and actually seeing it on this new electronic newspaper thing-a-ma-bob.
“Look Ma, top of the world!”
It did occur to me that I could move other peoples’ stuff. That might be a alley that I could go down and creepy crawl the dumpsters. The one main problem there is I’m too damn picky about what I would tell people to check out. Nothing pisses me off worse that finding out that I’ve been chumped by some slicker! I’m just like anybody else. I don’t mind spending my money but at the end of the day I like to look back and say “I might not have needed to spend the money but in some weird way it was worth it”. Of course that just adds another layer to my already busy days. Not only do I have to find stuff but I also have to evaluate it to see if I would waste my hard earned cash on it.
First Impressions of Blogging
Dec 17th
Hummm! As I walk around in the world of blogging I see a bunch of stuff about making money with a blog. OK! Making money is always a good idea but for me, with this blog? I’d have to say that the jury is still out on that! I see a bunch of stuff about Squeeze Pages and how to pick a niche for the product or service that I want to sell. Well, what the F**k, cowboy. I don’t have anything I want to sell and my services are pretty well taken care of with my business web site. I did have a look at the Squeeze Page theme and my first impression was that it was Butt Ugly. Maybe that’s just me. I also tried to follow alone with some of their info about how, when and with which but some of their video is in a foreign format that I just barely found a program to play it with. It looks like it was made on a Mac. I don’t have one of those! It was in a weird file format, m4v and that was bounced off some file storage company. It seemed to pop up in a Adobe Flash Player. For the life of me I’ve never had much luck downloading anything that was in one of their windows. I know, you’re going to start spouting off about Video Download Helper. Been there, done that. I tried and I tried and I tried! After about 23 truncated copies on my desktop I pretty much blew that off. No big deal, I’ll keep looking. After all, it’s not like I have to do this for my living! If it was meant to work I’ll find a way. If not, I’ll just shine it on!
A newbie in Linux land
Dec 13th
Several years ago I decided to investigate Linux. I down loaded about 90% of the major varieties and loaded them. A lot of them wouldn’t even load on my machines! As most of my computer work is now business oriented I was looking for a stable and ultra secure OS. I haven’t had a systems crash or lost data since migrating to Linux. I know. You’re saying but Debian Stable is running old software. Ain’t no big deal! I’m old and am still operating quite well. I was looking for a flavor that would work well as a unit and wouldn’t pose too much of a learning curve. Granted that the first couple of generations of Debian had some problems. Woody had some problems with my equipment in it’s discovery routines but nothing that a little reading and tweaking wouldn’t take care of. With a move to Sarge I began to notice the curve to take care of some of the little bumps and the Debian team began smoothing the rough edges off of the software. Moving on to Etch I watched them really start to address the problems of newer architecture!
Discoveries in a Binary World
Dec 11th
First in line came the PC! I stumbled onto an old 8088 IBM machine that was setting on a back desk in a construction office. Grabbed me a book from the library and learned how to run DOS on the dusty old beige box that nobody else knew what to do with! Now for something that is in fact a glorified adding machine that just blew me away. I spent many a long night in that back corner exploring the HD and even found a proggie on it that was called “Learning DOS” I likened those nights back to a certain lady in high school and the back of a Buick! Couldn’t seen to get enough. I soon became bored with making DOS whistle and rather quickly found that you could also hook it up to something called modem and visit bulletin boards, Yes, at a blazing 2,400 speed I found naughty stuff, beautiful things and even people on the other end of an electric line that if you weren’t too much of a wee-hole might even talk to you! But there were limitation. The people that were running them weren’t always interested in the same things that I was nor did they or I have the space to store large amounts of data and what the “F” is the idea of turning their own computer off or using it for your own purposes . Don’t you hear me tap, tap, tapping at your electronic door?
Ricky – 101
Dec 9th
Uncle Ricky
If you aren’t already freaked by the initial photo then you might be interested in this stupid Blog {?}. { I do apologize! I was in motel lighting under the influence of narcotics that the good Doctor had given me.} I will label this blog as “Adult” only because it contains the inner workings of Uncle Ricky’s mind and at times I have been known to act in a decidedly adult manner. At other times, not so much so! The postings here are mine. Not always correct, politically or otherwise and I will try to censor myself but occasionally some Marine Corps will slip through.
I guess that the first order of business is to kind of explain the OP {operating premise} of this blog.
Don't know why anybody wouldn't want to Be Ricky!