Joseph Zitt

Thanks to all who responded about my Bluetooth problem and keypad confusion. John’s comment, erudite as always, explained the odd history of keypads in a way that made sense of things (though my hands will remain confused until my brain convinces them of how things are).

Ron’s comment explained what I needed to do to get things working.

It turns out that I didn’t need a pre-existing passcode at either end–the passcode can be anything, as long as it is the same at both ends. Once I got that happening, I was able to transfer pictures from the phone to the PC, clearing out the old pictures from the phone.

This was important because I need to do some shooting with the phone over the next couple of days. As I’d mentioned (I think), I’m doing a quick book of my old blog posts about the church where I have my secondary job and the neighborhood we are in. Chelsey will be doing the photography for the book, and had asked me for a sense of what I’d like her to shoot for it. Since I’m kind of aural and verbal in my communications and she’s mostly visual, my attempts to describe locations haven’t come over well. So I’ll be going around the exterior of the church and taking snapshots of places that I would like to see pictured. Chelsey’s already done some photography inside the sanctuary, so she has an idea of the place, but these will help us capturing the views outside.

I’ve finished an alpha version of the book (in the “beta test” sense, not the “alpha male” sense) and one person will be giving it an edit. But if others would like to take a look and comment, let me know and I’ll let you know where you can download it in PDF or LaTeX formats. I hope to get the thing completed and off to the printer by the end of the month or so, so I may be moving faster than humanly possible on it.

My renewed activity in blogging has come about partially due to the work on the book. I did a new prologue and epilogue for it, but can tell that my writing had become rusty. msmas has been nudging me to blog daily, and so I’m trying to do so. I’m hoping to not go on a tear of verbosity like before, so we’ll see what happens. I also have ideas queued up to write for days on which nothing interesting happens.

And now to try to upload a picture to WordPress, which an FAQ suggests is easier than what I had done before. If you hear howls of rage from over here in the next few minutes, it will be me falling into another chasm between documentation and functionality…

Well, nope, looks like that’s broken too. It turns out that they’ve snuck in an upgrade to WordPress, which has now gone to version 2.0. I’m running something from the dark ages of a couple of months ago, so it no longer corresponds to the documentation. And I’m loath to try to upgrade, since that looks like a complex procedure that, with my current track record of causing software to break, seems to have a high probability of destroying things entirely.
I’m trying to upload images the old way, through FTP, but that’s not doing the right stuff. I’ve tried several different tools, including uploading the images to my Linux box and sending them from there. I usually (though not always) can connect to my site, log in, and move among directories, but any attempt to send a file or even get a directory listing, each of which uses an FTP PORT command, tells me “425 Unable to build data connection: Connection timed out.” I was able to do these things earlier tonight, but the FTP gods seem to be on a coffee break. Or something.

I think I’ve hacked around the problem, though not as I’d wanted, and with a smaller thumbnail of the photo at the beginning of the post than I’d intended. But if you click on it, it should show the larger image. Or not. Whichever it does, I’m going to bed.