Tag Archives: Wordpress

Usual Rubbish

The fate of Ned Trek: A Mystery

Get Music Here

Where is it? Well, I can’t tell you. I was looking at it. I was looking right at it, and then it just wasn’t there! Stupid Internets!

Ever have one of those days when you keep losing track of things? Yeah, well I’m having one of those weeks. First I couldn’t find my shoes. Then my bag of marbles went missing. (That’s right – I lost my marbles.) Next it was my reading glasses. I couldn’t even look for those because my distance glasses were missing too, and I can’t see my reading glasses without my distance glasses. And then there was the bank deposit, but never mind – you can read about that in the papers.

These are all trifles when you come down to it. The big thing that’s missing is a web site. The Ned Trek web site, that is – it disappeared without a trace last week. Of course, so did last week. I mean, last week is gone for good, right? And sadly, it has taken Ned Trek with it.

Home for wayward clowns

Some of you may know Ned Trek as an occasional segment on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. We would gab a bit, maybe play a stupid song or two, then play an episode of Ned Trek and call it a night. Of course, the show was buried in a lot of even more inane nonsense, and we felt that people needed an easier path to the oasis that is Ned Trek. After all, some might only want to hear bad imitations of vaguely famous people and a seasoned naturalist imitating a sit-com horse from the nineteen sixties. (There ARE people like that, you know.)

With that in mind, we built a separate site for Ned Trek. (Here’s the cached version of the site on the Wayback Machine.) There we just posted the shows, gave a little explainer about the premise, etc., and put up some ridiculous pictures that drove people mad. Every other episode of Ned Trek was a musical, so we had a separate WordPress post category for those. It was a whole thing, and it got tens and tens of visitors until …. well, until earlier this year.

Who the hell would ever hack THIS masterpiece?

Things that go boom

You’ve heard the not-so-old saying, “boom goes the dynamite”, right? Well, this is a case of boom goes the web site. I went there one day, nothing better to do, and I got the white screen of death. I tried all the patented WordPress hacks to resurrect it, but it was no good. But I think the real issue is …. what the hell happened? Did we get hacked by Captured by Robots or someone?

Maybe it was Desilu, in retaliation for lifting their show concept. Or maybe it was Desilu in retaliation for murdering their show concept. Fortunately, the show files are still there, so we set up a temporary page until we can figure out what the hell is going on. (Did I hear Trump just now?) Then there was that one-armed man spotted leaving the scene. We’ve got to find him before Richards does! (Damn it. Now I’m mixing up my bad sixties television shows.)

Calling all engineers

Hey … if you’re an engineer (i.e. not someone who drives a train) and you know something about WordPress, do me a favor. Call up WordPress central and tell them that their bloody platform just dumped years worth of pointless activity … I mean, backbreaking work. We demand restitution!

Usual Rubbish

Back to work.

Where do you plug this thing in again? Hmmm. That looks like a 220 outlet. Are you sure I won’t blow my amp sky high? Okay, then I’ll take your word for it. Now …. what’s that funny smell?

Oh, hi, dear readers. As you can see, I’ve decided to discontinue my internal exile to the shed in the courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill and return to our basement studio where all kinds of trouble are made. Hey, the summer’s over, right? Time to stop wasting time on pointless pursuits and get back down to the serious business that has been the bedrock of Big Green since our founding: more pointless pursuits. Like songwriting and recording. And doing funny voices. Honking on kazoos. That sort of thing. Do I need to paint a picture? Good … because I DON’T KNOW HOW.

So things are happening. The leaves are turning red and yellow, for one thing. For another, we launched a new web site. Looks a hell of a lot like the old one, only with a new home page (see www.big-green.net ) and a new free WordPress theme. Just another example of cheapskatery run amok. What a useless waste of human potential. (Hey … that could be the title of my memoir.) Sure, we COULD have gotten a new abandoned hammer mill to live in, maybe one with running water even, but NO … new web site comes first in our twisted little world. Priorities!

Now, where the hell did I put that wire?As you may have guessed, I am trying to re-acquaint myself with recording technologies after a summer of copying tapes and taping copies. A few weeks in that garden shed and it all looks like an undifferentiated tangle of wires and metal boxes to me. That’s kind of what our studios always look like, but the fact that I’m taking note of it now tells me that I’ve got some remedial learning ahead of me. Fortunately, with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I can reconstruct my keyboard workstation to a point where noise comes out of it and goes into the recorder thingy. Do that until the blue smoke comes out, and then you have a record. Or at least I think you do.

No worries – I’ll get this right before my brother walks in here with five new songs, fresh from the farm. Farm fresh production … that’s Big Green!

 

Usual Rubbish

Anudder home.

Where did I put my html tags? I thought I packed them with my socks, but they don’t appear to be in there. WFT, man…. getting a new home is always such a pain.

No, friends. We have not abandoned the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That would be something you might expect from the department of redundancy department (of redundancy). We have, however, abandoned our old web site and moved into a new one, designed by, I don’t know, professional web designers… as opposed to my sorry ass, who threw together our last site with Front Page and some tweezers … not to mention some cracked old photo manipulation software. Yeah, that’s right. Do I have to draw you a picture? (Actually… that would have been better than what came out of that software.)

Anywho… out with the old, in with the new. We’ve been using WordPress for Hammermill Days (and, earlier, Notes from Sri Lanka) for over five years, and so we thought, hey, why not build the whole freaking site using the same software? It actually works, you can edit it from anywhere using a Web browser…. How easy is that? Too easy! That’s what Mitch Macaphee says. Being a mad scientist, he thinks things should be hard … at least as hard as building Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was. Sure, he built Marvin out of spare parts and bric-a-brac he had lying about his lab, but that doesn’t mean it was easy. Building a sentient being never is, my friends.

Now, the cynical and suspicious-minded amongst you (and you all know who you are) will imagine that this web site face lift is all about our supreme ambition to become special assistants to inevitable president-elect and future king of the moon Newt Gingrich; that we somehow abandoned and discarded our illin’, aging old web site for a shiny, sexy younger one, like … well, like … something some politician did once. That is a dirty lie. Fact is, we have already been invited by Newt Gingrich – future president and current Lincoln in his own mind – to advise him on interplanetary relations including, most specifically, his plans for our nearest neighbor in space. In point of fact, we will be a bit like the late Richard Holbrook, who was given the Af-Pak portfolio. (We will be in charge of the Moon, Mars, and Saturn, so it might be called the LunaMaSa portfolio, in media culture shorthand-speak.)

So anyway… welcome to Big Green’s new home on the Web. Take a look around. Kick the tires. Leave comments. Move in to one of the pages and order expensive dinners. Glad to have yuh.