Sorry about the lack of posting recently; first I had a bad cold that lasted for a couple of weeks, during the second of which I was going to work anyway and lapsing into a solitary torpor during the evenings. (“Solitary torpor” is the state of being too braindead for anything but computer solitaire.) Just as I was getting through that I fell into a serious case of Photoshop. Then my eldest got his tonsils and adenoids out; and he’s been having a rocky recovery (though I think he’s through the worst of it). What with the pain and worry, I’ve again been settling into a solitary torpor during the evenings. This may last for a few more days; but then I’m due to go on a business trip. So it may be into February before things wake up around here again.
Category Archives: Admin
Site Upgrade
So I just upgraded WordPress; my webhost has a neat one-click solution for that. Unfortunately, I have almost no memory of how I set up WordPress to look the way it did; and no desire to muck around with whenever I upgrade. So I’ve picked a theme that’s somewhat similar to what I had before, and that’s what I’m going to use.
E-Mail Problems
Jane and I seem to be having trouble getting our e-mail at the moment, so if you’ve sent me some and I’ve not responded that’s probably why. We’re looking into the reasons why. If you need to get a hold of me urgently, leave a comment here.
Update: Apparently Earthlink’s blacklisted my web hosting service’s e-mail servers for no particularly good reason. Dreamhost is working on it.
Update: Mail is flowing again, one way or another. The thing with Earthlink still isn’t resolved, but we haff ways of getting your messages anyway. 🙂
Merry Christmas
Christmas isn’t over until Epiphany, you know. I’ve no interest in a pair of turtledoves, even if that is the canonical gift for today, but I thought I’d pop on-line long enough to wish everyone Merry Christmas on this the Second Day of Christmas. May Jesus Christ whose birth we are celebrating bless you and keep you and make his face to shine upon you all through the new year!
Where In The World Is Ian Michael Hamet?
Ian Hamet of Banana Oil hasn’t responded to any of my e-mail since the end of June; his blog has been displaying a WordPress database error since the 22nd of July. I am worried about him.
Usually if a blogger falls silent, it’s cause for disappointment but not for alarm. People get tired of blogging; people get a life apart from the ‘Net; there are all kinds of good reasons for the silence. In Ian’s case, though, he’s an American expatriate living in Shanghai. He doesn’t speak the language well, and he’s there on his own, without much of a support system–unless he’s made some close friends among the Shanghainese. Ian doesn’t blog much about his private life, so I don’t know. In any event, I can think of all kinds of horrible things that might prevent Ian from blogging. Adding to this his lack of response to e-mail, and as I say, I grow worried.
Last week I sent a note off to the American consulate in Shanghai, asking if they could do anything. They tried to contact him, but were unsuccessful. I don’t know how hard they tried, but it appears to me that they took my request seriously.
So, I think it’s time to unleash the power of the blogosphere. There must be blog readers in Shanghai; one of them might have a clue as to where Ian is and whether he’s OK. Let’s spread the word, shall we?
With any luck, this is much ado about nothing–Ian’s just taking an extended sabbatical from the ‘Net, or perhaps the Great Firewall of China is blocking him from his e-mail and webhost. But I keep picturing him being ill or injured in Shanghai, a foreigner with no one to help him.
Spoke Too Soon
Shortly after I posted my last post, the power went off again. It didn’t come on again until around 1:15 this morning…which is to say that our power was off from 6PM Friday evening until 1:15 AM Monday morning, with only a two-hour break on Saturday afternoon.
We coped; yesterday, figuring that we were going to be hot, sticky, inconvenienced, and waiting about no matter what we did, we decided we might as well have some fun at the same time…so we spent the day being hot, sticky, inconvenienced, and waiting about at Disneyland. It was a fine time, and included the delightful discovery that my almost five-year-old girl likes rollercoasters. She road Big Thunder Mountain (twice), the Matterhorn, and Space Mountain, and wanted to go on all of them again. (My eldest went on all them as well, but didn’t like the Matterhorn or Space Mountain.)
Today it’s back to work; and for once I’m grateful.
This and That
So yesterday I arrived home at 10 PM from my business trip; that was two hours later than usual, as my plane out of Washington-Dulles was late because at the scheduled boarding time the pilots were still in Chicago. When I arrived home, I discovered that the power was out, had been out since about 6 PM, and they weren’t sure when it would come back on.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to have a low-carb supper when you’re trying not to open the refrigerator at all in hopes that the food won’t spoil before the power comes back on?
Be that as it may; the power came on around noon today (18 hours without power), and the stuff in the freezer is largely history. On top of that, it’s 110 degrees Fahrenheit at our house–well, 100 degrees outside, since the power’s back on–and we are all trying to avoid doing much of anything at all, really. Later we’ll probably try to find a pool to swim in.
In other news, I’m a bit worried about Ian of Banana Oil. I’ve sent him a couple of e-mail messages since June 30th, and haven’t heard anything from him. Moreover, his blog hasn’t been updated since July 12th; if I’m not mistaken, all of the posts in July have been quotations from some book or other (the kind of post, in other words, which he preschedules when he knows he’s going to be too busy to blog); and as of today the blog is showing nothing but a WordPress database error. He’s a yankee in Shanghai; I hope nothing has happened to him.
Woo-Hoo!
Not only has the ‘net connection been working reliably since my last post, but I picked my laptop up from the shop this afternoon. It’s got a shiny new keyboard, a new optical drive, and it appears to be working just fine.
For the last week I’ve been using the kids’ eMac (that’s one step down from an iMac), using my external backup drive as the boot disk. That works, but in order to preserve my backup I’ve been avoiding saving anything to disk as much as possible. That, fortunately, is no longer an issue…which means that, at long last, I am able to download the pictures I took during our vacation. Approximately 400 of them, which will probably be winnowed down to 150 or so. I’ve been eager to get to it, but haven’t been able. It also means that I should be able to write a book review or too, so expect a burst of activity this weekend (it’s certainly going to be too hot to do much of anything else!).
Hmmmm.
I spent some time on the phone with Earthlink this afternoon, and did enough troubleshooting to prove to them that my connection problems were not in my house–that it was, in fact, AT&T’s fault. The nice lady with an Indian accent wrote up a trouble ticket…and, astonishingly, my connection was back up just a few minutes after I got off of the phone. It’s been up ever since. This is remarkable, as it’s been down most of the time for the past week, and has usually only been up during the early morning.
Not that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, mind you, but I’m quite curious to know whether there’s any causal relationship, here, or whether it just happens to be up this evening.
In other news, I still don’t have my laptop back from the shop; it seems they are Waiting For A Part. Ugh.
Update: when I tried to post this, the connection went down. It came back after I power-cycled the DSL modem, which is a nice change.
Connection Troubles
Howdy! I’ve been quiet for the last few days partly because my laptop is still in the shop, but mostly because our DSL connection has been really flaky recently–off more often than it’s on. I’m starting to look into that with the tech support folks, but posting is likely to continue to be minimal until it’s resolved. Just FYI.
The View from the Foothills 