Wanderings

Anything you dream is fiction,
and anything you accomplish is science,
the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction.
- Ray Bradbury
November 29th, 2012

WordPress 3.4.2 and PHP 5.4

You may have noticed that the blog was down for a little while this morning.

My hosting company, 1and1.com, asked me to upgrade my sites to a new version of PHP. Little did I know that it would break WordPress and my blogs.

I did the upgrade and tested my http://www.blogseye.com site and it worked great. I didn’t think about this further, but then someone emailed me that one of my other sites was down and unable to connect to the database.

I reset the PHP version and everything now works.

The reason that blogseye.com worked is that I use the WordPress beta versions; what are called “bleeding edge nightlies”. I was running the 3.5 version of WordPress and it worked well with the new PHP version.

I hope that this is all fixed by the time my hosting company gets rid of the old (and working) version of PHP.

I hate this stuff. A new version should not break old stuff.

In a similar vein, I bought a disk storage box. I can fill it with disk drives from an older server that died. I figured that I could utilize the disks and keep movies and music on them. This is an older box that I got for just a few dollars, but it runs Linux. All I have to do is plug it into the network and I get a new server with disk space that I can access from any computer. The very cool part is that it also has a web server built in with PHP and a MySQL database. I can use this for testing programs. This is handy, especially if I retire and work at home on consulting jobs. I am wondering which version of PHP it will be running and how I can upgrade it. I am looking forward to playing with it.

I looked into making this web server a host for some of my sites, but Optimum charges $15 a month for Optimum boost, a requirement for running a web site at home. If I made $15 a month from programming, I could justify this and as it is, hosting costs me about $15 a month, but this is a bit of a leap that I am not willing to make, yet. Optimum boost is somewhat faster than vanilla cable internet.






November 18th, 2012

LORE vol. 2, no. 2

Lore Magazine has been released. My story is in this issue.

Lore 2.2 is available at CreateSpace.com

LORE vol. 2, no. 2
(November 2012)
TWELVE INCREDIBLE NEW TALES!
Featuring:
“Enshrined” Bridget Coila
“Finny Moon” Keith P.Graham
“Congregate” Steve Rasnic Tem
“One in a Billion” Colin Heintze
“Asylum” Stephen Mark Rainey
“The House of Dreams” Nyki Blatchley
“Electric Souls on a Starless Planet” J.P. Boyd
“Lost in Darkness” Jeremy Harper
“Melbourn’s Storm” Nickolas Furr
“Can Spring Be Far Behind?” Jeff Samson
“Tumor is the Night” Corey Mariani
“Nzambe” Denise Dumars

cover artwork by Christopher Allen
- 167 pages -

via Lore.






November 18th, 2012

Beekeeping the old way – journalpatriot: News: everett “ebb” barnette, brushy mountain road, honeybees, bee gums, black gum trees

I have been looking around in the storm damage for an old hollow log for use as a beehive. I’d like to try one.

Beekeeping the old way – journalpatriot: News: everett “ebb” barnette, brushy mountain road, honeybees, bee gums, black gum trees.






November 7th, 2012

After Sandy

I forgot to update this, but we got lights back on Friday night at 9:30pm. We were in the middle of watching a movie on the laptop when the lights came back on.

Erica and I lost lost the lights about 9:30 on Sunday night. I went over to my Brother’s house and got my Generator so we had light for a few hours each evening. We tried to conserve gas by running the generator just long enough to cool the freezer and charge the cell phones and my laptop.

Before the lights went out, I had downloaded some movies that I wanted to watch, and a few TV shows that we had missed so we could catch up. It was nice watching TV on the laptop. Each charge was good for 4 hours and it turns out we had just enough charge and enough canned video to watch each night.

We used the Jotul wood stove to heat the house every night so the house was warm. It was not a terrible experience. Sitting in near darkness for a few hours before going to bed actually helped me to sleep at night.

The yard did not do well. A very large and very old Silver Maple broke in half and fell on the chicken run, barely missing the coop. There was minor damage to the coop. When we came out in the morning, the chickens were all loose, but the racoons did not eat them in the night. The chickens seem oblivious to their near death experience, event though the chicken coop must have been rocked nearly off its foundations.

A very large White Pine came down in the back and fell on one of the bee hives, smashing it to tooth picks. I repackaged the bees in a new hive, but I am not sure they will make it through the winter. They were exposed to the cold and rain for quite a while.

We hired the guy who provides our firewood to come and cut up the silver maple. We have quite a bit of wood for about the same price as cord of wood, so it was a good investment.

I missed three days of work, so my paycheck was a little short. Other than that, we were inconvenienced, but did not suffer at all compared to many many other folks who lost everything in the storm.

We had Omelets a few nights, and since we rarely eat eggs, it was an opportunity to enjoy our own fresh eggs (delicious) and live off of the land.

Perhaps it was just good luck, but we were well prepared for the storm and weathered it as just a slight annoyance. Next time, I will have more gas, more batteries, and more movies ready. I am going to try to get a “Whole House” hookup for our generator to make it easier to use. It’s nice to be part of civilization again, though.






November 1st, 2012

Still no lights

Just heard om the radio that it will be a week or ten days of darkness.






November 1st, 2012

We Survived Sandy

I made it into work today so I can post here. Still in the dark ages at home. I will post the videos and pictures when the lights come back.