Friday, August 14th, 2009
The picture is of a Cona vacuum brewer. It makes very clean coffee with no filter. The water boils up from the bottom, mixes with the coffee for a couple of minutes, then after the flame is put out the coffee is vacuumed back into the bottom pot. Very yummy.
But that’s not what this post is about…
A month or so ago I was complaining about the slow progress on our work website. Well, we finally went live with it right before the Jeep trip to Nevada. It all looked good, though it really was harder to accomplish that result than we thought it should have been.
Anyway, today Bruce and I were making some small corrections to the copy on the new website. In order to preserve our security I decided to delete the username that the web-people used to set the site up. When I started that process, WordPress asked me if I wanted to re-attribute the pages created by that username to another username. I said no, not realizing that almost the enire site was attributed to that username and not reassigning the attribution would result in the site being deleted. Back in my Navy days when we needed to operate a valve we used to think about what the valve was and what the expected result of turning the valve was before we operated it. Too bad I didn’t do that today.
Guess what? I deleted the site with that single stroke of stupidity. Not thinking here was very costly. I was in shock for a moment but managed to start re-focus on recovery pretty quickly. We didn’t have a local backup of the site — I wasn’t even sure how WordPress could be backed up, and it was suddenly too late to be making those plans.
Well, first I arranged w/ our hosting company to restore the site to yesterday’s backup. That cost a bit of money, but much less than re-building the site. And it would take up to five days. Hmm, that’s still a big problem.
My next step was to figure out the best way to upload our old site (which I did have a local backup of). I needed a way to load the site without changing the file structure and WordPress configuration too much. I wasn’t exactly sure how the site would be restored by the hosting provider and I didn’t want to make any unnecessary changes that might hinder that process.
As I researched and planned my next steps, I found a system backup of the WordPress database. Re-installing the database recovered all of the text and pages of the site. Oh yeah, that’s good! The site had only been down a couple of hours and now we were suddenly back in business. Then I realized that almost none of the images or charts were recovered. Oh, that’s not so good. I spent the next three hours finding and uploading the images (most had been used by our old site too), and adjusting links where it was too hard to try to fix and upload the images.
That got us back to about 90% of the full site loaded. Now, when the hosting company does the full reload, it will be a much smaller, lower risk proposition. In the interim, I will use my new knowledge to create a local backup of the site as it stands right now. Whew, that was too close for comfort. You can be sure I will pay much closer attention to what I am doing when working on our site. Yep, I’ll be thinking before I push those buttons.
So, it was a tense, intense day today. Lori and I met Dorette and Duane for dinner in MV this evening. It was nice, and it was nice that I had recovered from the day — I even got a little run in before dinner. So, I guess you could say today was full of living, good and bad, and now I’m we’re all one day older. Cool.
Thursday, July 9th, 2009
Warning: This is a grumpy post. Don’t read it.
Okay, time for some whining. Three things:
1. Moving my blog to WordPress seems like a good idea. There are a lot of features available, and the interface is reasonably good. And with some effort, you can even customize your website “look and feel”, as the professionals say, without learning too much actual coding. This is good.
What is not so good, is that it is still software. And software is another word for bugs. Now, the particular bug I have been fighting this last week may be in an added feature (known as a plugin in WordPress terms), or it may be WordPress. Either way, it’s been a pain.
A couple of weeks ago I added a photo gallery to my site using Flickr Gallery. This plugin allows me to directly import thumbnails and a slide show of my Flickr photos. This is nice because it means that I can post photos on Flickr and they show up in my gallery here too. This plugin worked well until sometime in the past week. A new version of the plugin was issued, and my old version died — and the website bogged down too.
I updated the Flickr Gallery plugin to the latest version, but it still didn’t work. I updated the connection information to Flickr, and it still didn’t work — and my website was still bogged down. I disabled all the gallery stuff and it was fixed, but of course I didn’t have a gallery any more.
Today, I searched around for a solution. No problems were mentioned on the web that I could find. The author’s Flickr Gallery seemed to be working. I decided to try again. It works. The bug is back under the rug. I hope it is fixed and not just hiding.
2. My coffee roaster, the I-Roast 2, went on the blink last week. The unit started shutting down before finishing the roast. Then my beans would sit there and crackle and burn. Fortunately I heard the roaster shut down early and checked on it, so there was no fire. Still, not good; and it only got worse, taking multiple efforts to finish the batch.
I have had my unit for six months, and it has a one-year warranty. I called their customer service line on July 3 to find out what to do. Their system put me in the wait queue and then hung up on me. I emailed them with my problem, and they still have not responded. In my book, that is pretty poor service.
I called them again yesterday, and got through to a person. She took down my information and said they would send me a new power base to replace mine. Okay, that is good service. All I had to do was send them my proof of purchase information and pay for the shipping of the base. Once I had faxed that information over, they would call me to get shipping payment information and send out the base.
I couldn’t find my receipt so I emailed Sweet Maria’s (where I bought the unit) and asked them if they could send me a copy. They emailed the POP within 30 minutes. Now THAT is good service — and very consistent with their typical performance.
I faxed the information to Hearthware at 11:03 a.m. yesterday. No call back the rest of the day; so given their poor performance so far, I called them on the phone this morning. No record of my fax or call was available to the person I talked to on the phone. She put me on hold and walked around the office trying to find the person that had handled my call. No takers. She passed me off to someone named Holly.
As Holly took my call, someone handed her the faxed POP. So her comment was “Oh, here, we just received the information!” Er, what? “Oh, I mean the person who took your call yesterday is not here today. Someone else just handed me the fax. Now, tell me again what is wrong?” Anyway, we went through all that, I gave them my credit card information and the say I will receive my power base in 10-15 days. I guess we will see. I’m going to put a note on my calendar to call them in 10 days to confirm it has shipped, though they say they will send me an email when it does. Somehow I’m not very confident in them.
3. We have hired a web designer/creative director to update our shift work website. He had some good ideas and communicated well enough to convince us that he could do the work. The plan is to use WordPress (as I mentioned some time ago) and themes in the new site. All good, and he said we would be up and running by early July.
To me, early July is over. Since we hired this creative director, I have moved this blog to WordPress, tried four different themes, highly modified the theme I am using, and created (now) 14 posts. What do we have at Shiftwork Solutions? A header, some poorly designed buttons/menus, and not much else. Oh boy, what a pain.
Hey, we’re not paying this guy $20 an hour to do this work. We are talking thousands of dollars, and I’m starting to think I could have done better over a weekend. I hope I’m wrong and just being grumpy.
Okay, the grumpy warning is over…
Thursday, June 25th, 2009
Okay, I can live with this for now. Using a Firefox plugin called Firebug, I have been able to figure out how to change most of the colors in this Worpress theme. I wanted to darken most of the graphics so that the photos will stand out more, and I have been able to do that. There may still be some text or graphics that don’t quite look right, but I will try to fix that going forward. Feel free to leave me any feedback (positive or negative) about the new site and its look and usage.
This photo is from my ride in to work on Monday. It is a composite of several photos taken with my 45-year-old Yashica Minister-D camera.
Back in May I misplaced the camera while packing for our vacation trip to Utah. At the time I was debating what cameras to take with us — film (which ones?), digital (which ones!?), pen and ink… I finally settled on my choices, but at the last minute I threw the Minister-D and GSN in the center console of the truck. They both had film in them and I guess I figured I would finish out the rolls w/ snapshots.
Anyway, the time was so busy I kind of forgot that I put the cameras in the truck. I ended up using the digital cameras and Hasselblad for the trip. When I got back home I went looking for the two Yashicas (thinking I had left them at home) and couldn’t find them. I remembered the camera selection process before leaving on the trip and figured I must have actually brought the cameras with me and put them in some safe place in the camper. After searching, no dice. Then I searched the rest of the truck and Jeep. Nope. The garage (did I store them away???), no joy. I finally gave up in frustration, figuring they would show up some day.
Well, that day was Sunday. I happened to look in the truck console for some bottled water while working on the acacia forest, and there were the two cameras! I am sure I looked in the cosole during my search, but somehow I missed them. I guess. I don’t know, but at least I found them.
So this week I finished out the film in each camera. The above picture is stitched together from scans of 7 different photos. The actual combined scan is quite large, and pretty okay quality for such an inexpensive camera. And it’s hard to beat the retro fun.
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Category Black and White, Film Photos | Tags: Tags: "Minister-D", "Mt. Tamalpais", Film Photos, Yashica,
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