Fixing a few things | Caches and ads, oh my

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This old blog of mine has been around for quite awhile now. Nearly 6 years as of this coming February and over the years all sorts of fluff, cruft and nonsense have accumulated. Bits of code and database entries left from past plugins, themes, previous versions of WordPress, upgrades and updates that no longer serve a purpose but end up getting left behind nonetheless. These bits of fluff and matter kept accumulating until one day things started getting funky. And so it was with my old DYI WordPress powered blog.

First my venerable old caching plugin, WP Super Cache, stopped working then the Text Link Ads (TLA) plugin stopped showing ads anywhere but the Home page as well as other bits of weirdness popping up here and there. These irritating little problems turned out to completely the fault of Text Links Ads and their latest versions of their WordPress plugin. Turns out that the powers-that-be behind the TLA plugin decided not to allow showing ads site wide any longer (with no announcement of the fact, of course) and purposely disabled caching for all pages viewed by adding a “DONOTCACHE is defined” statement to the source of each page viewed (also without any announcement of any kind).

Nice.

I happened to find this out while I was troubleshooting my way through the back end of the blog equipped with hammer and screwdriver and packets of my favorite explosives. WP Super Cache has this lovely debugging mode which, when enabled, creates these horrendously long log files filled with all sorts of fancily structured information that one can happily spend hours sifting through–if left on long enough that is.  I only left the debugging mode enabled for a couple minutes but it was long enough to tell the tale.

Since I do make enough pocket change from TLA for the occasional doughnut and coffee every month and since I’ve never had a problem with TLA in the past, I decided to contact them about this situation. After several attempts they finally responded to one of my emails and informed me that they would consider adding an “Allow caching” option in the TLA plugins’ “Settings” page in order to solve my non-caching problem. Two days later I receive another email from them saying that the newest version (3.9.9) of the plugin now has that option included and I should try it out and let them know how it works.

Long story short, it worked like a charm. The ads show up in the sidebar and footer widget areas just like they used to and all pages are cached properly once more. But the ads were still only showing up on the Home page and not site wide just like the previous version of the plugin (3.9.8) The version prior to that (3.9.7) showed the ads site wide although it prevented page caching as well.

So I fired off another email to TLA explaining this new ‘old’ problem and they responded that the site wide function had indeed been removed since they felt that showing ads only on specific pages gives better results than showing site wide

Really? Considering that the plugin only allows showing ads between content on the Home page or via widgets/templates, I guess the only “specific page” I’m able to show ads on is the Home page unless I list specific posts/pages I wish to show the ads on or resort to using an old fashioned style script placed in the code of specific posts.

Considering I have well over 1000 posts on my beloved old site, manually inserting the TLA script is not a viable option. The folks at TLA did say in their reply to my message, that they would consider putting site wide showing of ads back into the plugin sometime in the future. Well, at least they’re talking with me and after all they did fix one of the problems. And I still like the buggers as well so patience is and all that.

So while I was troubleshooting all of the above I decided to remove as much of the fluff, cruft and nonsense that was left over from the nearly 6 years of pounding on my particular install of WordPress. I deactivated and removed every single plugin except for a very few and then cleaned out all related entries from my WordPress database. This included entries from themes I have long since stopped using. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead and all that.

When all was said and done (and seeing that the blog still existed despite my best efforts) I reinstalled most of the plugins I had previously removed and slowly activated them one by one, thoroughly shielding myself from any random explosions should they occur. Thankfully none did.

So did it work? Well, if you happen to stop by and the blog is still here then I can safely say that it did. However, if you happen to stop by and suddenly drop into hole in cyberspace then I’m afraid it may not have. Please let me know either way–if you can. If you do drop into a hole in cyberspace where the blog once existed please leave the name and email address of your next of kin and I’ll do my best to alert them of your untimely (and certainly unbelievable) demise. And my deepest apologies to you as well.

Onward…

 

Dinner comes to call.

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I was awoken this morning by a rather excited woman who was making some rather extravagant gestures, mouthing silent words (I don’t sleep with my hearing aids in you see) and holding up her hands with all ten fingers pointing straight up which she opened and closed at least twice, possibly three times and then rushed back out of the bedroom.

Considering this rather excited woman was my wife and that she’s really not in the habit of acting this way on a regular basis, I thought it might be a good idea to drag my rear end out of bed and investigate.

I should also point out that she gets up much earlier than I do. Like O’Dark-thirty in the morning.

It turns out that dinner had come calling this morning in the form of nearly 30 (29 to be exact) good-sized wild turkeys who were busy milling about our yard and gardens scratching up  all sorts of good things to eat. It hasn’t snowed here at all to speak of and the temps have been well above freezing the entire fall. So the ground isn’t frozen at all in fact, the grass is green and lush and, sadly enough, looks in need of mowing (Mowing in December? In Vermont? On the Canadian border?). So there was plenty of fodder for these early morning visitors.

Now is the time when anyone reading this post of mine is thinking; “So where are the pictures already? You did take pictures, right?”

Well, in all truthfulness…I did.

I stumbled bleary eyed up to my computer desk, grabbed my old digital point and shoot and staggered back down to the kitchen while attempting to shove the batteries into the bottom of the camera at the same time. It’s amazing the cats survived at all what with me stepping on them 3 or 4 times each in the process.

Out onto the deck I went and then rushed right back in to put on a robe and rushed right back out again. No one was looking thank heavens. The sight has been known to drive those with weaker constitutions to the nearest trauma center.  I scanned around and spotted the flock moving out towards our woodshed, all lined up in two abreast precision when suddenly they did an amazingly synchronized ‘about face’ and marched themselves back into the side yard. It seems that while I was giving the neighborhood a free show, my wife had hightailed out the other side of the house and down the side of the garage and woodshed in hopes she could herd this fleeing flock back into camera range. A act of valor that succeeded wonderfully.

So I took about 8 to 10 pictures in all but since the morning was dark gray with the cloud ceiling at about 100 feet or so it seemed (plus the camera is rather old) I only got 4 pictures I actually liked. And these I’ll be glad to share.

Wild Vermont Turkeys

Turkeys in the grass, alas!

 

Wild turkeys in Vermont

Turkeys marching towards my wife (wife is hidden)

 

Wild turkeys of Vermont

Turkeys running away from my wife (wife still hidden)

 

Wild turkeys of Vermont

And the final pose.

By now I’m sure some of your might be asking yourselves, “Well? Did he shoot some dinner or not?” I’m sorry to say the answer is a resounding no. Somehow the mental picture of alternately scalding and plucking one of these rather large birds on this particularly raw, wet December day just didn’t seem all that appealing to me. So the rifle stayed in the corner and I came back into the house, all my shooting done with a camera.

So, I wonder what’s going to show up in the yard tomorrow morning?

No idea where the idea went.

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I’ve sat down to write up a post. A cup of tea is steaming away on my computer desk along with my can of mixed nuts sitting beside it just in case I need a quick snack (got to have that protein in order to write you know). My chair is adjusted properly, the room is at just the right temperature and the cats are nowhere to be found (probably on the bed trying to push my wife’s legs into unnatural positions–you know how cats are). In other words, every thing is set for writing up a lovely late evening post and…

…my mind has suddenly and completely gone blank.

I had this wonderful idea for a post and I seem to have lost it. I know I had it when I was downstairs beating the bed into submission for tonight’s sleeping activities but I seem to have lost it between then and now. Thinking about it though I may have lost it when one of the cats, who was obviously lying in wait for me, ran through my legs while I was climbing the stairs. Yeah, that’s most likely it. I dropped the thing as I stumbled over the cat and she took off with it. Probably has it under the couch by now and I do my best not to reach underneath the couch unless I absolutely have to. It’s dangerous you know.

So I sincerely apologize to all those who came here looking for another thought provoking post and found this instead. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll take a sweep under the couch with an old yardstick and see if I can fish out that idea I had. If I find it I’ll immediately sit down and write it before it gets lost again.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter.

When everything happens at once

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Sometimes things happen every now and then that tend to shake up our normal lives and routines. You know these types of things I’m sure. A move to a new dwelling, sudden illness, the car terminally breaking, financial problems, a sudden windfall, etc, etc. With any luck these sort of “wake up calls” that throw our respective lives into turmoil are spaced out a bit so we only have to deal with one say, every 4 to 5 months–or so we hope. Unfortunately, it’s not so in our little household in the Clyde River valley or at least it wasn’t this time around.

No, I’m wrong there. It always happens like this. Everything happens at once it seems and this time was no exception. So with no further delay and in no particular order…

I start insulin and eyesight goes on vacation.

I began injecting insulin at the end of October and by the second week in November everything is blurry. Sure, having my blood sugar reading at something less than the sugar content of a pint of maple syrup is great but not being able to see is not so great. That plus I seem to be having all these massive low blood sugar attacks. Especially when I’m not doing anything. Like at 3:00 AM in the morning for instance when waking up dead is not an acceptable situation. So now I can’t see well enough to find the refrigerator that contains the orange juice I need to drink at 3:00 AM during a rather bad hypoglycemic attack that has me three quarters the way to passing out.

And right about this time…

We have to move my wife’s quilt shop.

Yes, now that we put all the effort into remodeling her 500 square foot quilt shop, my wife came to the notice of one of our local (one of the oldest and most respected and most successful) commercial real estate developers in the State that just happens to own the plaza that runs along the shore of Lake Memphremagog here in Newport. Appropriately named the “Waterfront Plaza” of course. And it just so happens that he loves the idea of her selling only Vermont made products, that she makes all her quilted items she sells herself in store and it just so happens that the center store front has gone empty so he wants her in there and he wants her in there right now!

Okay, so this is all fine and dandy and although Laurie would normally balk at moving from a small 500 square foot shop to a 2002 square foot store (with 3 times the rent as you might imagine) we both decided that this time it just felt right–so we went.

In fact we moved the whole kit and caboodle in 10 days despite my constant low blood sugar attacks and blurry eyesight and our mutual exhaustion. But one thing for certain though…we had all the energy of a couple of anemic gnats as compared to the last time we moved the shop (gasp, cough, wheeze, die). We were all done in by the time 3:00 in the afternoon rolled around and we just knew we had to keep it up till well past dinner time everyday if we were going to make opening day on the 21st of November. It’s the holidays after all and everyone hits the plaza.

Of course with the move to a much bigger store front comes the need for financing the endeavor which means contacting the small business loan department head of our local bank who further complicates matters by sending my wife a…

Corrupted .pdf loan application that demolishes her Windows partition.

My wife uses Windows 7, she has a degree in computer systems management and she knows how to secure her system…and so do I. And we don’t use Adobe Reader but another well known PDF reader that has no history of vulnerabilities whatsoever so in other words, our Windows installations are terribly fortified. Despite all that, attempting to open this damn loan application .pdf file sent to her by our bank ended up corrupting her entire Windows partition as well the compact flash card from her camera that just happened to be plugged into her computer at the time.

(But it didn’t touch the Linux Mint 10 installation that lives in it’s own partition on the same hard drive mwahahahahaha!! So she’s been using that instead while her husband semi-blindly wobbles about here and there until he manages to figure out this insulin thing.)

But this is our bank. A local bank. The bank that holds our mortgage for heavens sake. Should I be worried now? I think so!

And to top it all off…

Our second oldest cat decides to die.

And rather messily as well. The reason that I called him our second oldest cat is because our first oldest cat had already passed on this past summer. This time, right after we had decided to move the quilt shop, I had to take Dingo for his last ride to the vet. And since we had already begun the process of moving I didn’t have the time to bury him so let’s just say it’s a good thing we have a rather large deep freezer where we could put the “cat coffin”. Come to think of this I really need to attend to his burial in our little pet cemetery before the ground freezes over.

So, even though some might think that all the above might not be a good enough excuse for not writing up 2 or 3 posts over the last couple of weeks–I do! I do have a couple ideas for a couple more posts in the very near future plus pics of my honey’s new quilt store. So stay tuned my dear readers (all 4 or 5 of you) for there is indeed more to come.

Unless something else comes up of course…all at once.

Meanwhile back at the farm

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In case you’ve been wondering where I’ve got off to for the past two weeks or so all I can say is that several unexpected things happened to my wife and I  all at once (not necessarily bad but rather work intensive) and we’ve been up and at it from morning to late night since then. Things have just started to ease off a bit but we won’t be done entirely until the end of the month arrives.

I’ll write up a more detailed post as soon as time permits but for now please be patient while I attend to what needs to be attended to–so to speak.

Blood sugar down and everything blurry

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blurred text

The blurry text above doesn’t bother you does it? It doesn’t make you want to rub your eyes or rush for an aspirin because you feel a sudden headache coming on or anything like that, right? Well, it does that to me no doubt about it.

For those that might have read my previous post (and ran away screaming due to the pic of the crossed syringes I stuck at the top of the post) you’ll already know that I’ve started taking insulin recently and I’m quasi-happy to say that the results have been immediately apparent. And one of the most obvious is that my world has suddenly turned into the above image. That and my blood sugar has dramatically dropped towards the realm of normal. Fine and dandy but I do believe I miss my eyesight.

Age brings on many things. Decreased hearing ability, wrinkles, irritable bowel syndrome and the need for store bought reading glasses and I’m no exception to this whatsoever. I’m aging just like everyone else and to be truthful about it, I was a bit ahead of the pack in one area–I was pretty much deaf to start with. But in all other symptoms of aging, I’m right on track including the need for those damn reading glasses I spoke of. Still, it wasn’t all that bad seeing as how I only needed 1.5 diopter reading glasses in order to read my computer display and 1.75 for reading the fine print. And my farsightedness was as sharp as ever.

Then came insulin and subsequent lowering of blood sugar.

It’s no secret that diabetes is harmful to your eyesight but as long as my blood sugar was as high as cake frosting my eyesight was fine–minus the aging factor of course. However, now that my blood sugar is between 70 and 150 (normal) my entire world went Gaussian blur. Near sight, far sight, no matter where I look it’s as fuzzy as that annoying image at the top of this post. Very irritating when I’m driving you know–especially for other drivers within my general vicinity. Wearing those store bought 1.5 reading glasses helps to some extent, I mean I’m not side swiping as many cars on my way to the post office as I was but it’s not the fix I’m looking for.

So, I’ve called the VA eye clinic, those nice people who make my bifocals which I’m supposedly entitled to due to being a diabetic and all and I’m told there’s a fix for this problem in the form of a brand new set of bifocals, goggles, contacts, visors or whatever. And I’m to drive down there later this month for the required eye exam and all that kind of stuff.

If I squint real hard I’m sure I can stay on the highway instead of in the trees.

Thoughts on starting insulin for the first time

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Insulin syringesI began injecting insulin for the first time a couple of days ago. I included an image of the syringes I now have to use in an effort to connect to my readers more thoroughly. If you found yourself flinching the second this page appeared in your browser then I’ll consider the effect successful (anything for my readers).

This is scary as hell.

Look, I know diabetes is progressive. I know that once you’re found to be diabetic the chances are you’ll always be a diabetic even if you are only 5 foot, 11 inches tall and weigh all of 150 pounds. And I realize that a type II diabetic like myself wasn’t guaranteed to be able to control my diabetes with pills “for ever more” especially when the docs have no clue as to why I developed diabetes in the first place or why it’s progressing the way it is. My diet is good, I’ve never really had any sort of sweet tooth at all and there’s no history of diabetes on either side of my family. Still, when my HbA1c came back at 12.1% (normal is 4% to 6%) and my afternoon blood sugar readings were somewhere in the 400s (normal is 70 to 150) it became clear that something needed to be done. And that something was insulin.

But as a lot of folks realize, knowing what may be coming is one thing. The reality of the situation is quite a different matter.

Not that I’m squeamish about needles at all. I don’t get all sweaty and shaky with eyes rolling back into my skull and drooling a lot. Nope, I just simply pass out the moment I see the needle, saves all the theatrics. Okay, that’s not true in fact, I couldn’t care less about needles. I’ve been poked by them all my life so these little things (1/2 inch long and so thin I can’t see it without my reading glasses) are no problem at all. Of course injecting yourself instead of someone else doing it for you can take the wind out of your sails at first I’ll allow that much.

So I’ve had my training including injection practice down at my local VA and I’ve given myself injections (20 units twice a day) for two days now and all done with proper clinical precision–more or less. The label on the phial of insulin they sent tells me that it’s a delayed action, “human” NPH type whatever that means.

And “human” type? As compared to what exactly? Non-human type? Badger type or perhaps salamander type? Klingon type? I attempted a bit of research on the old WWW and all I got out of it was a disturbing sense of profound confusion and a solid idea that diabetics like me should stay as far away from these diabetes forums as possible. I mean really, the way one person treats their diabetes is absolutely not how another person should treat their diabetes and it seemed to me that a lot of unprofessional advice in that area was being passed around in these forums I visited. First impressions you know.

I believe I’ll stick with my docs and professional med sites when it comes to questions about diabetes for now.

Okay then, it appears to be lunch time and since I am at the very beginning of my insulin regime and still not off the type II medication I’ve been taking for the last few years (glipizide)–I’d better have some lunch.

 

Conversation lost or just misplaced?

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I wish I’d had a camera. Then again probably not, as the two subjects I had wanted to snap a quick picture of might have taken offense if they had happened to notice this older guy walking towards them pointing a some sort of device in their direction–or would they? It doesn’t really matter, I didn’t get a picture. Sorry about that.

After a few afternoon chores the other day, the last day we had any sort of sun in it, I decided to walk over to my wife’s quilt shop and help her close up. Once I had made it up out of our small Clyde River valley to the top of East Main street and started the downhill run to my honey’s shop, I came upon a sight that, for a second or so, took a bit of wind out of my sails.

A couple was walking up the sidewalk towards me, a young couple. Not unusual to see these kinds of things even in these northern territories of the State of Vermont (we do have young people up here you know, not just old farmers who give bad directions to tourists). These couples even hold hands now and then (shock!). What had virtually (but not realistically) stopped me in my tracks was the fact that not only were these two not holding hands (no rule says they have to, of course) but they were each talking on their own cell/smart phones and completely ignoring the person walking beside them.

Hi Beth. Wanna go for a walk? I need to make a couple calls.

Sure, Brian. I need to make a couple myself.

So why bother going for a walk?

A very long time ago (about 10 years before the word ‘weblog’ came into being) I once wrote a short, rather silly thing called ‘Conversation Lost’ in which I lamented thusly and in highly condensed form:

Four score and several years ago there were likely a whole lot more people who actually knew how many years a ‘score’ was and how to properly apply the word into a conversation. Also, there were most likely a hell of a lot more people who knew exactly what a conversation was and moreover, how to properly apply one between two or more people for a reasonable period of time, say more than 43.067 seconds and carry on said conversation without managing to insult anyone by being politically, socially, or sexually incorrect.

Unfortunately, conversation today seems to be limited mostly to “howyadoin?“,” whazup?” and “howzitgoin?” along with the various ingenious replies such as “okay“, “nahmuch“, and “whythehelldonyoumindyerowndambizness!“.

In those days, long before the first blog ever showed up on the then budding Internet thingy, us tech-heads of old used to sit around the office/garage/basement/bar table and talk about what technology might bring in the near future. We could easily imagine tablets and smart phones, multiple core processors, flash drives (SSDs) and all sorts of other neat devices and computer technology we take for granted today, even way back then. We’d sketch them out, build 3D models, talk about the components and supporting resources we’d need to make a certain device like a tablet computer viable, what technology existed back then and what still needed to be developed. If you looked at it from that long ago viewpoint, we young geeks/tech-heads/nerds of old had all the devices of today only said devices were still in our heads rather than in our hands and on our desktops.

What I doubt any one of us could possibly imagine back then was what I witnessed just the other day. The human reaction to all this present instant communication. How what we dreamed about way-back-when would end up causing present day people (younger people?) to still spend their time with each other, like taking a walk together for example, but talking on their respective cell phones rather than to each other. Perhaps if I had been as cynical back then as I am now I might have seen this coming but alas, I was not. Probably a good thing now that think about it.

I have since realized that I’ve seen this kind of phenomenon before just not so up close and personal as having this young couple pass me on the sidewalk yabbering into their respective mobile devices about two completely different subjects while successfully tuning out the fact that there was actually someone walking beside them. Have our priorities shifted so much that our friends and acquaintances who are not with us become more important than the ones who are?

Do I feel completely out of touch with this mobile generation? In a word–yup!

So now I think I’ll take a walk. Feel free to join me if you wish.

Just leave the smart phone home for once would you?