Tom's Diary

[Mentat]   left around 12:30 this afternoon.  I was sorry   [Emmy]   wasn’t here to see him. 

But that’s okay because a week from Sunday, he’s traveling to Ohio to visit his girlfriend.  But he’s making a two-day stop over in Pittsburgh.  I’m riding to Pittsburgh with him, and the two of us are going to stay at   [Emmy's]   place so we can do some more catching up.  Then on Tuesday, he’ll catch the bus the rest of they way to his girlfriend’s place.

[Emmy]  has a small place, and she no longer has the futon she had the last time the three of us stayed there together.  So I’m not sure yet where everyone’s going to sleep.  But we’ll manage.  [Mentat]   will probably sleep in   [Emmy's]   single bed, and she and I will sleep on the air matress that we bought ourselves for Christmas, 2007.  Crowded or not though, this should be another fun visit, and I’m looking forward to it a lot.

Tom Hesley

Today we watched the movie:   The Death of the Incredible Hulk.  It surprised me that   [Mentat]   enjoyed it as much as he did, because he used to rib me for being such a big hulk fan back in 1979, when we lived together at McKee Place.  But he said it was a great movie although he didn’t think his girlfriend would like it, since it has a sadder-than-expected ending. 

Then, I showed him the 4th generation iPod Nano and he liked the speech.  He picked up how to use the thing quickly and within less than ten minutes, he knew enough to use it on his own.  The built-in speech helped a great deal there. 

I also showed him my Victor Reader Stream, and he liked that device so much that he’s talking about buying one himself so he can download NLS digital talking books.

Then, in the evening, we watched President Obama’s press conference, and I was glad to see that   [Mentat]   is not today the staunch republican that he was in the 80s.  Yep.  He’s finally coming around. 

03:00 PM: I had my last visit with the “love doctor” therapist.

10:00 PM: Worked   Mentat’s Corrupt Mail File   problem. 

Tom Hesley

Related Posts

• Mentat’s Corrupt Mail File
• Today’s Business: 2010-02-07

[Mentat] and I finished the evening trying to import some mail files he had saved from an older computer running Outlook Express 6, into Windows Mail on his new Dell, which he brought here with him.  Once we got past the missing folders.dbx file issue, we were able to see approximately 50 of the 500 messages that were in the file originally.  Unfortunately however, we weren’t able to retrieve the others because the file appeared to be corrupt.  I pulled it into UltraEdit and found that all but the top tenth of the file contained nothing but zeros.  He did say that the hard drive on the original computer was going bad when he made copies of these files.  So it’s possible that the copy he got was a bad one also.  He was sad and so was I.  I really wanted to help him more.  But with so much of the file blanked out, I couldn’t do anymore than I did.  Too bad.  We couldn’t get the messages from the mail server either because most of them came in on a now-cancelled account.  So we no longer have access to that mail server. Well, I guess he’ll have to make more frequent backups in the future and check them often for integrity.

Tom Hesley

Today, my long-time buddy,   [Mentat]   will visit me, and stay until Wednesday.  I always look forward to these times because he’s so knowledgable and I learn so much from conversing with him.  There’s just so much I want to run by him that I hope we don’t run out of time. 

We should have plenty to eat:  I bought him a box of Wheaties; his favorite cereal. and one night we’ll get Philly cheese steak wraps from Sheetz down the road here.

I’m so glad he returned to this area from California.

Tom Hesley

I found that it can take months for changed or deleted pages to be updated in Google’s page cache. The same is true for search terms for that page. However, there is a “Remove URL” option in Google’s Webmaster Tools where web masters can request this for specific pages. I’ve requested that two of my pages be removed and then updated. Hopefully, this won’t take months. I’ll let you know.

Tom Hesley

I downgraded this blog from WordPress 2.7.1 to 2.7 today. However, the error seen when I visit the ‘Add New’ posts page still happens. This is strange since it did not begin until I first upgraded from WordPress 2.7 to 2.7.1.

So I purchased a copy of UltraCompare 6.10, from IDM Software, hoping to find some different files between a working installation of 2.7 (Tom’s Views blog), and the 2.7 installation that has the error (Tom’s Diary blog). UltraCompare is a very handy tool if you have large numbers of files to compare in deep hierarchical directory structures. However, aside from configuration file differences between Tom’s Diary and Tom’s Views, all other files were identical. So I’m puzzled as to why I don’t see the error in Tom’s Views, but do see it in Tom’s Diary. I have to think about where to go next to investigate this further.

Tom Hesley

I upgraded the MySQL database for this blog from version 4.1 to 5.0 so it matches my others. Nothing surprising or particularly difficult about this; I just exported a copy of the data from the 4.1 database, created the 5.0 database, and then imported the original 4.1 data from the copy I just made.

There was one slight problem however: The export database script I generated during the 4.1 database export had a CREATE DATABASE command in it. That database had already been created when I set up the 5.1 database. So I just commented out this line and the USE line below it, and then the importation completed successfully. I then pointed the web site code to the new database, and everything seems to work well.

Tom Hesley

Today, I’ve reached my lowest weight since beginning the current weight loss campaign: The scale said 176.5 pounds.

I hope to get my BMI below 20 percent within the next year. So that means that I need to get my weight down below 132 Lbs. Yes, I have a long way to go. But I hope that as the pounds drop off, that my cholesterol, triglycerides, and blood pressure will drop, and that my good cholesterol will rise. I’ll let you know!

Tom Hesley

Read and accepted the Google AdSense user agreement this evening. That took close to an hour.

Implemented the Google AdSense code on my home page at http://tomhesley.com/ .  The next step is to place the ads on my various blogcast pages.

A new person commented on a post in this blog the other day. This is the first person outside of people I know (Emmy specifically), to do this. So it looks like people are starting to see the sites.

Currently, the post count on my blogs is as follows: Tom’s Diary has 89 posts and 9 comments; Tom’s Love Quest has 166 posts and 8 comments; Tom’s Views has 5 posts and 2 comments.

Google continues adding documents from these blogs to their index: Currently they have 85 pages from Tom’s Diary, 119 pages from Tom’s Love Quest, and 13 pages from Tom’s Views. I’ll probably keep them behind for a while on Tom’s Love Quest, because I’ll be adding lots of pages there over the next several months.

To Do Items:
- Develop and publish a privacy policy for the sites.
- Figure out how to disable revision tracking in WordPress.
- Place Google ads on the various blog pages.
- Find out how long it takes for the old terms from an updated page to disappear from Google’s index.
- Fix problem of RSS link text overflowing past the bottom boundary of the document white space area. This happens on all pages in all blogs currently.
- Downgrade the WordPress software from 2.7.1 back to 2.7 in the Tom’s Diary and Tom’s Love Quest blogs. There are problems in the post editor in 2.7.1 that do not show up in 2.7.

Tom Hesley

Well, I feel less tired today. So I don’t have to take as many naps. The dizziness and fever are gone, and I’m less sluggish over all.

However, the cold seems to have settled in my nose and chest. There is lots of drip, some of which is yellow in color (sinus infection?), and a cough. Some of that discharge is green. I guess I’d better visit the doctor on Monday because I get nervous when colors come out of me.

I tried Delsym cough medicine. I got no relief however.

In some ways I’m getting better; in others, I’m getting worse. Monday will mark a whole week since I’ve had this blasted thing, and I usually host a cold for two weeks. So hopefully I’ll turn the corner on this bug soon.

While I don’t get a cold but once every year or two, when I do get them, they’re really nasty; they seem much worse than they were when I was a boy. Do you think that with the heavy use of anti-biotic and other cold remedies these days, that the cold bugs have gotten more debilitating? They sure seem nastier to me.

Tom Hesley