It’s been raining steadily for the past day or two here at the house, and there’s a flood warning in effect for this area until early tomorrow morning. Already, the river out back has risen to the east side of our tool shed and it’s likely to come closer to the house before it crests. In this entry, I track my efforts to manage this water problem both in the yard and the house. Hopefully we won’t experience any flooding in the house basement.
This year, as I’ve done every year since 2002-12-31, I’m DJing a New Years celebration party at Richard and Christine’s garage, in Sinking Valley. I do not charge them, because this is my way of paying them back some, for all they do for me during the rest of the year. Besides, it’s my way of ringing in the New Year, Hesley-style, with lots and lots of great-sounding Tommy’s Tunes.
In this post and the attached comments, I’ll mention all that I do over the next several weeks to prepare for this gig; everything from getting the computers ready and testing the sound and lighting equipment, to assuring that my hard drive-based library contains all the latest hits I’ve purchased this year.
This will show that there’s a lot more involved with DJing a party than just sitting down, turning on the lights, and playing music when the get-together begins. It’s not as simple as it looks.
So, enjoy.
This year, as well as last, the color scheme with which we’ll decorate the outside of our house and around the property, will be deep and vibrant blues and whites. As I put up each piece of the show, I’ll document the effort in the comments section of this post. This year however, I’m phasing out the incandescent white icicle lights; they consume too much power and they fail too often. Instead, I’ll put up more C7 and C9 LED blue lights in their place. These appear more reliable than the series-configured miniature LED light sets, and the screw-in light sets are much easier to troubleshoot and repair if they do fail. I’m also phasing out the miniature LED light sets. That is: I’ll use what we have here but plan on buying no more of these for outside.
Hi [Sandy].
Wow, don’t get eyestrain, being in front of that microscope so much. 
Yes, I hear that Bellwood has great water. I wouldn’t know however, as we have well water here; very HARD well water in fact. Been thinking about a softener, as I just replaced a water heater that only lasted six years. But I’m not sure the added expense of a softener would be offset by the savings in less appliance repairs / replacements over its life time. I’ll have to think about it some more.
Hmmm. Your long work hours remind me of the software engineering job I held for fifteen years. Lots of overtime there. One month in 1992, we worked 8:00 AM until 1:00 AM, seven days a week. I gained some weight that month.
Do you visit those 13 reservoirs personally to collect the samples? That would be a neat way to get out of the office now and then.
Sorry you had to go it alone like that. But if you obtained plumbing skills, at least you could do that work to make some extra money if you needed it. I re plumbed our house here, back in 2008; replacing most of the copper with PVC pipe, and going from a 1/2 inch water main to 3/4 inch one. That really improved the pressure and now, you don’t get scalded in the shower when someone flushes the toilet. In fact, there’s no temperature change at all. We can even wash clothes now while someone showers, and they don’t know the difference.
Working with PVC seemed pretty easy; although I did have to learn to solder copper pipe because I decided to use copper around the water heater, as I didn’t trust PVC to handle the heat there as well. But in retrospect, it probably would have been just as safe to use PVC. So I will use it, if I ever do that job again, which I’m hoping not to.
Goodness, you’ve certainly had a rough year! But it’s great that you’ve emerged from that darkness. Congratulations. I’ve had my bouts with depression as well. But things have been very good over the past eight years or so; particularly now that I’m doing more of what I was apparently cut out to do – writing. I’m happier now than I’ve ever been, and while it took some time to adjust my life to support it and to learn how to be happy, it was well worth the effort. I don’t mean to say that everything is perfect. Mom’s ongoing health problems sadden me deeply. But nonetheless, I like my life – I’m a “life-a-holic” as well.
I saw your Mom and dad last December. They came for a little Christmas bash that Mom held. I always enjoy talking about math and computers with Jim. Once we talked about the special significance of the number zero and why calculators give you an error message when you try to divide 1 by 0. Wow! He’s really very smart.
One day at a time, yes, because the further out you plan, the greater the risks of those best laid plans going awry. Best to keep it short, and simple I think. Do you like philosophy? I must confess that I enjoy writing it more than reading it.
Today’s project: An IBM ThinkPad laptop that the customer says shuts off and reboots unexpectedly. So far, I’ve not been able to reproduce what she’s seeing. But I’ll do an Avast scan for viruses, check the battery and power supply, look for overheating, and determine if a corrupt application / program might be causing this. Check the comments below for further updates as this project progresses.
Worked on a customer’s laptop computer. Her problem: While restoring a QuickBooks 2010 company file, and overwriting the existing one on the computer with the newer one in the backup, she gets an error message saying that the file can’t be overwritten because it’s read-only attribute is set. She says that though she frequently restores backups like this, she only yesterday began experiencing this issue.
The solution we hope to discover, would be to change her computer’s configuration (whether that be in Windows 7 or in QuickBooks 2010 itself), to once-again allow these over-writes. Check the comments below for progress on this issue.
Overnight, I worked on extending my blogging software so that it emails all comment authors in a comment thread, whenever someone posts a new comment to that thread. I see that other blogs do this and was disappointed that WordPress does not generate these notifications by default. This could be a problem in that people who post comments are not notified when someone else replies. Thus, the original poster may never discover that someone followed up with a comment, because they may forget to visit the blog again to check. So I’m hoping that adding this emailing will entice people to return to the blogs more often.
To that end, I found a plug-in that does something similar; although for each new comment, it apparently emails only the person who posted the last (most recent) comment. It does not email all comment authors in the thread, which is a shortcoming in my opinion. But, in its favor, this plug-in (the ReplyMail WordPress plugin) allows the blog administrator to customize the formatting of the email messages it creates. Plus, it supports template tags, which provide easy control over the content of said messages. So I’d like to use this plug-in, but modify it slightly to email everyone in a comment thread when a new comment is added.
Unfortunately though, upon installing ReplyMail, I discovered that it does not generate any email. I’ve verified that the plug-in is indeed executed each time I post a new comment. Nonetheless, it sends nothing at present because it deems all comments which I’ve tried replying to as being unapproved, though in fact, they are indeed approved.
So, in the comments below, I’ll track my progress toward getting this new functionality functioning correctly. I hope you’ll enjoy this software development journey as much as I will.
01:30 PM: Mom called up here, saying that when she started the dishwasher just now, it made a noise like a small explosion, then shut down. She’s unable to re activate it. Investigating.
01:35 PM: Verified that what she said was true. The dishwasher indeed shows no signs of “life” right now.
01:37 PM: Checked the circuit breakers in the basement. The one that feeds the dishwasher was tripped.
01:38 PM: Attempted to reset the breaker. But it immediately tripped again, and I could hear a distant bang from the kitchen as well. Best not to try that again until the origins of that loud sound are determined.
01:40 PM: Unplugged the dishwasher, as I’ll be working inside it shortly.
01:45 PM: Removed the lower front panels of the dishwasher. No odor observed.
01:46 PM: Located the junction box, mounted to the frame of the dishwasher, where the power line enters the unit.
01:47 PM: Removed the cover. Now, a pronounced smell appeared, and the inside of the cover had a couple black marks on it.
01:48 PM: Examined the wires inside. One of the wire nuts was discolored (lots of black on it), and the neutral wire showed signs of heat stress (its white insulation had turned black near the its connection to the mains.
01:50 PM: So, I undid both the hot and neutral connections, stripped all wires anew, and replaced the two wire nuts with brand new ones.
01:55 PM: Went back to the basement. Plugged in the dishwasher and reset the breaker. Thsi time, it did not trip again.
01:57 PM: Then, I headed back up to the kitchen, where I latched the door on the dishwasher and pressed the start button. It resumed the cycle that Mom nad started without further incident. It appears that something caused a short circuit in the wiring, which now has been addressed.
02:00 PM: Reassembled the power junctin box and the kick plates, as the unit purred all the while. Since normal operation has been restored, this job is done.
Okay, well, the new season of lawn care has begun here at the Hesley household. I’ll detail this effort in 2010 in the attached comments.
So, I’m talking to [Emmy] the other night, and she says that she doesn’t like so many of those “automated” comments on my posts, because they make it harder to find real comments (from other humans).
I looked into the matter and found that I had 1060 of these pingbacks, strewn throughout my collection of posts for this, the Tom’s Diary blog. Upon examination, I discovered that all of those were pingbacks from this blog, to this blog; thus the term: self pingback.
In short, a pingback is a special comment attached to a particular post, which is generated by WordPress whenever another blog (or another post in thisblog) links to the subject post. Upon reviewing the WordPress documentation and goggling around for “independent” explanations of pingbacks, I determined that these self pingbacks probably aren’t that useful; especially since most of them referenced my daily revisions posts, which give little more information than the names of revised documents that day. Therefore, I figure that I don’t need these, because when I write a post, I always add links to other relevant posts to it, and so, need not rely on any self pingbacks in the comments beneath to provide those links.
Subsequently, I deleted all self pingbacks from this blog. This involved a couple steps; the first of which was to run an SQL script on the wp_comments table in the blog’s database. That script was as follows:
DELETE FROM `wp_comments`WHERE `comment_author` LIKE "%Diary%"
Note that you’d have to modify this statement for your particular blog’s name. Since this blog is called Tom’s Diary and since I knew that nobody left any non self pingbacks with the string “Diary” in the author’s name, I surmised that this would be safe. It deleted 1060 comment records.
Well, immediately after this, I thought I was done, but soon realized that the comment counts displayed beneath each post on the blog had become incorrect. The self pingbacks had been deleted alright. But the count of comments in the affected posts had not been decremented to reflect this. I had assumed that the WordPress database would have triggers to automatically update the counts. But It appears not to.
So I wrote a non destructive SQL script, to get a count of the post records whose comment count field did not match the actual number of comments associated with that post in the wp_comments table.
SELECT count( * ) FROM `wp_posts`
WHERE `comment_count` <> (
SELECT COUNT( * )
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_post_ID` = `wp_posts`.`ID` )
I verified that I got what appeared to be a reasonable count of disagreeing records.
Next, I rewrote the above SQL that, instead of just displaying a a count, actually update the counts in the offending records as follows;
UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_count` =
(SELECT COUNT( * )
FROM `wp_comments`
WHERE `comment_post_ID` = `wp_posts`.`ID` )
What this does is that, for each post, it counts the number of comments that list that post in their comment_post_ID field, and assigns that value to the comment_count field.
This seems to have done the trick, as the ten or fifteen posts I examined that had comments noe display the correct number below, and there appear to be no missing comments either.
Thanks for the tip, [Emmy].
I’ll need to run the above SQL against the databases for my other blogs as well, and will note in the comments below when I finish that.
Of course, there’s still the problem of preventing the self pingbacks from being written to the database in the first place. I read of some plugins for WordPress that may solve this problem. So I’ll look into them at some point and install them.
Take care.