Luna Tail

Okay I broke down the other day and bought one. I know I know… I’m a spending nut and haven’t I talked lately about not spending so much money!? UGH! Well I couldn’t resist. So I have a Google / Android G1 Smartphone through T-Mobile.

I love it! I use it for texting and so most of my email reading on it too. I’m still getting used to the pull out keyboard, and I type pretty slow. But I also type out full words, I don’t really like the shorthand that the kids do nowadays. I can hardly understand it!

I like the apps that come with, and most are free. I like that Android is open source. And I love the touch screen and the flick scrolling and the Wifi. I read that the Blackberry Storm doesn’t have flick scrolling or Wifi and that would bother me.

At least I don’t have to pay my car insurance bill due now, but I might have some credit card stuff I have to pay. UGH I hate debt! Anyway, the phone is nice!

I’m not going to go into detail because I don’t like to share private information here on my blog… but three people were laid off at my work last week. It’s horrible. One of them directly affects me because it was my boss.

I love my boss, as a boss and as a friend. And my heart broke to see her go. Fortunately our friendship will keep us in contact and is more valuable that the work relationship anyway. And she is in good spirits. In a way, it’s an opportunity for her, some relaxing time off, and some decisions for the days ahead. She’s an amazing woman, smart, and has a lot of knowledge so she should be able to get another job pretty fast.. if she wants to.

However, for those of us left at work, we’ll be moved back under the boss I left a couple of years ago. And I won’t go into detail about that, either. But suffice it to say that I was very happy being under my friend/boss for the last two years. And some things will probably change now, changes that I won’t like much. Maybe some wholesale programs will be cut.

Anyway, the dogs keep me happy, and life goes on. And I guess it’s good that I still have my job. Four years and two months and I can retire. I’m hoping for September of 2013. The time really will fly, I’m sure.

Wow! I must admit, I am very impressed with HP support! I sent my laptop off last Tuesday, and by Friday I already had it back! Shiny new motherboard and all. Oh and they fixed my two missing keys, too. I use that darn F2 key a lot to modify columns in spreadsheets and rename files, and it’s been missing for a few months now.

So my HP Pavilion Laptop is now back. They didn’t even have to wipe the hard drive, so all my data is still here and I didn’t have to restore. yay!

So I didn’t get as much house cleaning done as I planned on… I’m back to blogging, following the Niche Blogger program as I do want to increase my blogging income substantially over the next few months. But I can’t clean much anyway in one weekend. I scrubbed the cabinets in the kitchen (finally got the dripping dog food off, LOL) and it really tired me out. Ugh!

Anyway, back to the fun blogging!

It is at the Laptop Doctor… AKA Hewlett Packard. Before I sent it off, though, the wireless card was being detected for two days in a row, and was working… but before that it was only intermittent. So I’m not sure if they will really fix it up, if they can’t see the problem?

I hope they replace the motherboard anyway. And the keyboard, since it’s missing two keys. LOL. Anyway, this weekend will be hard, though I hope to get some good house cleaning done! Maybe some yard work, if the weather is nice!

I hope my laptop comes back soon!

I hate it when things don’t work. Pisses me off. Which is, actually, a good feature of a programmer and it’s why I’m fairly good at figuring out problems with my job.

Ever since about Wordpress 2.5, probably ever since it’s been included in Wordpress, two of my blogs would let me automatically upgrade the plugins, and the rest would not. Of course this has been driving me batty because, basically, I’m lazy and I don’t want to have to upload my plugins to my VPS every stinking time they need upgrading. And that is quite often, actually.  I just upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 and I was hoping the issue would be fixed. Apparently it was not.

So off to Google I went to find out what in the world is going on. Finally I figured them all out.

This Site has the best information to fix the plugin upgrades.  Keith’s Automatic Plugin Info Page.  Of course, though, it didn’t work on all the blogs on my VPS that needed fixing.  But it did work on most.  The ones it didn’t work on I just had to adjust the information a little bit. Like one of them didn’t need the modification to the files.php file.. though I really don’t know why.

Anywho, even though I’m repeating what he says, I’m going to post here what I did to fix this so that I know for in the future when I have to apply it to every single new version of Wordpress that comes out, which is a pain in the rear, but I’ll do it because I hate it when things don’t work. Oh also.. I do not have FTP on my VPS, and I really don’t want to install an FTP server on my VPS because it’s just one more security hole that I really don’t need.

Here’s the process:

1. I adjust the permissions for the entire Wordpress installation.  I do wish I knew the proper and correct permissions settings, but you might want to try your own. If you need to, you can change everything to 777 temporarily for this to work, and then change back to 755 or whatever usually use.  I would love for someone to tell me exactly what I need permissions on all directories and files to be… but I haven’t found a good easy to understand tutorial about it yet. And the WP codex page doesn’t help me one swat.
2. Second I open the config.php file and add the following lines:

   define(’FTP_SSL’, false);

   This is to force Wordpress not to use FTP for, like me, servers that don’t have FTP installed. And I cannot word it as well as the guy who commented on this post:

   There is a bug with WordPress 2.5.0 and 2.5.1 where the setting to use FTP over SSL can not be deactivated once activated. So no matter what changes you make to the config page in the GUI, it will not work. The only way to override that setting is to set FTP_SSL to False in the wp-config.php file as you mention above.

   So to get this to work, the above is necessary. And I found it so in all of my Wordpress installations.

3. I added the following line also to wp-config.php:

   define(’WP_TEMP_DIR’, ABSPATH . ‘wp-content/upgrade’);

   This forces Wordpress to use the directory wp-content/upgrade to write temporary files needed for the plugin upgrades.  At this point I saved wp-config.php and went on to create the the upgrade directory.

4. I went in and created a wp-content/upgrade directory. In addition to creating the directory you’ll need to set the permissions (777?), and also set the group to apache. Apache needs to be able to write to this subdirectory.
5. Finally, and this is the step that I sometimes needed, sometimes did not. I opened the wp-admin/includes/file.php file and made the following changes:

   I searched for getmyuid(). There are two instances of getmyuid() in file.php. The first one is in the if statement that looks for the function getmyuid(). That one remains the same. It is something like if( function_exists(’getmyuid’) && function_exists(’fileowner’) ) {
   inside that if statement, however, you’ll find it again:
   if ( getmyuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {
   that needs to be changed to:
   if ( posix_getuid() == fileowner($tempFile) ) {
   For more information on this change, please refer here as he describes it better than I can!

If you do all these things… then the automatic plugin upgrade in Wordpress 2.7 should work. It is working for me, now, on all of my blogs. Finally! Of course it will be a pain to make these changes every time Wordpress upgrades. But I’m willing to do it, since I hose a number of blogs and it’s easier to do this fix than it is to upload all the new plugin versions to my VPS when they update.

I went to the dentist today for my regular 6 month checkup. My husband has been encouraging me to ask about a mouth guard… I wasn’t sure if I actually ground my teeth at night, but I know I clench them.

Tooth

And so I asked for one right off the bat. The dental hygienist (if that who is the one who cleans teeth?) said yup they could make one for me and she did the impressions.  Impressions are never fun, but I’m pretty good at not letting it gag me. It’s from all the practice I had when I had a lot of throat problems when I was in my 20s and the doctor would swab my throat a lot.  Never was strep.   But anyway, docs are pretty amazed at how still I stay when they throat swab me.

So anyway then the Dentist came and looked at my teeth and said that I have a lot of evidence of clenching, and some of grinding. Ugh! So yup, one of the reasons (if not the reason?) of the muscle pain I have in my jaw has been from clenching and grinding my teeth at night.  Bleh. Oh well, I hope this helps.

I have always wondered, sure the mouth guard will protect my teeth, but how will it stop my muscles from clenching?   I asked the dental tech and she said it’s kinda cushy… I guess I’ll find out when I get it. The Dentist said I’ll probably hate it for 3 to 5 days. I know when I tried to sleep with trays to whiten my teeth, they drove me nuts and I had a hard time sleeping. Soo… I guess I’ll have to suck it up for a week or so first and hope I deal with it better after. Maybe taking a few days off work and getting some Outer Banks rentals would help me deal with it better! Oh and it’s only a tray for my upper teeth, not my lower. Hrm.

Oh and.. I have Mitral Valve Prolapse, and the Doc said that I no longer have to take Anti Biotics before my dentals. I guess the American Heart Association puts out these guidelines, and MVP has been taken off.  I will have to look up why… I never really did think it did me much good!

It’s hard to look at property when it’s 2.5 hours away… and I’m not really sure how many miles. I should check that!  But a Realtor has helped me check out some five acre lots in Monroe, Utah.  And if this Google Maps plugin works, it should show the location below. It might take a minute for it to appear… if it doesn’t sorry!

Anyway, five acres, ready for electricity and water. $66,000 about. I don’t know if that’s a reasonable price or not! I better compare and check it out. If you just want to go to google maps and have a look, click here: Google Map

I’m going to go watch Stargate Atlantis now and have some hot tea, maybe look for some cheap auto insurance, and rest. I had a busy day and it was supposed to be a relaxing day. Oh well. This weekend I have agility so I won’t be on the computer much.

EDIT: It’s about 170 miles… and the map should work now!

Well I’ve been looking around for a feed reader that I really like. I like the idea of RSS but I haven’t really had any good experiences with reading feeds and organizing them and seeing them in a way that I like.

When I was looking into various feed readers I found mention of Feedly. It works in conjunction with Google Reader.  I’m not too crazy about Google Reader though I do use it some, and their calendar, and their mail. But I digress.  I looked more at Feedly and how it reads Google Reader and displays them in my Firefox web browser. So this is my brief little review of Feedly.

If you click the image on the left here, you will see a larger version of my Feedly screen. I have installed it as a Firefox plugin.  I like it a lot.. I changed the settings so that unread posts show up in red so I can easily identify them. I can read the posts and view the images and videos. I can also read the comments from in Feedly. If I want to post a comment, I click the blog entry  name, or the comment section, and it opens the post in a new tab where I can comment to my heart’s content.

You can see, in the image, new unread posts are to the right.  There are multiple views though… I can view all my feeds from the dashboard with new feeds marked. Or I can view latest posts chronologically, where all the blogs I follow are listed together in chronological order. Or I can view each blog individually.

I do wish it would notify me of new posts.. but perhaps that will come in time. I have set my Feedly page to be my home page so I can just hit Home when I want to see my feeds.  And they are all right there!

I can even add and delete feeds right from Feedly so I don’t even see, or have to visit, Google Reader itself.

So far, so good! I hope to no longer miss my friends’ blog posts!

This is just a picture of one of the last roses outside on my rose bushes. I kinda think they are a pain… but pretty for the most part. If they died, though, I wouldn’t be too sad. Okay maybe a little.

Yesterday was a great down day and I woke up this morning feeling much better. Physically, emotionally and mentally. But as I sit here again on the couch (I seem to get stuck on the couch once I start blogging) my neck is just killing me.

I’m sure it’s still because of my car accident. I got the car back, it’s up for sale already. I hope it sells, I haven’t gotten any bites yet. But my arms still go numb when I lay on my back, or have them above my head, or sit for any length of time.. all of which must be bad. I was going to go to the neurologist last Tuesday but they put me off again until this Wednesday. I really need to go in. I’m still in a lot of pain and discomfort and I want to be better. So we’ll see how that goes.

I upgraded the memory on my VPS (server, host, whatever you want to call it) by 256Mb. I hope that helps. It’s not flash memory but regular old memory. So now I’ll have 768Mb and we’ll see if that speeds up the websites some. I might have to ask those I host for to give me a wee bit of money to cover costs. Maybe $6 or $10 every three months or so. Not really too much, just enough to help when my bill comes due.

I think I’m going to flop over and take a nap now. Sitting on the couch makes me sleepy.

I want to make more money. Yeah I know I know… there is an issue that I have to actually consider first, which is spending less money. Like on buying a MiniVan. My husband isn’t working right now, but we were joking, the other day, about how our (my) spending habits haven’t changed much, we are not too strapped… considering I just bought a Minivan. LOL And I walked out of the dealer without giving them a dime. Pretty impressive. When I talked to a guy at my credit union about the loan, he told me my credit score is 805. Max is, I guess, 850 or so, so I have pretty darn good credit. People love to loan my money.

But I don’t like loans, or debt, that’s why I don’t have much. Just the mortgage now and this new minivan. But anyway, I want to optimize my blogs for more income and I’m not sure how. As I don’t really like that many ads all over the place. And the ones I do have don’t seem to sell very well anyway!

Maybe I just should focus on content. Lately I’ve been focusing on restoring my VPS, that is where all my time has gone. That, and doing dog sports. But the dog sports are winding down now, and I hope to have a bit more time. Maybe I can use some of that time to do some blog optimization.