A new autumn look! Still a couple of pages under construction (eg., Linkage), but here’s one nifty feature: the image in the middle frame of the header changes every time the page is reloaded. I’ve only got four images in the cycle for now, but I’ll add more as I go along. The new theme might be a little testy for a while before all the kinks get ironed out. Let me know about any other weirdness, please and thank-you!

Today I officially reached another milestone: the six-year mark for online publishing. I’ve only celebrated the blogiversary once before, last year, but it’s really only been in the last few years that the posts evolved into full-length chronicles and the photography resembled more than just snapshots.

Current tally of posts is 2,552 including this one!

more…

You may not have noticed, but last night I upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5. Everything went smoothly, so I went one step further and upgraded to FastCGI for PHP.

What does this mean?

PHP5 (FastCGI)
All files with the extension .php will be handled by PHP5 FastCGI processes. FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_suphp. This eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpretor on every hit. Since it is always in memory ready for the next hit, the responses will be generated faster.

Depending on your computer and what applications you use, there should be a difference in page loading speed. If you have the password, password protected posts should now login normally (input password, hit ’submit’) and those posts will stay open for you as long as your cookies are enabled.

As per usual, please let me know if there’s any weirdness. Cheerios!

Nothing, except this post. Unless raccoons in the new millennia have tired of raiding rubbish bins and moved on to coding websites.

PHP: The wonkiness regarding password-protected posts has nothing to do with your machine and everything to do with Apache files and my website needing a full migration from PHP4 to PHP5. Apparently this started a while ago, even before the upgrade to WordPress 2.5, but I have to do a bit more research before I continue with the changes, otherwise I will break my site completely. I had to make some mods yesterday to make it possible to get into that last PWP-3 post at all.

So, if you have the password for the category of posts labelled PWP-3, for now the only way to get in (unless you’re a hacker) is to enter the password into the field and click the POST TITLE, not the “submit” button. You may have to clear your cache and then make a couple of attempts, it seems to vary between machines. I’ve tried it on PC and Mac (not Linux, though), and Firefox, IE, and Safari. Once I get everything migrated, that submit button should be working again.

Enough of that, on to the raccoons!

At 6:00 yesterday morning there was some rustling around the skylight directly above my head. It was getting light, and I could just make out some ears…

… then a tail… of a big raccoon — doing what, I do not know — and Beano FROZE. Xena was probably sleeping on the recliner, but Beano is always beside me. I didn’t want the raccoon hanging around and making the skylight filthy and freaking out the cats, so I had to get rid of it.

How do you get rid of a raccoon?? First I got the flashlight and tried to blind him (her?), but that didn’t work (of course). The only other thing to do was bang on the skylight, but what if it just made the raccoon angry and bang back? Great, just what I need: wake up to a raccoon face directly above my head, staring at me angrily and shaking his fist. I already have two cats waking me up in the morning, crying for food.

Thankfully, the raccoon decided it was more interested in possible food caches in the eaves of the house and moseyed away. And hopefully that will be my last raccoon-in-the-skylight post, otherwise I’ll have to wear one of those airplane eyemasks to bed.

I’ve got some updated anti-spam plugins activated, so if you try to comment and it won’t let you, please email me.

If you comment and there’s a message “your comment is awaiting moderation” then everything’s OK.

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my site to the latest version of WordPress, but I did it a little differently… so if you see coding weirdness, please do let me know. The site itself will look pretty much the same as before, but the whole interface behind the curtain is laid out differently. It’s an improvement on the admin side (hurrah for one-step plugin updates!), with more features that largely don’t impact me while I’m still using my Gail-ized version of K2 Beta Two r167 (the current version is Release Candidate 3). At least one of my plugins has been updated to work better with 2.5, which hopefully means the other plugin writers will follow suit.

This is gobbledy-gook to most readers, yes, but cross your fingers this upgrade doesn’t break anything!

It’s Good Friday, so I tried to make a good pun! (Tried.)

Aboard the USS Hornet, a decommissioned aircraft carrier, now a floating museum across the bay from San Francisco. It’s supposedly haunted. (Click on the pic for related links.)

As you can see, I’ve been messing about with the banner and background. It’s how I learn — by fooling around with Photoshop tools. The postage and handwriting brushes are courtesy of Stephanie Shimerdla at www.brushes.obsidiandawn.com. Lots of excellent PS resources there. I’ll definitely be revisiting and putting some money in her online tip jar!

In other news, I sold a photo last week to a non-profit group in New York City! Hooray! It’s one of the reasons why I’m putting more effort into improving my design/photography skills, because I benefit a great deal from it — not just personally but professionally as well. Plus, I love being able to say I made something myself.

I was talking to a friend last night about Googling, and the conversation reminded me that I have this little cache of odd screen captures from one of my webstats programs. Here’s a gem from Pennsylvania a couple of weeks ago:

I don’t know what’s more bizarre: the query itself or the impression that my website has the answer. The funny part is, I didn’t have an answer — David wrote the question as a comment, one day before I met him in New York. He is, inadvertently and posthumously, sending people ’round in circles!

Related post: One of the Funnier Ways To Be Found - January 9, 2007

* or, in this case, chacha?? (see screen cap)

For any Wordpress users out there who would prefer to show their Flickr photo sets directly on their site instead of opening up a separate window, this may be for you. The plugin can be modified to accommodate whatever width you require.

Wordpress plugin by Kumara Sastry
PictoBrowser by Diego Bauducco & Co.

Now, all I need to figure out is how to customise the plugin to accept either sets or tags. Right now it’s defaulted to tags sets (oops — see comment below).

Here’s an example of how it looks using my Christmas ‘07 in Vancouver set. Just click on the main photo to advance to the next one, or click on the individual thumbnails to select.

Today marks five years of writing online. FIVE YEARS!

2002 - 105 posts
2003 - 226 posts
2004 - 344 posts
2005 - 431 posts
2006 - 624 posts
2007 - 324 posts as of today

My first post didn’t exactly set the internet on fire; I was babbling on about being a university student and not getting enough sleep and incurable procrastination. In fact, I set up a blog to continue a fine tradition of procrastination and work avoidance. It’s still there, for posterity.

When Claude from Blogging in Paris wrote about her third blogiversary last month, she posted pictures of all the people she’d met through Flickr and her blog. When I got a chance to comment on that post, I thought it was hilarious that I was sitting in Claude’s living room on my computer while she was on hers, typing out the comment and talking to her at the same time! What a couple of geeks we are!

By the way, meeting Claude was an absolute riot — if there was ever a reason to have a personal website, meeting fellow bloggers like Claude is definitely one of them. And only in 2007 could retirement mean shooting 20,000 photos, posting them online, and sharing technical information with a Canadian girl “just passing through Paris on her way back from Iceland”, then writing about it practically in realtime.

This website will always be a work in progress. Earlier today I was fixing old posts, uploading old photos to Flickr to replace Blogger-hosted ones, reformatting text, filing posts in categories, etc. I didn’t get far, maybe only a month of posts. It sounds like a lot of work for something that doesn’t pay the rent, but it’s a personal project that I take pride in and it’s brought me a lot of joy over the years. Sometimes I get lost in the archives, reminiscing when my nieces and nephew were babies and toddlers, the adventures I’ve had while travelling, people I’ve met, photos and video I’ve taken of special events, and reading funny comments people have written. Sometimes when I can’t remember details from a certain time, I return to this website and use it as reference.

So much has happened to me since I started writing here (from Blogger), I can scarcely believe it. Even when I was working on fixing posts from July 2004, just three years ago, I noticed that the subject matter was completely different: writing about taking a ferry to go to work, griping about whether or not to go to my friend’s wedding alone or find a date to drag along, and experiencing an earthquake. As I work my way through the archives, I’m marking my favourite posts — also a work in progress as there are currently 2,054 including this one.

I can see my writing and photography evolving over the years, too.

The #1 draw to this website these days via search engines is aviation-related, mostly people researching Piper Tri-Pacers. I love that people stop to read David’s four-part story of how he bought Zero-Two-Papa and flew it up from Tennessee. Not only is it an interesting story, it’s a way for me to share a bit of David with people around the globe who also love to fly like he did — the old-fashioned way, with wires and fabric-covered wings.

As much as I write online, it will never be a substitute for the real thing, though: communicating with people in person. I can feel myself becoming much more sociable again, compared to 2006. I’m meeting more people, engaging in more activities, settling into a comfortable familiarity with Toronto, and making plans.

It’s been a roller-coaster of a ride, the last five years. I don’t know how long you’ve been reading, but thanks for checking in!