sueeeus

I am inept.  Or perhaps, a fraud.  I bought a PDA, ummm, three years ago, and only today have I succeeded in accessing the internet with it.  SO FRUSTRATING!  Off and on through the past three years, I’d try, and give up in complete and utter exasperation.  And I’m a generally tolerant and steady person. 

I finally found an obscure note on a support forum somewhere that suggested that I re-run the welcome executable.  Voila!  Now, why, why, WHY, would that be necessary   And if it IS necessary, why is it so obscure   Why is it not documented in the help files somewhere   Anywhere

I HATE COMPUTERS!  But I also love them, for the way I can connect and live vicariously in the wide wide world.

I can hardly describe how pleased I am to have finally gotten that little doohickey to connect to the outside world.  Delighted, for sure.  But the frustration through the journey was not one bit worth it, and my so-called state of the art electronic gizmo is so yesterday’s news. 

C’est la vie.

Sometimes it’s so time consuming, trying to figure out what is wrong.  I’ve been having trouble with my blog.  I keep getting a database error, and I can’t for the life of me determine why.  My configuration files have the proper names and locations.  My database hasn’t changed.  Nothing has changed that I can tell, but for some reason, the system is hiccupping and sporadically throwing an error.  I can reload the page once or several times, and eventually I’ll get back in. 

So. Frustrating.  I’ve perused the WordPress forums to no avail.  I looked at my server settings.  Finally I submitted a ticket to my host service, and they sent me a test file to show that from their perspective, all is working fine.  So I ran their test file, and lo, everything is working fine.  Ever since, things have been working.  It’s not a magic test.  It just says, hey, I’m a php page and I can talk to a mysql database.  Whoopee.  It does nothing else.  I don’t know what the problem is.  I hate that.  I like stability. 

Anyway.  There it is.  My whinge for the day.

Oh, there’s more.  Much more.  But I’m too tired to get into it.

Tomorrow I am taking a day off.  I’ve gotten into a use-it-or-lose-it situation with my vacation time, which is totally pathetic.  What kind of person doesn’t take time off when they can, and get paid for it to boot   I seriously need to examine my priorities and learn how to put me-time into better perspective.  The giant corporate entity for which I work will not go belly up if I take a break or two.  So.  Tomorrow.  Time off.  Perhaps I’ll blog.  Or clean house.  Go shopping   Run errands   Do laundry   I’ll think of something.

Yes, it’s time consuming, but I love categories!  I’m going through my imported blogger posts and categorizing them, bit by bit.  I have finished two months worth (the first and the last).  I am liking WordPress more and more.  I like the free part, and I like the ability to categorize posts and manage the blog details.  Initial setup was a bit of a struggle, though.

I ought to document all the little steps required to make this migration, in case I need them in future to save me some trouble.  Little tiny things have caused me such trouble.  Things that are supposed to be intuitively obvious, I guess.

Basically, I followed the instructions on the support site, posted by Poco.

Starting with this thread, I installed EasyPHP.

1. First I had to find EasyPHP.  It’s French, but the latest version comes with the English language choice.
2. Installation was easy enough.  Getting it working took a bit more effort.  I have XPpro, and I needed to stop IIS in order to get the Apache server to run.  Once I got the green light on Apache and MySQL, I was stuck.
3. Sometimes it helps to read the installation instructions.  I swear they were in French when I was trying this, but now that I go to document it, from their site, there it is in plain English.  Anyway.  I was tripped up because I didn’t know that all I needed to do was right click on the little e-icon in the System Tray to get the menu of things that could be done with EasyPHP.
4. I copied wordpress to a folder under the www directory in the EasyPHP folder on my hard drive.
5. I followed the WP installation instructions to define a new local database, etc…  (using the phpMyAdmin steps).
6. I tried the Import Blogger option in my local WP and got the same CURL extension error, so I enabled the CURL extension (right click EasyPHP –> Configuration –> PHP Extension), tried again and voila!  It worked.
7. Then I imported my blogger images (to my local WP) using the blogger image import plugin.  I had to run it over and over because it times out after 30 seconds. (Lord help you if you try this over dial up!)  It eventually retrieved my images (at least most of them) and didn’t appear to hose my database.
8. Next I followed the instructions for moving WP to a new server.  I used the existing Backup plugin and saved the on-line database to my hard drive, and did the same to my local WP database.  Then I compared the two and merged them.  This part was no fun.  I recommend not doing it.  If you migrate from blogger to WP using the long and drawn out method here, get the WP running, but don’t start posting anything that you want to keep until after the migration process is finished.  Just get the structure and options and all that set up the way you want, mimic them on your local machine, and when you go to update your online database, upload the local one.  I ran into an error when uploading the new database, but found the solution in the support site.  The error and what worked for me are documented here (support site).
9. Finally, I copied my imported blogger images to my web server.

I had some odds and ends things to clean up, but essentially, the big task is done.  Now I will go back and cleanup the loose ends as I have time and ambition.  (It may never get done!)

Things are going slow.  I’m trying to figure out how to make the links work and how to get the format situated and how to import my blogger stuff.

There are a lot of settings, but once they’re done, I think things should be good.  I like the tool itself, so far.  This is a blockquote example.

Here is another blockquote, nested.

1. The template is set up for lists and such
2. I need to learn about the inline imaging.  It doesn’t resize and the aspect ratio isn’t locked.

And another nested one.

I’m in the process of moving from Blogger to WordPress.  I’m moving at a snail’s pace, but so far, if I just follow the instructions carefully, things seem to work.  Almost.

We have a new world order around Chez Squished. The boy is sleeping alone. Through the night. All night. In his own room. Without a bottle. A moment is in order to digest the magnitude of this fantastic milestone. Of course, measures have been taken to make this come about. It’s been a journey, beginning with the decision, for safety’s sake, to put him in his own room, followed by a fairly successful first night. We learned that the tension style safety gate in his doorway makes him feel too abandoned or trapped. I found a set of Kidco safety gates on Craigslist for a bargain, and we now have a very secure stairwell. I’ve put tension gates in the doorways of the other rooms, and left his room open, and my room open. He now has a free path to our room should he need it, if he wakes up afraid. Simply having an open doorway has done wonders for his perception of things. And, since I’m married to Mr. Gadget, we now have the child on nighttime surveillance.
The camera is mounted so that I have a full view of my munchkin all snug as a bug in a rug. Mr. Gadget claims to have had these gadgets all along (the usual story), and is just retrieving them from the places where he’s had them squirreled away. I do know that he won the mini DVD player in a company raffle, so that gadget is legit. The others Not so sure. But I’m not complaining. In my sleepy stupor I can press a button and check in on my sleeping munchkin. I can see if he’s scooted his way out of his blankets or if he’s scooted himself into the corner. Tomorrow is our first Saturday with this arrangement, which means I can sleep in (or at least pretend to). I’m looking forward to seeing if he wakes up happy and comes looking for me, or if he stops to play with his toys along the way.

Or lack thereof. What does it mean when a woman has three park assists in her garage

It’s not that I have trouble parking (although I did actually recently scrape my side mirror against a support beam in my office’s parking garage). The thing is, I am married to a gadget guy.

One day I was pulling the car into the garage and was greeted by a dangling blue ball. When the ball hits the windshield, it’s time to stop. This is parking assistant number one. Low tech. A little time passed. A new parking assistant arrived. A laser. Ooh. Ahh. Parking assistant number two. When the red dot appears on the left front dashboard speaker, it’s time to stop. Groovy man. I just rolled my eyes at him. The other day the Park Zone appeared. The light is green as the car approaches, turns yellow as the distance closes, and red when it’s time to stop. Parking assistant number three. It was on clearance, he says, as his defense.

The baby likes the laser one. He likes that red dot. He always looks up at it when I’m getting him out of his car seat. This bothers me. Is it just a red dot, or is it something that could harm him I hope no more parking assistants show up.