Author: gfox (old content)

Aches Degree

Just after getting to bed last night Elliot called out. He was shaking, complaining of aches, and when we took his temp it was 103.7. Yikes.After a round of drugs, we brought it down a degree, but it was still a bit of a rough night.

This morning I took him to a clinic so that both he and I could get swabbed for Strep throat. Sue has a positive diagnosis already, and I had a cold with the exact same symptoms, and that cold is lingering a bit. The doc suspects Elliot and I have it. We’ll know for certain in 24-48 hours.

I really hope I don’t since I start my new job on Monday.

Flower Digging

Today cleaned up another old flower bed that was badly neglected from before we moved in. As I started to work I found that the small Holly bush that I wanted to remove used to be a large Holly tree that someone had hacked off. Lots of little Holly branches were growing from the remaining stump.

The only thing to do was start digging. What a hole I made.

A couple feet around it and about three feet deep. I couldn’t even get all the roots out either. I dug out what I could then cut the three roots that were a couple inches in diameter.

I was left with a big hole and big pile of dirt. The easy part was throwing the dirt back in the hole.

Fancy Plant

On the weekend I made a trip out to Petsmart for some more things for my tank.

I got three fancy Tequila Sunrise Guppies to round out my fish population. They add some nice color and I really like the mix I have now. There is one Leopard Danio, one Red Long Fin Tetra, one Albino Cory, one Otocinclus, one blue Fancy Guppy, four Black Neon Tetras, and the three Tequila Sunrise Guppies. Those and many crayfish 🙂

I also picked up a live plant for the tank. It has been a while since I had one. When I got home I planted it appropriately and while I was doing that one of the five leaves broke off. Bummer. When I came back a few minutes later, the plant was floating, so I had to replant it a little deeper this time. A little later it was floating again. This kept happening throughout the day and got very frustrating. Leaves kept breaking off too.

By the time I went to bed, there were two leaves left on the root system. When I got up this morning, the plant was floating again, and only one leaf was attached. Grrr. Now I am starting to wonder if the crayfish are doing something to the plant.

Cron Errors

I’m having a strange problem on some of my Drupal sites. Hourly a cron job runs to rebuild caches and do regular maintenance. This is something every Drupal site needs.

Some time in the last 6 months I was finding that cron would get stuck and not complete in the hour. Another would get started and block. Eventually my webhost stopped spawning processes for my user which lead to weird errors on my web page (page not found errors).

I was logged in as me, not the uber administrator when I started messing about. I cleared the cache tables, including the cache_menu table. I was planning on rebuilding the cache table, then the menu system. I was logged in with the wrong account, and I couldn’t remember the administrator account. Since I had thrown out the menu system, I couldn’t navigate to the lost password page.

I had royally messed up my site.

I fixed it by going into the DB and copying the known password from one user to that of the administrator account. I logged in as administrator, ran cron.php manually, then hit up the page to rebuild the menu system.

So far so good. The next day I ran into this tip: How to reset the password of user 1. A little DB query action to set the administrator account password.

I am still having the weird cron blocking issue though. Every couple days I just log in to my web host and kill the running processes and then everything runs fine for a bit. Bandaid solution that is labour intensive.

I can’t figure out how to debug cron issues in drupal though. I’ve read some tips that running update.php can reset things, but that didn’t work for me. I’ve read this page that suggest modifying core files to add more logging about which module is running cron. I think that will be my next step.

Machinery Project

I got out for a bit of a photo walk today in the gorgeous sunshine. Most of these pictures were taken near Point Hope Ship yard on Harbour Road. The chain link fence was a bit of a pain, and it would be awesome to have free run of the place for photo taking. I imagine there is a bit of risk in that though. There was lots of heavy machinery working and a few boats in dry dock getting worked on.

Some old buildings in the area were perfect for taking texture shots.

I happened to come across an open house for the UBC Blue Whale project. There are still in the process of getting this huge skeleton ready for display, but there was lots that was ready to be viewed. This was an amazing animal and its size cannot be described easily. The section in the photo below was likely around 20 feet long and there were a few more sections before it. Then the massive head.

There were few flowers in the industrial area, but I still managed to find some.


Studios Annoy

I saw this infographic on BoingBoing recently, and it really struck home for me. This is even more painful when you have an impatient child that just wants to watch their DVD and doesn’t understand why they have to watch previews and can’t skip things.

I’ve always wondered why movie studios think that it is a good idea to annoy and harass the customers that have paid for their product. To me that seems like a great way to drive away customers. Perhaps for my kids DVD’s that we have bought, I should make a backup copy that allows me to skip the unnecessary previews and ads.

The worst previews are the ones that advertise movies coming “this spring”. Once the DVD is a couple years old this just sounds silly.

via BoingBoing