Author: gfox (old content)

Packing Tendencies

The pack is on. I was working on the garage tonight clearing some stuff out, packing, purging, tossing away.

I will admit it, I am a pack rat. I keep a lot of stuff I don’t need to, so I am making great strides in getting rid of things. It is hard though.

Example? Tonight while in the garage I came across my old fishing gear. I sat on the floor of the garage and poked through my tackle box and other gear. Looking at old lures, poking through old containers, and reminiscing. I thought back to when I used to go fishing a lot.

My friend Trevor and I would go a couple times a week in the summer after grade 12. Englishman River was a common destination. We would hike up the river stopping at all the fishing holes along the way. I remember a specific time where I stopped and sat on the sun warmed rocks and just listened to the babbling river.

I then remembered time I spent fishing with my father. We would often go out in his little aluminum boat and troll around various lakes. We would eat sunflower seeds while fishing.

I then thought about taking my kids fishing and introducing them to what was once a favorite past time of mine.

I think I held on to those things since they remind me of good and happy times in my childhood. Not everything in my childhood was bad, but I definitely like to keep the things that remind me of especially happy times.

So the question is what do I do? Do I keep the gear? Do I give it away? I haven’t gone fishing since 93. What if I want to take it up again? Ahhh, my pack rat tendencies are making me think twice.

Conflicts Handler

Tonights game was an early one which suited me just fine. I needed to work this evening, so the early game meant I could eat some dinner then get some stuff done.

One thing about my team is that several people are on multiple teams (some are on 3 teams). This means that sometimes they can’t play for our team due to schedule conflicts.

Tonight we had 4 players show up, but one of them played for a different team the he was also on. We lost by default which sucks. I am the kind of person that likes commitment. I committed my Thursday nights to the team, and I kind of expected everyone else on the team to be as committed.

Anyway, we ended up snagging a couple people from the other team and playing a 6 on 6 game for a while. We got creamed. The other team had 4 really strong players, and a couple other good players. We didn’t play well, made lots of mistakes on defence, and definitely deserved the loss.

I still sort of had fun though. I really needed to get out and run to blow off some steam, and I accomplished that tonight. Handling-wise I wasn’t all that hot if I was a dedicated handler. If I was a mid or a winger then my throws were fine, but as a handler I threw it away a lot. Weird.

I did have a couple good throws though. The first I was going to hammer to one of the guys in the end zone. I faked a hammer to him, and the defense noticed this and converged on him. I hesitated, looked around, and saw one of our ladies in the end zone all alone. My check was on me pretty good, so my only option was a hammer. It was a perfect throw, and she made a great catch. I felt good about that play.

Another situation where we were aiming for the endzone I looked up and saw two ladies in the endzone not really being checked. I hammered to the further one, but the closer lady tried to catch it. Meanwhile the defense caught up to the play. The closer lady actually had the disk skip through her hands, the defense swiped at it, but barely tipped it, and the further lady actually caught it. I felt lucky for that play.

After the game I felt like I had done a good workout. My legs still feel a little drained.

Stressful Month

I haven’t really posted about this here yet, but the move is on. We have been in the process of buying a house recently, and the deal was finalized yesterday.

This was an interesting process, and definitely not like what I would have thought it would be. Intense, stressful, protracted, and in the end, satisfying. We are very excited by our new place and in some ways can’t wait to be in it. We will still be in Esquimalt, which was something we were hoping for, and the house is perfect for us (save some obvious updates needed).

There is the rub. We take possession in one month exactly. Between now and then we need to decrapify, sell old stuff we no longer need, pack, clean, and move. Lots to do, and really not a lot of time.

I called our landlord tonight and gave notice to him. That did not go well. He knew we were looking for a place, but was unprepared that we would find something so soon. When I told him we were looking, he mentioned that he was going to put the house up for sale, so I am not entirely sure why he was so surprised we found Anyway. A new place to live is definitely cause for celebration. If only there was time for that 🙂

Upgrade Tags

I re-did the upgrade here tonight. I still have a few things to fix up, but I am hoping I can handle that. I need to get my theme reinstated, which may take a bit of work (not sure).

More strangely, I am using the image module to store the photoblog I created for project 365. That image gallery is not showing the images any more. The image tags are missing from the html. Very weird.

Also, I had some customs views using the views module. Those are gone too, but I did export them from the version 5. Importing fails 🙁

The one that will take the most work is my custom module for showing posts on this date in previous years. I rely on the archive module, which has changed, and has thus broken my module 🙁

Happy to have this site at drupal 6 though

Tank Explosion

One of my Cory’s died recently. I was bummed since they had been around for quite a while, and I thought they were happy and well fed. Not sure what happened.

In general the tank is doing very well. I haven’t made any changes in a while, but I think the last plant I bought came with some travellers. I am having a bit of a snail explosion right now. The other day I counted 10 different snails, some tiny (approx 2mm wide), and a couple quite large (1-2 cm long).

I like snails, but I can’t say I like them proliferating on their own. Not sure what to do about a snail explosion.

Swinging Muscles

On the weekend I learned an important lesson from my 2.5 year old son.

We were at a playground, and he was playing on some low to the ground monkey bars. He holding on the bars and was swinging back and forth. He said to me “Dad, do this”.

I got down on the ground, grabbed the monkey bars and tried to swing. The problem was that I was to big, so I had to hold my legs out in front of me while I was swinging.

I am not used to this, and in the process pulled my ab muscles. I was sore for several days afterward.

Turning Position

Just got home from this weeks ulti game. A few weeks ago I was on the verge of quitting. I wasn’t having much fun at the games and didn’t feel like a part of the team, but rather just felt like I was a warm body on the team.

The game two weeks ago was a bit of a turning point. I had a lot of fun, and ran lots. I spent less time handling, and more time out on the rest of the field. Since that game I have been trying to do that more, and I think it is helping me enjoy playing with this team.

This team also likes to play in a style that I don’t always enjoy. They like to employ the horizontal stack, which I can theoretically understand, but in practice I think it is harder to implement well. I like the vertical stack since I feel it opens up the field more.

They also like the long bomb, and quite often can make it work. I don’t like it since with most other teams I have played with, it frequently doesn’t work. It also doesn’t get the team playing as a whole.

In any event tonight I was playing a mid position as we were zoned most of the time. I felt like the timing of my cuts during the swing pass were getting better, but my position was still a little off. Once I get that down I will feel pretty confident in that position.

On defense I can’t say I played great and I can’t say I played poorly. Most of my checks never got the disc sent their way. On defense zone I played a long position which is generally pretty lax with lots of communication to the mids. I prefer to play a mid position though.

Next week is another game.

Disaster Domain

I had a bit of a disaster on this site recently. On Saturday I went about upgrading Drupal from version 5 to 6. I have always had no problem doing upgrades and fully expected this one to go fine as well.

I turned off all the extra modules, changed the site theme to the default, then pointed my domain to another Drupal directory I had with Drupal 6 in it. The actual upgrade was smooth, but I ran into a snag with the image module.

I then backed out of the upgrade. I pointed my domain back at the Drupal 5 install then did a DB restore. This is where it went bad.

The DB restore I chose said it was from 9 hays ago but I had read 9 hours ago. I waited for the restore to complete but I panicked when it seemed to take a while. I started another restore from the next oldest restore point, only to find my database completely empty. It was late at night on a weekend. I made a basic html page for my site and entered a support request.

The next day as I was preparing to head up island for Thanksgiving I checked my DB and saw that it had been restored. Loading my site I found that everything was there. Sure enough, Dreamhost support had come through and restored my DB.

Turns out the restore I had originally attempted was named incorrectly. I still don’t know why it didn’t work when I tried it.

The lesson I learned: back up the DB first! The dreamhost wiki has some information regarding this. I’ve instituted the nightly db backups for almost all my databases. With the script, I can run it just before an upgrade so I have a convenient way to revert.