Another call from Ghana

We were awoken this morning with another call from Ghana. It was my parents again, however this time they were calling from the hospital. Dad had passed out. It was overly hot there, Dad had not drank enough water, and his blood sugar was low. He was bent over, and when he stood up quickly, he got light headed, took two steps and then passed out hitting the concrete floor. The whole experience gave Mom quite a scare. Dad was out for a while, and he needed 4 stiches to scalp, just above eye. Also he landed on his arm, and it is really bruised and sore.

They had tried to get an earlier flight home, but we not successful so they will get home late Monday or Tuesday. We’re praying for safe travels.

Another week over

Another week is now over, but once again it feels like I’ve worked really hard but didn’t get anything accomplished. That’s not quite true; we spent the afternoon today going through all of the old machines that we had here. We stripped all the old parts that might be of any use out of them, and got rid of the rest of the equipment. We may a big dent in stuff, and now we actually have some room and some decent machines left. In the next couple of weeks we’ll finish the process up and finally be clean again.

I’m just about ready to head for home. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for “playing” this weekend. I need to do more cleaning and pitching in the office to make room for stuff from the guest room. As always I have laundry to do, I need to get a haircut, I need to start work on the videos for Mom, Fern is going to a “Girls Night Out” dinner on Saturday, and as always I want to get as much sleep as possible.

Heatbeats

The wife went to the doctor today, and she heard the heartbeat for the first time. This was kind of reassuring because this pregnancy has been so easy that at times she says that she doesn’t feel like she is pregnant. (For those of you who didn’t know, yes we are pregnant again! The due date is July 30.)

E. tonight and computers

I’ve watched E for most of the evening. She has been really good. We’ve both worked on the computer for about the last hour and a half. I’ve been working on populating my new media library while E has been playing on her website (Play House Disney, Nick Jr., and NOGGIN). She can really get around on the computer.

Open Media Lending Database

I started playing with OpenDB last night. It looks to be really cool. While I’ve added my booklist to the blog, it was/is only showing what I’ve read and it does not really take what I own. Ideally, I’d love to find/build a system that does both (track what I own and what I’ve read), but in the meantime I’ve started working with this. It tracks books, DVD, VHS, CD, etc. It is a PHP application that can pull information from Amazon and other sites to populate the database. I’ve just started entering information into the system. If you’d like a look at the kinds of things that I own take a look here!

Review – Diuturnity’s Dawn

Diuturnity’s Dawn is the fifth Foster book that I have read this year. I have really spent too many late nights just reading. In this the concluding book in the Founding of the Commonwealth trilogy, Foster concludes the saga of how the Human-Thranx (Humanx) Commonwealth came into being.

I have kind of been reading the books out of chronological order. I started with the newest book first, Flinx’s Folly, which is set way in the future so these Commonwealth books have been some nice background material but overall not as enjoyable as the Flinx & Pip stories. But they are a definite (and easy) read if you enjoy the rest of Foster’s Universe.

MT Config

Inspired by many other sites, I thought that I’d keep a list of what actually I did on this site in way of config.

1/23/04 – Signed up on geourl
1/13/04 – Refined and published my yearly booklist
1/12/04 – I added the Archive by Category list, and created the Books section.
1/11/04 – I dirified my archives
1/10/04 – I installed MTAmazonand BookQueue
1/01/04 – Created Site

Coming and goings

Today we finally took down the Christmas tree. That sure is a big job (and messy too). The wife is upstairs wrapping up the last ornaments, while I’m down here uploading a whole bunch of Christmas pictures to our Photo Gallery. One of things that I need to figure out, is do I really need to upload all the full resolution pictures. They take up a lot of space, so maybe I just need to upload the smaller version and people can email us if they want the larger ones.

E has been handful tonight, full of energy and getting into everything. The wife and I are about out of energy dealing with her. She is a fantastic daughter, but quite tiring tonight. Well, it’s back to work tomorrow and time to go up stairs and get ready for bed.

AAAGGGHHHH!!!! It looks like the new version of the Gallery software is putting the pictures up in reverse order, all 88 of them. I will have so see what I can do about that (it may just be faster to upload them all again), but that is for another day.

Well, I was able to get them basically back in order by using the sort by Picture-Date function.

Call from Africa

We were awakened today by a collect call from Africa. My parents are in Ghana on a missionary trip. They left on Christmas day, and this is the first that we heard from them. They are having a good time, although Mom sounded a little tired an worn out. We miss them much and wished them a safe trip home.

Cold !!!

It is getting cold here tonight. It has already dropped 4 degrees since I got home at 6:45. It is supposed to get down to about 15 degrees tonight, and a high of only 20 tomorrow. This is the time of year that I really dislike our heat pump. I will have to turn on emergency heat tonight and all day tomorrow.

MySQL, PHP, and Turck MMCache

When I first started playing this the MovableType weblog, I used the default Berkley database files. Wanting to try and get as much speed as possible out of the system, I decided to upgrade to MySQL. Because I am not a database person, I wanted to install the phpMyAdmin software that makes working with MySQL very easy via a web front-end. In order to install phpMyAdmin, I needed to add php-mysql package to my Linux server. When I did this, it also forced me to upgrade my basic php package as well. I thought not a big, so I went ahead and did it.

Later I wanted to see who my installed copy of Turck MMCache, a PHP accelerator, optimizer, encoder and dynamic content cache, was working, and low and behold it was broken. So I tried to recompile and reinstall. After a couple of tries with no success, I was able to determine that it was using an older version of php, but I had no idea how to fix it. It hit me today, that maybe when I upgraded php that not everything got upgraded. I was right, the php-devel package was not upgraded, so I recompiled again after upgrading and everything is working again.

Alan Dean Foster

Well I’ve just finished my fourth Alan Dean Foster novel Dirge and fifth since the Christmas. I’ve read all five books in the last 2 weeks. Something that I haven’t done in a long time. While the Foster books are not great literature, they have been a fun and easy read, and a nice diversion from life. They are what I would classify as standard SciFi.

mod_perl2

Well it appears that I did not get mod_perl working with MT. There are a lot of post from July 2003 with people talking about trying to get it to work, but nobody says that they have. I know that I’m on the bleeding edge with Fedora, but this is proving to be frustrating. Well I will keep trying, but it will take some time as I am defiantly not a programmer.

After doing a little more reading. I looks like I may try installing verion 1.3 of Apache. I don’t need the features of 2.0, but do need the speed boost that I would get mod_perl working.

Long Day and some product annoucements from Apple

Afer a long day at the office all I want to do is go to bed. Today Apple announced major upgrades to their iLife suite of products (iMove, iDVD, iPhoto, iTunes, and now GarageBand). It looks likes a nice set of upgrades. Apple does produce some nice software to go a long with their hardware. Although it is a struggle to decide what to do about purchasing a new computer. There is so much out there for Windows that it makes it a hard choice, but the iLife products are really great.

Apple also announced upgrades to their existing iPods as well as the introduction of their new iPod mini. These new smaller iPods sport a 4 GB hard drive and are aimed at the high end flash based MP3 players. It will be interesting to see what happens to that market in the next 6 months.

Ties

You know you are tired when you forget your tie in the morning. I haven’t done that in years. I have got to get more sleep! Thanks to Fern for driving to the office to bring me one.

Reading and Sleep

I love to read that that is my biggest downfall. I spent way to much time this weekend reading books and searching for information about weblogs. I got nothing else accomplished, stayed up way to late, and didn’t get enough sleep. Oh well. As time allows this week I hope to correct a number of things on this blog site so stay tuned.

Mod_Perl and Apache 2.0

Well I finally got (I think) mod_perl working with Apache 2.0 on this box. Things seem to be faster or it could be my imagination. I wish that knew enough about perl to tell if that was the case. I know that Apache::Registry is not working, but I followed the movabletype instructions for making it a mod_perl handler and I didn’t get any errors. It is a shame that can’t get the Apache::Registry stuff working because I think that would speed up all of the plugins as well. Oh well, something to work on later.