I’ll Tell You What…

Well, I’ve decided that since I take so many photos that it would be easier to start a flickr account and upload my pictures there instead of maintaining my own photo website. So, if you feel so inclined, head on over to http://www.flickr.com/photos/larrysnider/ and let me know what you think about my photos.

Thanks!

I think the database is finally correct. phpMyAdmin is such a pain when it comes to very large databases. I suppose it’s not really the applications fault but the server settings for mysql. The default timeout for “importing” an SQL dump is 5 minutes and when one has a few hundred thousand lines of SQL commands to run it takes a while.

I think I’ve lost a few comments in the past few days but will try to get those put back in the database real soon.

Also, I’ve tried to speed up the loading of the main page by moving the Bloglines links to an early morning cron job that runs the following code and redirects it to a static file that gets read with each page request:

#!/usr/bin/php

// Let’s filter the Bloglines feed so that it
// kind of meets XHTML 1.0 standards
$page = preg_replace(’/&/’,'&’,$page);
print $page . “\n”;

It looks like there some word wrap going on with the fopen statement.

The next thing I’m going to do is save all those badges to the right locally so they load faster. I’m also going to to convert the TTLB Ecosystem thing to something other than javascript and see if that makes it load faster. I think that’s the next biggest bottleneck.

I will be switching web host providers this week so if you experience any broken links or strange error messages while trying to load my site it’s just me. Just try back later if you get an error.

Thanks.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything original and I’d like explain why. First, the good news.

At the end of June, I took my oldest daughter on a trip celebrating her high school graduation. We traveled by plane from Boston to Calgary, AB, grabbed a rental car and drove a couple of hours to Lake Louise in the beautiful Canadian Rockies. The hotel wasn’t the best, IMO, but it was adequate. We went hiking in Johnston Canyon totalling about 10 miles, canoeing on Lake Louise itself and went on an all day trail ride in the mountains around the same lake. It was very nice to spend that much one-on-one time with my daughter.

Now for the bad news.

Since my annual physical in January my liver function test scores have been on the rise. 52 in January, 95 in March and over 170 in June. 45 is normal. My liver has been swelling some causing some minor pain in my upper abdomen with most of the pain in the upper-right quadrant. This has caused me to feel a little sick most of the time, especially in the morining and in the evenings. If I work out hard one night, my body is just devastated for about four days. My doctor’s office is supposed to call a gastroenterologist to setup and appointment.

Overall, I think I’m taking it well. I only get a little depressed when I’m hurting and feeling as if Death is in the room.

Please keep me in your prayers over the next month or so. I would greatly appreciate it.

If anyone would like a Google Gmail account, reply to this post and I’ll send you an invite.

I’m redesigning the graphics so if you see strange things happening with text color, picture placement, etc there’s nothing to fear - it’s just me.

Let me know what you think of the new look.

I just noticed that some of my single and double quotes in my ported posts are showing up as question marks. They showed up fine on my PowerMac at home but under Windows (at work) they’re not being displayed properly. This is with FireFox and Internet Explorer on a Win2k machine. I’m not sure why that is but it looks like I’m going to have to write a script to replace those things in the database. They look fine in phpMyAdmin…
…
Ok. It’s been fixed. For some reason some of the single quotation marks were converted to a latin small letter i with acute, í. All better now.

As you can obviously see from the looks around here I’ve given myself a make-over. The old site is still around. I’ve also moved the picture gallery to a sub-domain (pictures.esnider.net).

Let me know what you think.