{"id":5100,"date":"2011-01-06T11:06:36","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T18:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5100"},"modified":"2011-01-06T16:57:55","modified_gmt":"2011-01-06T23:57:55","slug":"geeking-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=5100","title":{"rendered":"Geeking Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I got an urgent message from the fine folks at WordPress, telling me I needed to upgrade to the latest WP release lest a security flaw in the version I was currently using bite me in the ass.\u00a0 They sounded genuinely concerned, so I figured I’d better do it.<\/p>\n

I’ve never forgotten the WP upgrade in 2007 that turned the apostrophes and quotation marks in every entry I’d written all the way back to 1995 into meaningless strings of special characters, like this: #!@;*.\u00a0 Nothing like that has happened since, but I still dread WP upgrades.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because they’re so damn hard to do.<\/p>\n

WP has an automatic upgrade feature, but it’s never worked for me.\u00a0 The only way I’ve ever been able to install new releases has been to do it manually, which involves turning off plugins, downloading the new release, going to my site via FTP to\u00a0 delete and replace files, then reactivating the plugins and hoping everything works.\u00a0 And sometimes it doesn’t, and I have to do it all again.\u00a0 Since I maintain four separate WP blogs, I have to repeat the task three more times.\u00a0 Yesterday’s upgrade consumed a substantial part of my morning and afternoon, but is now done.<\/p>\n

While I was upgrading my blogs — this one, my hash house harrier blog<\/a>, my cooking blog<\/a>, and the blog-based information site<\/a> I maintain for five Tucson hash clubs — I added a new plugin that will allow me to insert photo slideshows into blog entries.\u00a0 Building tables in HTML to organize multiple photos?\u00a0 A thing of the past!\u00a0 Or so they promise. . . .<\/p>\n

Getting intensely geeky here.\u00a0 Do you care what bloggers have to do in order to present you with organized, readable sites?\u00a0 Of course you don’t, nor should you.\u00a0 But you might, just occasionally, appreciate the fact that most of us have moved beyond shit like this<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Speaking of disorganized and unreadable, I downloaded some free e-books to my Nook.\u00a0 You get what you pay for, it appears.\u00a0 The downloaded books are PDF files, unformatted for the e-reader.\u00a0 Words are randomly hyphenated, headers appear in the middle of pages, other pages break after only one or two lines of text.\u00a0 The Gettysburg Address is a wonderful document, but do you really want to read it on the back of an envelope, in Lincoln’s scrawled handwriting, with smudges and ink stains?<\/p>\n

Lately I’ve been seeing these political campaign-style signs at major intersections in Tucson.\u00a0 They say “What in the world are they spraying?\u00a0 Chemtrails.”\u00a0 I thought maybe the signs had been put up by organized gangs of chemtrail conspiracy theory crazies, but I just Googled “What in the world are they spraying?” and see that it’s part of a marketing campaign for a documentary film<\/a> . . . put out by an organized gang of chemtrail conspiracy theory crazies.<\/p>\n

I’ve left more than my share of contrails across the skies, and like all educated, non-crazy people I know they’re made of water vapor, but there’s no point in trying to prove it to a chemtrail crazy.\u00a0 A friend of mine sent me a link to an article<\/a> showing that the conspiracy theory connecting vaccination to autism is based on a fraudulent study, and said “Maybe now they’ll shut up.”\u00a0 No, they won’t shut up, any more than the chemtrail nuts will shut up.\u00a0 They’ll cling to their crackpot beliefs even harder than before.<\/p>\n

Enough complaining already.\u00a0 I’m making navy bean soup today, using up the rest of our Christmas ham.\u00a0 I buy dried beans and cook them according to the package recipe, but there are two brands of dried navy beans, and each has a different recipe: one calls for water and the other calls for milk.\u00a0 I love the recipe with the milk but can’t always find that particular brand, so this time — what a concept! — I wrote the recipe down.<\/p>\n

If everyone were to eat a nice bowl of navy bean soup, crazy people would listen to reason, free e-books would be as good as the kind you have to pay for, all web sites would be pleasantly designed, and the WordPress automatic upgrade feature would actually work.<\/p>\n

Hey, I can dream, can’t I?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I got an urgent message from the fine folks at WordPress, telling me I needed to upgrade to the latest WP release lest a security flaw in the version I was currently using bite me in the ass.\u00a0 They sounded genuinely concerned, so I figured I’d better do it. I’ve never forgotten the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,15,27,2,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5100","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-administrivia","category-cooking","category-memes","category-personal","category-a-series-of-tubes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5100"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5124,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5100\/revisions\/5124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5100"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5100"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5100"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}