I’m Baaaaaaaack! (Once Again)

After not blogging for 3 1/2 years and not having the blog online for 2 1/2 years, I’m back again.  The blog disappeared in August 2018 when I changed web hosts.  Migrating a WordPress blog from one web host to another is NOT as easy as hosts say and I consider myself tech savvy. Just back up the WP site and database, download to a local computer, upload them to the new web host, install, and presto, they said.  Simple, right? WRONG.

I perused the literature, looked at my 3 gigabyte WP directory and opted for the techs to handle it.  Several times the old techs failed in giving me uncorrected files or even all of the files for the new techs to install.  Several fruitless attempts and much aggravation later, I became discouraged and gave up, thinking that I’d probably lost seven years worth of blogging.   Winston, that damn dog also got in the way.  Then I embarked on a Sooper Seekrit Projekt (which I’ll talk about in a later post).  Suddenly I needed my blog online and working.  Oh dear me.  I started again.  However this time some cosmic deity and the planets and sun must have been aligned because techs on both ends finally got the blog online intact.  Things are a mess behind the scenes; the layout is old and dated but the blog is back. Over time you will see changes to make it better – and different.  How so?  Stay tuned.

Since this blog started as a Richard Armitage appreciation site, I’ll leave this picture of him here looking older, wiser and doing his best to weather this pandemic lock down.

Richard Armitage
Richard Armitage courtesy of Gratiana Lovelace’s archives (via @MsSarahLena)

I’m Baaaaaack!

grand openingAs you might have noticed, my blog has been down since March.  My site was hacked and infected with nasty malware.  The web host therefore took the site down until I did something about it, never mind that it was on their server.  They gave me a list of 91 infected files and left me to it.  Needless to say, the development didn’t help my shaky mood so I let the whole mess languish… and languish… and languish.  I could have erased everything and started fresh but didn’t want to lose all my posts.  A computer friend looked at it and said I was pretty much screwed unless I had a clean backup (nope) or somehow puzzled through the server language to do a clean sweep.  OR the web host could do it for me- for a one time hefty fee.  Lovely.  So I bit the bullet and forked over the cash. I’m now back in service.

So a lot has happened in six months, although poor The Man is still stuck in London playing in The Crucible.  Will have to rectify that.  Stay tuned!

 

Behind the Curtain: Blog Maintenance

There seems to be a problem with some people getting push email notifications of comments.  Since WP.org is integrating the capabilities of some of my add-ons, I going to disable some of them to see if that’s causing the problem.  If anybody would like to be a guinea pig, please reply, subscribe to comments, and let me know if you get an email.

Checking In or Hailing from the Deep End

I’m still alive Dear Reader.  Like a victim with a hypthermia, I’ve been marshaling all my mental energy dealing with a serious Real Life problem.  It’s not how I pictured my transition, but there’s not much I can do about it right now. In a few months, there might be a bit of breathing room to accommodate other activities like blogging.  A friend is coming to for some face time and powwows on how to wedge a tad more social interaction into the mix.  This has always been the bane of my disorder; I critically need to engage with people, but it’s the first thing that falls by the wayside.  Damnit.

My inner trio (Jada, Jodi and Quiet One) have decided to institute Plan B to get me going as well: Christmas.  Yes, I’ve broken down and not waited for November 11th, Trinalin.  Sorry.  The holiday is playing on my iPhone.  I’m seriously contemplating breaking out the Christmas blog banners.  An elf has to do what an elf has to do.  (Halloween has always been so unnecessary).

Also, my blog comments have decided to take a walkabout in my absence.  I have no idea what’s going on now, but I’ll fix the problem this weekend. 

 

 

Internet Woes 2

My internet has actually stayed on for the past few hours.  Dare I hope my ISP solved its DNS server problem?  I just *knew* I couldn’t have been the only one affected.  Will wait and see until Monday before cancelling the appointment.

*hugging and kissing her internet*

I’m becoming waaaaaaay to dependent on it methinks.

HAL, Is That You?

Strange things are happening here.

WordPress.org is becoming sentient.  It just took a draft post and published it – dated three days ago.  If some of you saw the “Patty Takes on Winston” post, that’s not supposed to go live until next Tuesday. For once, I’m not trying to be a tease today. So if you see any other strange goings-on here, HAL is messing with me.

Anyway, how about another kind of tease?

RA 2004 promo

Richard Armitage in 2004 promotion shoot; Courtesy RichardArmitageNet.com

More Tinkering: Test 3

Thorin looks like he had extensive plastic surgery to have those Klingon ridges removed.  Did I writes that?  Whoops, I did it again!

Hope this motivates anybody who received motivation to comment.   😀

 

 

Tinkering behind the Curtain Again

It’s again come to my attention that auto notification of posts have ceased on its own.  So, I’m messing behind the scenes and disabling certain addons to see if there’s a conflict.  Oddly, I receive notification for everything in triplicate.  Sigh.

So if you received notification on this post, please comment below.

 

 

The Case of the Missing Comment Box

As you might have noticed, WorPress.org and I aren’t getting along.  There are cosmetic formatting issues but the biggest problem has been it keeps globally closing comments to all my posts.  Ticky boxes check and uncheck all by themselves.  Subscriptions even disappears for awhile. After wracking my brain all month, it turns out the problem is not WordPress but my internet host.  Something they are doing on their end is affecting my WordPress database, so every time they reset the servers, things go haywire.  They are also known for not being terribly responsive to users.

Happily I found a Magical Fix but it involves real programming geekery.  I’m visiting my guru this weekend and she will Take Care of It (TM).  I will also look for another internet host for the blog. 

In the meantime, I will manually check each day that the comments section is open.  I just reopened them for the last post which is all I can seem to affect at the moment.  The contact page does work, so if you encounter problems,  you can notify there.  If you have subscribed in the past, please do so again.  Or you can use a RSS feed, or bookmark this.

Please bear with me.  This will be resolved one way or another.

Technical Difficulties

Not tryin’ to be funny but WordPress is having technical difficulties.  It’s come to my attention that the ability to reply to any of my posts has vanished.  I’ll trouble shoot and then beg my guru for intervention if it’s not resolved soon.

Please standby.

EDIT: I updated WordPress two days ago and it hasn’t been playing nice since.  Comments seem to have defaulted to none and must be manually allowed for each post.  Hence previous post comments are closed is which really annoying. Time for my guru.

Welcome back!

Well, that was interesting.

My IT buddy left after massaging HP back to good health since its trauma at the hands of Geek Squad.  Long story short, after having HP for almost six weeks, they only thing they successfully accomplished was wiping the HD and installing Windows 7, oh, and a new video card.  They did not correctly identify the problem (the possible virus I mentioned six weeks ago); misdiagnosed alleged problems with the old video card, fans and power supply (nothing wrong with any of them); and my favorite – botched backing up my stuff.  In what must be the Epic Fail of Back-ups, I had a restored hard drive full of empty directories and folders.  Yup, they neglected to COPY THE DATA.  Thankfully none was critical but several gigabytes of data are a lot of files to lose and reconstruct.  The moral to this story is: avoid the Geek Squad at Best Buy!

Because of my frustration over the WordPress Service limitations, she also migrated this blog to my own server.  So bye WordPress Service, hello WordPress at Judiang. If you hadn’t noticed, you were redirected to a new URL at www.jagrant.com/watcher. You will probably need to bookmark, RSS, or subscribe again to the new URL. Everything here is a la carte as far as personalizing is concerned, so I’ve been adding plug-ins to at least be on par with WordPress Service before I can dabble with the fancy gizmos.

Sadly the move wasn’t damage-free.  While posts arrived basically intact along with comments and links there have been some big problems, the move has stripped paragraph breaks, borked image placement and broken embedded videos.  I’ve been painstakingly parsing and fixing code, although I fear some aesthetics simply can’t be mended.

So, watch out for the boxes scattered around and don’t look at the wallpaper. Be sure to bookmark my new URL, RSS, or subscribe in the right panel.  I’ll get things in some semblance of order while I finish birthday feting.

But I’ve got posters.  Here’s one:

Richard Armitage in 2004 photo shoot

Another Year

Today is my birthday.  Nothing momentous; that was last year, capped off with a cruise in the Caribbean.  I don’t have any insights or revelations today.  There’s simply a sense of tranquility, something I’ve been sorely needing these past few weeks.  One of my buddies (the IT maven) arrived Wednesday and another is due today.  We’re taking things easy while my IT massages HP into health it hasn’t had since it left the factory nursery.

It’s amusing actually. I’m happy chirping at everybody “Today’s my birthday!” but don’t particularly care whether there’s a big dinner or a musical or Something Special to do as the younger me would have.  Just marking another year without much fuss is good enough.  Maturity is definitely a perk to getting older.

My IT is darkly muttering about buying flash drives for HP’s surgery so I need to head out.  Meanwhile take a look at the lovely shiney posted by RichardArmitageNet.com.  Enjoy!

“So, it’s your birthday, milady?” SQUEE! *THUD*

Computer Angst Redux

Young female person called and left a message this morning saying HP was ready for pickup but oh, it had a raging fever and bad congestion (overheating and fan problems) and it should go the The Service Center.  I hesitate to call this girl a geek, because based on the chat that later transpired, if  she was actually a tech, I feared for any computer she touched.  Apparently, yes the HD had  been backed up; no, it was still crashing; no she didn’t know if it was a virus or the HD; and no it hadn’t been fixed.  I tersely agreed for HP to The Service Center (or more like Purgatory) which leaves me without a desktop for two more weeks.  I could buy a new one if it wasn’t only three years old.  Grrrr.

Meanwhile, I’m determined to resume blogging on the iPad once I return home, albeit a bit slowly and sans media (at least until I can figure that angle out).  Hmm, my friend’s computer seems to be having video problems.   Uh oh, wasn’t me!

More Computer Angst

HP is still in the hospital. The young geek said it would probably need a brain transplant ( read: new hard drive). I blanched, forked over my credit card and was $300 poorer in the bat of an eye. That was Monday; surgery was to occur in 4-5 days. I’ve yet to hear a thing. Right now I’m out of town valiantly pecking on an iPad. It has no name (yet) but likes the letter “s”. It also likes it’s own punctuation much like RA’s wandering apostrophes.So by next Wednesday I hope to get the blog rolling again by fingering the person responsible for my fangrrl ways. Watch this space.

Geek Angst

All of RA’s characters and the man himself could be parading behind me wearing nothing but smiles and bows and I would say, “Meh. Can you fix my computer?”

You see, HP, my main squeeze desktop is very sick. I’ve had others in the past 20 years, but HP has been steady for awhile (accept for that video thing last year but it can sees well now). HP gives really good internet. Oh yeah, I gotta have it.Super Bowl Sunday, HP suddenly flashed the Blue Screen of Death and crashed. Many times. An essential system file has been corrupted probably by a virus and the computer can’t boot or remain stable long enough for me to repair the file or run a scan. I have enough knowledge to diagnosis the problem but not enough to personally traverse the minefield of digital brain surgery. I certainly don’t want to risk turning it into a vegetable (read: borking the system and losing all my precious data. This is the age of storage described in terms of terabytes; that’s a lot of information to reconstruct.) Because I’m distraught, I’ll continue to beat this metaphor and say HP now sits comatose until I can get it to a specialist. Right now I’m using Toshi the laptop which has gotten so little love lately that it balked at allowing internet access but I made it see the error of its ways. At least I’m reunited with my beloved internet.

Needless to say, with the post-blizzard mess plus two more snowfalls in less than a week, an emotionally delicate pooch, and now poor sick HP, my nerves are a bit frazzled. I wish these guys would put their clothes back on and go. Not a computer savvy one in the bunch.