Father’s Day

It was a good Father’s Day. Woke up to smiling faces, had a great breakfast, then took the family over to visit my own father before spending some time in the pool. After much splashing we returned home, ate lunch, and all took naps.

After naps were done Kelly made us a great dinner. We then topped that off with a visit to Goodberry’s for some tasty frozen custard. Then it was bathtime for the kids and then story time for them before tucking them in.

Now Kelly and I will likely spend time working on the 500-piece puzzle that Hallie and I started. It should be a fun ending to a fun day.

Drupal To WordPress Migration Snafu

Bah. I’ve found a fault with my hack of the Drupal to WordPress migration script: the authorship of posts isn’t migrated. This typically isn’t a problem if a blog only has one author. For a multi-author blog, though, it can lead to much confusion.

Its easy enough to copy user id’s from one system to another, and so I’ve updated my script to do that. This still doesn’t correctly show authorship, though. The problem for me as a SQL n00b is how to create WordPress’s wp_usermeta table with the appropriate INSERT statements?
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Cuts And Runs

I said goodbye to an old friend yesterday: the lawn mower that I first pushed across lawns over twenty-one years ago now has a new owner. I put a wildly-popular ad on Craigslist earlier this week and sent it home to the first person who brought me the cash.

I had sold it once before, about five years ago to my buddy Scott, but got it back from him when he no longer had a need for it. I used it here until I decided I needed a mulching mower, at which point it took up its new home in the garage for the past two years.

Somewhere in my parents’ scrapbooks is a picture of a 125-pound me with the machine that launched my lifelong lawn care obsession. Goodbye, old friend! I hope to see your work as we pass by your new home on our occasional trips to visit Kelly’s parents.

Finger-eating Fan Pronounced Dead

One of the things I did on my get-stuff-done morning was retrieve the killer nonworking gable fan from the attic. After rigging up a plug and giving it juice, I determined the thermal safety breaker has tripped. The thermal breaker is a non-replaceable part which, when activated, turns the motor into a unique doorstop or lively conversation piece.

I’m still thinking it might be worth $50 to put up another fan. It gets to 130 degrees F up there, which makes the air conditioner work harder. The ideal solution would be to put in a radiant barrier but I think that would run $300 or more with the space I’d have to cover (~$.50 psf, if i recall). Maybe I’ll consider that in the fall (when it will also help with heating).

Why didn’t I get a degree in thermodynamics? Or curmudgeonry?

Job Front Progress

Looks like things are looking up on the job front. I have agreed in principle to a 3-month contracting position doing some interesting work. If things work out it’ll convert to a full-time job.

It’s not in the bag yet, and its not a full-time gig, but it is encouraging. More news as things firm up.

Spinning My Own Electrons

After reading the N&O story about businesses generating their own power, it made me wonder what it would take to do this at home.

The typical residential power rates are pretty high. If I converted to a Time-Of-Use plan and found an alternative way to cover my demand during peak hours, I wonder how much money I could save? Certainly not enough to afford a big, honking, million-dollar diesel generator, but how about a bank of batteries and an inverter? Or a smaller generator (preferably powered by natural gas)? What would it take to cover my air conditioning?

Of course, I don’t use nearly as much electricity as would be required to make this a worthwhile endeavor, but its fun to imagine, anyway.

On The Mend

I successfully played with the kids last night and safely tucked them into bed. To my surprise, I found the energy to read my book (Walter Isaacson’s Einstein: His Life And Universe) and chat with Kelly before I went to bed. I also found my stomach much more open to food and drink, so I helped myself to toast and a glass of water or two. After spending the day fighting to keep things down, that was progress.

This was followed by a peaceful night of sleep. Upon waking, I got the kids ready to go, chatted with Kelly again, and took Hallie to her summer camp. T and I also stopped in at the office of $FORMER_EMPLOYER to drop some stuff off.

Kelly had called the Harris County (Ga) health department to get the pool checked out. That pool is considered a private pool and thus out of their jurisdiction but the fine folks there followed up with the resort owner to make sure the pool was properly maintained. It apparently was, or is, though the health department says that this far out, whatever bug may have been in the pool has long since disappeared. So we’ll never know.

Good to be out of the woods on this, though.