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can't outrun the mental fog
Thursday, July 25 2024
I had a stupid little landlording chore this afternoon that had me driving over to the Brewster Street house. Gretchen had been in communication with Howard, the neighbor to the south, who was saying that there was a lot of dirt up against the fence that was coming through into his yard and interfering with a possible fence repair. I was also supposed to look at the trees in the back, where supposedly there was more trouble with fallen branches. I had a fairly long chat with Howard over the fence about these things (and other issues, such as termites and rats). He told me about some guy in the neighborhood who has been obsessively beautifying the public areas such as the "devil strips" (that thin patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street) and even front yards of people (such as us) who are happy to have him do it. His latest project is to fix our front steps, which Gretchen had told him he is free to do. (Unlike with asphalt scammers, there will be no unexpected five-figure bill at the end.) As for the trees in the back, one of the other neighbors (and there are many, as the properties come together back there like meridians at the north pole) had hired someone with a bucket truck to trim away the half-fallen ones, though some of these ended up in the yard of our rental. So all I ended up having to do was shoveling back a little soil from Howard's fence, building a tiny retaining wall with random stones, and then consolidating all the branches in the back into that one pile of mulberry branches I'd made a couple weeks ago.
On the way home, I stopped to buy a few provisions at the Ghettoford Hannaford: bananas, soy sauce, tofu, tempeh, and a six pack of expensive Belgian-style ale. (I hadn't had that in a while.)
While I was in the bathtub this evening trying to write a report to look at the words tried by an individual Spelling Bee player, I encountered another nice-to-have that my old reporting systems had but which this latest one lacks: JSON and SQL validation before saving the report. Without that, you create a report that mysteriously fails, and you're in a fucking bathtub, so what did you expect? Later as I worked feverishly to build such validation, I couldn't outrun the mental fog of a 150 mg dose of diphenhydramine that was racing to catch me.
Meanwhile, my Asecular.com website (hosted inertially on Godaddy.com, the worst host ever) has been experiencing weird issues ever since it was migrated by Godaddy from one server to another, something I wasn't aware of until after they'd done it. (I mentioned this the other day.) Today I managed to get and maintain a text chat with someone at Godaddy and, with their help (which wasn't great and was filled with copy-pasted advice), I managed to find the problem. A small part of my late father's website (a subdirectory of Asecular.com) is powered by a MySQL database, and something about the migration was causing it to consume an enormous amount of resources. All I had to do was disable it (by renaming it) and the troubles went away. Clearly, the problem was the migration, which caused code that had been working to fail. Of course, in the midst of our text chat, the Godaddy representative had naturally suggested that perhaps I needed a more expensive hosting plan. "But the site gets almost no traffic," I'd told him for the zillionth time. (I admit that I hadn't been the most pleasant customer to deal with, but Godaddy is a terrible company, and the only reason my site is still there is laziness on my part.)
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?240725 feedback
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