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thinking man's Bob Dylan
Friday, October 11 2024
I have a couple websites hosted on Godaddy, which was one of the cheaper hosting options back when I set them up. These days, of course, does not offer much for what I pay them, and I could have cheaper hosting elsewhere. But change requires work, and it's easier to just keep paying those assholes. The other day they sent me an email saying that if I continued to run an older version of PHP on my shared server, they would start charging me a nearly $3/month fee for the priviledge, since (according to them) supporting older versions of PHP incurs cost for them. This has all the markings of a "junk fee" of the sort that is common in the enshittified capitalism we now live in (and very much in keeping with Godaddy's enshittified business model). I like leaving things as they are, but there was no way I would knowingly pay an asshole company run by fascists a fee for something so stupid. So upgrade Asecular.com to run PHP 7.4. But then I wasn't sure if that upgrade was enough to avoid the junk fee. So today I used Godaddy's tech support chat feature to try to ascertain whether or not PHP 7.4 was advanced enough to avoid the fee. After getting through to a supposed human, though, I could not get anyone to answer this question. They kept saying they could upgrade my site for a fee, but that wasn't what I was asking. After I told them they weren't any better than their AI chat, someone smarter seemed to take over and said that I had to upgrade to something past PHP 8 to avoid the fees. So that was what I did.
But then the next time I checked the website you are now reading, I saw that it was a complete mess and nothing was rendering correctly. Clearly something about the switch to some subversion of PHP 8 was causing the trouble. But the error was such that all I could get was a message about a 500 error; I couldn't get a more thorough message giving a line number in the code. Also Godaddy doesn't appear to log errors in an error log. This forced me to do a binary search of some important files, particularly functions.php. In so doing, I found the hard 500 error was coming from a single function in functions.php. But since that function wasn't even being used, I could eliminate it. After that, all I had to do was find replacements for archaicly-worded statements. AS the core of the code was written in the early 2000s and much of it hasn't been changed since, this part was a simple mopping-up operation. To make it go as quickly as possible, I had ChatGTP do most of the refactoring around the issues. This code really was pretty archaic; even the PHP tags were broken, as they didn't include the word "php." I'd also made use of the command split(), which had been obsolete for years. Once all the corrections had been made, the site loaded correctly. I'd taken 150 mg of pseudoephedrine this morning, and it looked like I was using all that suplus energy to get my website out of the stone age.
I celebrated successfully getting Asecular.com working correctly on PHP 8 by taking Charlotte on a complete walk of the Chamomile Headwaters Trail, and then back home via the Stick Trail.
This evening, Gretchen and I drove to Bearsville to attend an all-acoustic performance by Jeff Tweedy, best known as the most important member of Wilco. First, though, we went to the Bear Cantina for a lovely meal there. As we entered the Cantina, we asked the guy at the front if we could have a table near the fire, which, due to the cooler weather, we expected to be blazing. Sure enough it was, but we had to wait five or ten minutes for a table there to open up. Before and during dinner, I was telling Gretchen about my plans to install a two-zone minisplit at our Adirondack cabin, but as I talked about it, the subject matter seemed anathema to Gretchen, and did what I could to stop talking about it, even after Gretchen offered follow up questions.
At the Bear Theater, we didn't see anyone we knew except Jon B., the guy Gretchen used to do organizing for and whom I did computer work for back when he lived in Stone Ridge (and before he started dating Natalie Merchant, which he no longer does). Jon told us that he now lives in Germantown, which, he said, has the best view of the Catskills. We also talked about our cabin, which Jon seemed genuinely jealous about. [REDACTED]
The opening act was Elizabeth Moen, a country-folk-adjacent musician with a good voice who loves Bruce Springsteen. As she performed, we took seats up in the special loft area, a place where people who paid extra can sit throughout the show. Gretchen had paid for two such seats, though initially we sat in someone else's seats. When those people showed up soon after Jeff Tweedy started playing, we had to move. I ended up sitting next to Gretchen for the whole show, though my seat was actually off in a corner, far from the one Gretchen had bought for herself. (This was a consequence of Gretchen picking seats too late). But nobody ever came to claim the seat I was seated in.
My expectations for the Jeff Tweedy show weren't very high. I like Wilco and especially liked their quirky break-out album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. But I tend to think rock bands doing the all-acoustic things is something of a pose. What, you guys don't want to rock? And I've never been into the singer-songwriter thing where someone sings over an acoustic guitar as if they're at a campfire or in the dorm room where everyone goes for bong hits. But the thing that Tweedy brought to the show was his very clever songwriting, which is full of poetic wordplay and soundplay. He's also a very good guitarist and spices things up with weird chords, dissonance, and fun little licks here and there. Not only that, Tweedy is hilarious. His intra-song banter was as funny as anything you'd pay to hear from a professional comedian. I turned to Gretchen at one point and declared Tweedy a "thinking man's Bob Dylan."
Throughout the performance, Gretchen and I were mostly drinking booze we'd smuggled in, as the Bear Theatre's drinks are New-York-City expensive. I'd started off with a $15 Jack Daniels on the rocks, but after that I poured the plastic cup it had come in half-full of gin from a smuggled flask. Meanwhile Gretchen drank a tiny bottle of some sort of brandy followed by a plastic airplane-compatible three ounce bottle full of Manischewitz grape wine (her favorite kind of wine).
Jeff Tweedy tonight.
Click to enlarge.
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