Al's Blog-o-Sphere

After just having bought an Acer Aspire One netbook as well as a D-Link router, out comes a combo deal on Christmas Eve.

Of course, it’s the version of the Aspire One with the 16GB solid state drive, not the 160GB hard drive mine has. They managed to squeeze WinXP on it anyway, instead of the smaller Linux also offered. I don’t mind Linux, but the stripped down version that they put on the AAO seems weak. I hear they run really sweet with Ubuntu, though. Mine does off of a USB thumb drive, no less. Continue Reading…

I love my new cell phone. It’s finally a fairly modern phone. I mentioned it here recently, the LG VX-9100 aka. ENV2.

But I have one problem with it. I keep dialing random numbers with it when it is in my pocket. Sometimes, it even treats them as a redial or gets into the directory. That’s the worst, because it calls real numbers and real people!

If I’ve called you and you heard nothing but background, or worse, heard whatever I was doing at the time, please accept my apologies for anything I said! One friend called me back to let me know it was happening and we laughed about it, because her son did the same thing all the time. Continue Reading…

We’re back from another trip to Pittsburgh. This was the first follow-up visit after Al’s transplant. He had labwork and a clinic visit yesterday and a bronchoscopy today.

We left Thursday morning about 7am and arrived in time for his appointments in the afternoon, then stayed one more night at the Neville Family House. The bronch was the only thing to do today and was an outpatient proceedure, so we were free to leave by about 5pm.

It was done under mild sedation, so there was some observation time before we could leave. The photos here are Al having his first food after being NPO since last night. He really felt okay and was glad to get the sandwich. They wanted to get a lot of fluids into him, so he had some cranberry juice and a can of Pepsi.

We noticed they have a new can design that we haven’t seen at home yet.

Al has been cleared to drive, but with the sedation still wearing off, I drove home tonight. He’s free to drive himself around all he wants to now, and enjoy that until they tell him he can go back to work!

Well, I decided to live dangerously and upgrade the version of WordPress this runs on again, even though I was not at home and relying on the wifi at UPMC. The way things have been at home lately with my internet service, it’s probably just as reliable.

It seems to have worked, and I got through it without much trouble. I use a plugin, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, which does most of the heavy lifting for me, so it didn’t take long.

Ther plugin used to work really well, but the last time I used it, there were a few glitches with the database backup. That uses another plugin. I found out that by disabling all other plugins and changing to a default theme first, it all works and the upgrade proceeds smoothly.

The problem is, they do disable all the plugins during the upgrade process, they just do it automatically at a later point. If they would just move it up sooner, it would work without my intervention. They also put the site into a maintenance mode, which probably accomplishes what using a default theme does too.

But that’s all minor. The main thing the update seems to do is change the Admin interface, the part of the site nobody else sees except the privileged few. The screen shot shows part of the new Dashboard. They did clean it up and organize it really well. I like it, but there isn’t much for the user to see.