Apr 9 [i-gree-j_uh_ s, -jee-_uh_ s]
Definition:
Extreme or monumental in some negative way.
Example of usage:
Now some people will forget things on their vacation, but forgetting your credit card and money is an egregious mistake.
I think that this word is pretty useful in everyday language. Now we might not necessarily encounter things that can be termed “egregious” every single day. However, it can be useful in order to reference things that could possibly happen or that have happened previously.
Apr 8 Today (okay maybe last night) I wanted to finally fix a stupid error that I’ve had with my Wordpress installation. Now I think that Wordpress has been pretty great, but there was something about it that was making me a little bit irritated. Wordpress was working great when I first started, but then one day it seemingly reverted itself back to the Default theme as Kiki so astutely pointed out on this post.
Ever since I was simply temporarily fixing the problem by renaming the default theme to kubrick and actually making a copy of my real theme (Not So Fresh) and naming it default. Thus if wordpress ever decided to revert again, it would have no effect on what people saw.
This is obviously a dumb fix.
So last night I looked harder for the source of the bug. I happened upon this page and noted this:
“The theme is reset to the default if the current theme appears broken with broken meaning that index.php or style.css are missing. If files are being deleted then replaced by some sync process, that could explain the theme reversion.
Ryan (Lead Dev)
This indicated to me that it might not necessarily be something wrong with my theme (since mine is a “modern” theme that seems to conform to many of the Wordpress standards). I then realized that I had made a backup of my Wordpress installation some time ago and left it in the same publicly accessible directory. (Aside: that is not a smart thing to do. I should have put it into a private directory that nobody could access.) Anyways, I suspect (thought I didn’t look far enough) that what happened was that someone (likely a search bot) found my backup directory and accessed the contents. This would in turn cause the Wordpress installation to not be able to find the proper index.php and/or style.css required pages. And this would cause the Wordpress installation to mistakingly believe that there was an error in the theme (and it would thus revert itself back to the default theme with an update command to wp_options).
In short, I deleted the backup that I no longer needed anyways, and cleaned out all of the junk in the apache-served directory that was unnecessary. If you are trying to solve your own similar problem, it will likely have to do with some files in your public-facing directory that reference Wordpress but are not actually in a proper Wordpress installation. Clean up those index.php and style.css files!
Anyways, so far the theme is holding fast, and I hope that it continues to do so because it’s a pain in the butt looking through logs and forums posts to find out what’s going on! Also it’d be nice to have a very clean and bug-free installation so that I could move on to more interesting things like perhaps hosting someone else’s blog in the future…
Apr 8 If you use Wordpress, I recommend the very nice Gregarious plugin for social bookmarking. It has an excellent interface and the Share This button works very well. But I was having a bug with it because the popup wouldn’t display.
Most of my readers won’t care one iota about this entire post. But I don’t post what they want to read, I post whatever I want to post! And onward!
Basically I was experiencing the error where the Javascript popup would not show up for the Share This button, and I was actually getting redirected to another page. I saw that prototype.js needed to be added, but I was confused because I could see in the page source that it was being added. I also verified that wp_footer() was being called in my footer template, and I saw the akst Javascript code being appended at the bottom of the pages.
So after some debugging (I figured that it was something that I could find) I found that I wasn’t getting the popup because I had previously removed some of the social sites through the gregarious options (mainly because I wanted to limit the sites to those that I knew well). This caused the Javascript to result in an error (in my case: $(”akst_furl”) has no properties) because I had deleted furl from my list of social sites. This subsquently left the Javascript to error out which resulted in no popup window being displayed.
To verify what I suspected, I temporarily reset my social sites and saw that I was able to get the Javascript popup to show (because all of the Javascript properties were properly set).
Now I can obviously go into the akst.js and comment out those that I don’t want and then de-activate them from the gregarious options.
Fix: Add checks in the Javascript before processing so that anything changed in the gregarious options will not affect the Javascript. I looked at the option_value for greg_social_sites, and perhaps the best way is to read that string in, process it, and then overwrite the Javascript to be output into akst.js? But that’s just an idea.
I posted feedback to the author here. I figured that I might as well post it also in case anyone is looking for it and happens to stumble upon my blog before the author’s (which I see as highly unlikely).
Apr 6 Now it’s generally understood that eating breakfast is a good thing for you. It gets you going in the morning by providing energy, and this in turn gets your body’s metabolism to change from its “sleep” mode to its “day” mode. And that’s good for you because the more energy you burn the more food you can consume. So you are essentially burning calories simply by being awake rather than having to work them off through exercise. Granted you’re not going to lose all of your excess weight, but it does help.
What I like to do is break my fast twice. I’d like to think that it gives me double the benefits, but I am probably completely wrong about that. That’d just be another case of justifying my actions. So I get up in the morning and mosey my way on downstairs. I eat a bowl of Honey Bunches of Oats with some fresh fruit (either bananas (cheap from Costco!) or frozen blueberries). That happens at around 8:15 AM every weekday. That’s pretty normal right? I’m breaking that fast from about 9 PM the previous night until 8:15 AM that day. That’s a hefty 11 hours and 15 minutes fast every single day!
The thing is…
I also break the fast from 8:25 AM (after I finish the cereal) to approximately 11 AM. That’s a not-quite-as-hefty 2 hours and 45 minutes fast. But the thing is…I’m fasting twice five times a week!
Some people laugh at me about that.
Okay everyone that I tell that to laughs at me about that.
Okay some people say that I eat first breakfast and second breakfast. And the aforementioned people, whoever they might be, also say that I’m like a hobbit. Because (truth be told) I also have second lunch in the afternoon.
Finally I must admit that I actually don’t eat as much as I was for awhile because I have been setting aside time and closing out the world in order to work more efficiently.
NOTICE TO ANYONE IN THE ORANGE AREA NEAR THE 55-91 JUNCTION:
Chick-Fil-A is having free breakfasts on Fridays for the next few weeks in order to spread the news about their new location! I swung by there today and got myself some free Chick-n-Minis! I’m spreading the love for Chick-Fil-A because their food is good, they close on Sundays to observe the Sabbath, and they are giving out free breakfast right now on Fridays. And that’s niiiice.
Apr 4 So I’m not sure if it is indeed a new idea, but I recently have been thinking that I’d like the producers of American Idol to consider a new idea. After watching the show tonight as well as thinking about extreme measures to vote certain contestants. My idea is they should implement a new system for their voting.
They need to allow for the ability to eliminate the bad people, not just vote for the best. The bad thing about the current system is that you get people like Sanjaya Malakar who lots and lots of people want off, but can’t really do anything about it except starve.
To allow for this, it would be so simple for the producers to modify. They would add another phone number for each contestant that would be to vote against a particular person. Then they could simply subtract the negative votes from the positive votes. I don’t see how this could possibly be a bad thing for the show. I still think that the best person will end up winning. And just like the current system, a very large group of people still have the ability to circumvent the system if they’re organized and thorough. It seems like a good idea to me. But a lot of things have seemed like a good idea to me so that’s nothing new.
However if they implemented it, I know that I’d be calling to vote off Sanjaya. And I don’t even call at all now.