Paul's Comments

I am using a really old version of the software for this blog. It won't run on the latest - version 5.3 - of the PHP interpreter without horrible squawking errors. So I need want to upgrade, plus get any improvements from the release of three or four years ago. But one thing I do not want is to potentially lose all of the years of material I have stashed here, so I needed to back up the database. Did that, yesterday. But I put a new item in here, so I have to go back and re-download it. Next time, let's try to do the upgrade before adding new items!

Sort of like painting the kitchen after removing the old cabinets but before installing the new cabinetry.

I kind of like playing with Crystal Gayle's Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue by using the mistranslation of the title of this phrase. What surprised me was nobody else apparently had used it on any of the billions of pages that Google indexes. I find that amazing that apparently nobody did the same pun I did. I wonder why.

Many years ago my mother decided to move our family from Long Beach, California to Texas. We stayed in Dallas for about a week, my mother discovered the place wasn't right, then moved to Midland, where we lived for about three months before moving back to Long Beach.

Writing about my trip to Riverside and remembering how I looked through the glass doors of the now-closed Greyhound bus depot into the empty and debris-strewn floor of an abandoned building, and being able to recall from memory the way it had looked several years before, reminded me of a couple of stories.

When we were in Dallas, we were looking up apartments in the newspaper, and needed to find a pay phone. To look back on this, and realize it was only about 1980, not the 1960s, and realize how much technology has changed the world, still kind of amazes me.

But I digress. Anyway, we were on the first floor of the Dallas City Hall, and went downstairs to find a pay phone. Instantly it hit me where we were - in the basement of Dallas City Hall - and I wanted to see if my mother recognized it. So I said to her, "Does this place look familiar?" She admitted that she was surprised that it did. Then I asked her if she knew why. She didn't. I pointed out she'd seen it before, because this was where Jack Ruby had shot Lee Harvey Oswald. (No matter what strange Kennedy assassination theories people come up with - and I even indirectly made one up for a book I wrote - there's no doubt about this one happening since it was televised live and recordings have been shown zillions of times in various programs.)

On the way to and from Texas, traveling by road means basically taking I10 to get in and out of California. Which goes through several major areas including Phoenix and Tucson in Arizona. Well, anyway, we stopped in Phoenix to get something to eat. So I needed to find where there was a supermarket. I found a pay phone, and it had a phone book. (Again, today that would be two miracles that are no longer available due to changes in technology.) I looked up a few until I found one that seemed reasonably close, or I might have even called them. So anyway, I drove over and we bought bread, lunch meat, Miracle Whip - I wouldn't use mayonnaise for probably another 20 years - sodas and other incidentals. Then we stopped for a bit, and continued on.

We came back about four months later, traveling through Phoenix on the way back to the Los Angeles area. Again, we needed to get some food, so as it turned out, I drove over to the same supermarket I had visited on the previous trip. Without benefit of looking at a map or anything else, I had just simply remembered how to get there even though I had only been there once, in a city I had never been to before.

It kind of amazes me, sometimes. I don't know if I could do that sort of thing again, but it was kind of interesting. And, like a lot of things, the significance of the incident didn't hit me until later.

I have found out that it's not a good idea to do any editing of files stored on removable media, specifically an SD card. I first tried to connect the camera via a USB cable. Either it's the wrong cable or the USB connection isn't quite working. I suspect the former; I discovered that there are apparently more than one kind of mini-USB connector, the mini and the sub-mini that's a little smaller. I think the USB cable I was using was for a different device and is sub-mini. Well, even after unplugging I had to pull the batteries to get the camera to shut off.

So, anyway, I pull the SD card from the (now shut down) camera and put it in the USB SD reader I bought from Micro Center for about $1.50. And it reads the card fine, I can see all the pictures. (This camera creates JPEGs, and Windows XP can show thumbnails of image files that are not damaged when viewing a directory.) So I decide to do a little "surgery" on those files. One of the pictures I decide to crop. At this point I decide to do a few renames of files, at which point some of them "disappear" in that they become 0-byte files, or on some of the files I see a generic picture icon instead of a thumbnail of the image. Not good. Other video files have become corrupted as I discover later, when I try to copy them, I get an error.

So I decide to copy and save what I can to my hard drive. Well, Windows has this nasty habit, if you drag-and-drop files or use explorer to move or copy them, if any file is bad, once it gets to that file, it quits with an error message. Doesn't matter if it's on file #6 of 307,431 files to copy, instead of flagging an error, it just throws up its hands in disgust and quits. Using the command line works better, as bad files are simply flagged. I then reformatted the media, and then had the camera format it for good measure.

But I realize now never to do that again, if I am reading a piece of media, copy the files and edit or rename them on my computer, not on the media. I suspect the ultra-cheap USB SD card converter doesn't do writes very well. I mean, I have never had this problem with external hard drives or jump drives. So that may be the problem. I mean, electronics have gotten lots cheaper over the years, but when a device sells at retail for under $2, there ain't a lot of profit and potentially a considerable (there's a word here I can't think of for "tendency") potential to use substandard and really-cheap components to get the price down.

Well, at least they weren't anything important. Actually, if they were important pictures or video, I'd never have done anything on the media in the first place, I'd have copied them over to my hard drive first, before doing anything. So maybe I've gotten a cheap lesson, as if there was anything important, it's all stuff that I can either go back and take again or it probably is unimportant if I lost it.

[Update 2010/07/01]The clock was lost when I upgraded to the new version of B2 Evolution. I like it, so I have to re-install the change.[End Update]

If you've ever read this blog before, or you've ever seen the B2Evolution blog software that runs this blog, you'll notice something new here. The (digital) clock that appears on the right side of the page (for most of the skins; one skin has no right side and the clock appears on the top).

I decided to do a little "surgery" to the code of this blog in order to get the clock inserted. It requires creating a page to define the clock, changing the main page of every skin to insert the clock, and include a Javascript function to change the time each second. Oh, and yes, if you're reading this blog and your clock gets to midnight, the date changes too.

What's the next step? Put it an analog clock. Actually, I have one; on the "custom" skin, about 1/2 way down I include an analog clock from a time service. Only thing is, this calls a Flash animation and an external function library, I'm figuring the whole thing can be done with Javascript, locally. (Actually, I've seen it done; someone programmed a text-based clock to follow the mouse. But what I'm considering is actually drawing on the screen, something I just discovered can be done at run-time.) I remember, maybe 25 years ago, that there was a program I saw, written in ordinary Basic, that actually drew a clock, with hour, minute and second hand, that refreshed each second. So it can be done, it's not that hard.

Oh, there is a slight difference. Javascript runs on your computer, so the time shown on the top right of this blog is the local time where you are. The analog clock I use (on the "custom" skin) shows the time on the East Coast. So the two clocks may not be the same.