Dream Journal : Fear Journal

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I found myself apparently stuck in a time traveling loop.

It almost played back kind of like the movie Memento, but way more exciting and creative because it was in an adventure-like setting with wizards and warriors. Eventually I realized that the storyline was some sort of puzzle to solve, and each time I was on the right track, the story would reset and I’d have to do everything over again, but now knowing an additional step of the way that I needed to complete.

Although I’m fuzzy on most of the details, there was a lot of running and hiding from whoever was chasing me until finally one time when I reset I found myself as a different person altogether, which was when I realized that I must be making some sort of progress because I’d reached the limit to where the first person … who I thought was me … could progress in the story. Now watching the entire story unfold from a different perspective, I needed to figure out what that character’s role was in it so that I could move her storyline forward.

All I wanted to do was go home, but first I had to figure out how to get there…

* * * * * * * * * *

Staring up at a wireframe tower that climbed hundreds of feet into the air, for whatever reason – possibly “to work on the lights” – me and two friends needed to scale this gigantic tower all of the way to the top.

It was reminiscent of the Empire State Building, but not nearly as sturdy looking. More like a radio tower, but even taller.

My friends tried to convince me that we’d all be on safety harnesses so the height wasn’t a big deal, and they even “fell” in front of me a few feet off the ground to prove it, but all I could picture was myself scaling this tower to hundreds of feet in the air, and then looking down at the city below before losing my grip and falling to my death.

We had no experience doing this, yet they were both gung-ho about the prospect and how cool it would be from the top, yet all I could think about was falling.

* * * * * * * * * *

My wife and I were renewing our vows, and I was running incredibly late.

She had booked a ballroom at the top of this hotel overlooking the water very similar to where we first got married, however I was several landmasses away and needed to cover a lot of ground in order to get there.

This dream segment was also loosely tied into the previous one, in that if I wasn’t willing to climb that gigantic tower which would somehow help me get closer to my destination, my other option was to take a series of bridges that were entirely too close to the water’s surface. And traffic was at a near stand-still, so I just sat there in my car staring at the waves lapping dangerously close to the side of the road.

Eventually the first bridge was behind us and we stopped to grab lunch at Arby’s, which was a particularly bizarre choice both because A) who stops for lunch when they’re late to get married?!, and B) this was one weird Arby’s, with a menu that featured some sort of crab dip sandwich that I actually got because it looked intriguing, though I never ended up sitting down to try it.

While we were waiting for our food, I wandered off into a room on the side that was apparently a child’s bedroom filled with GI Joe-sized action figures. I played with a couple for a while, and then I tried to eat one, upon which I remembered that we were there for lunch, so I went back out into the dining room as I found one of Sara’s sisters – who was escorting me to the vow renewal – waiting, having already finished her food.

Back outside, I was riding in a very small car with Ted Danson! And he wanted to drive, so of course I let him – it seemed only fair because he had been wanting to drive earlier and I was happy to not have to deal with the remaining bridge that we still had to cross.

By the time we made it to the venue, my groomsmen – the guys who wanted me to climb up the crazy tall tower – were already dressed and waiting, though they didn’t seem too shocked about my late arrival. I took a second to admire the view, which did look impressive even with the ominous concrete bridges criss-crossing the water that we had taken to get there. Then I took my suit and disappeared to get ready myself.

And that was it. 😕

On Chelsea Manning’s Commuted Sentence…

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I don’t think that I ever actually watched the infamous horrific video that was leaked by Army intelligence analyst Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning back in 2010 showing soldiers in Baghdad firing from the air on Iraqi civilians – including two journalists – but after stumbling across it this evening and sitting through almost twenty minutes of it … which apparently is only even half of it … all I can say is that this video is the quintessential example of why whistleblowers in our military deserve protection just as much as they do throughout the rest of our society…

I could never handle being in the military, however as one of 350 million Americans who ours represents to the rest of humanity, I don’t understand how anyone could watch a display like this and not argue that the United States has a grave need for more accountability in its armed forces. The justifications for shooting, the behaviors throughout the attack, and the blind defenses both in 2007 when the incident took place and even three years later when it resurfaced through the leak – they don’t speak of a noble cause fighting to defend freedom and democracy in a foreign land.

They speak of the iconic American cowboy – one who loves fucking and fighting – and whose bloodlust, while arguably necessary for such a job, question if this is really the kind of job that needs to exist in first place, at least in a country where we never should’ve gone to war in the first place.

Ongoing internal investigations that never seem to find themselves of guilt are the simple reason that we need people like Chelsea Manning because although I don’t want our solders’ safety to be compromised on the battlefield, I don’t want to see our country being rightfully accused of being the very terrorists that we claim to be hunting due to incidents like this where we won’t even accept fault after the cards laid on the table show that our motives in that helicopter were suspect at best. There are far more videos on YouTube than I’d care to listen to from Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans themselves sharing gruesome tales of how this isn’t just an example, but an expectation in the American military today.

We all deserve better, much less those brave and selfless enough to risk their lives to reveal such aberrational behavior for us to take notice.

Christopher – 1, Buzz Lightyear – 0

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Today I was reminded of an old episode of the Gobots in which Leader-1 got captured by the Renegades and ran through this machine that effectively disassembled him into little more than a pile of nuts and bolts…

It seems those age ranges that Lego puts on the side of its boxes are there for just such an occasion like when your toddler wanders off with your Lego Buzz Lightyear and proceeds to disassemble him by banging him repeatedly against his high chair’s tray to signal that he’s done with his lunch.

Sorry, Buzz, but if it’s any consolation, the other Guardians did manage to put Leader-1 back together again by the end of their episode, so I’ll see what I can do just as soon as I get this little Renegade of my own put down for a nap! 😉

Thanks, Obama…

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Looking for a little political inspiration as we prepare to stare down the dragon with Donald Trump’s own inauguration now soon upon us?

I just finished watching President Obama’s Farewell Address and here at 2:30am with his last words now fresh in my mind, I will freely admit that I’ve nearly got tears in my eyes. I can only hope that I live to see another president who speaks with such eloquence and whose sincere spirit reverberates through every word.

Barack Obama has set the bar pretty high for future presidents of these United States.

Let us not forget the character that this office deserves, and the diligence that we the people deserve from this person who strives to be our leader both here at home from sea to shining sea as well as to the rest of the world.

In the face of adversity and uncertainty, quite frankly right now I feel more patriotic than ever.

Thanks, Obama.

Is the USA Too Big When We Have to Subsidize Air Travel to Small Towns?

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Now before I get too far into this, I want to say that I’m not really sure if this is a good use of taxpayer money or not. Our tax dollars go towards lots of programs and I don’t necessarily think that every one has to appeal to every taxpayer because in a country of 300 million people, that’s simply not realistic!

Still I thought this was interesting simply because until five minutes ago I had no idea that such a program even existed…

The program that I speak of is called Essential Air Service and it’s run by the US Dept. of Transportation to help support air travel in rural areas that otherwise couldn’t commercially support it. The way that I discovered it was through a random news article shared on Facebook about a local airport back home in Northern Michigan adding direct service to Dallas for a limited time this summer, with a single line catching my eye…

“It costs more than a million dollars to add this service, but the United States Department of Transportation provided a $750,000 grant.”

I found this interesting because apparently a total of 8 small town airports around Michigan collect some $18 million in federal tax dollars each year through Essential Air Service, out of a larger $300 million nationwide.

Now Michigan is very bottom heavy with regards to its population distribution, in that the big cities across the bottom of the state – Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Detroit – have by far the most, and the further north you go, the fewer people you’ll find until you eventually get into the Upper Peninsula where you tend to encounter more deer than actual human beings. 😉

The problem is, deer don’t fly commercial flights, so if you want to travel anywhere you pretty much have to drive downstate in order to catch a plane, with Detroit Metro being the largest airport in the state. Though many smaller communities scattered throughout the state have airports of their own, they’re mostly limited to small planes and in most cases, they’re just puddle jumpers that connect you through Detroit to continue on to your destination anyways…

I’ve never actually flown into one of the smaller airports myself, mostly because they’re typically a lot more expensive. For example, several years ago I remember pricing out tickets to visit during the summer and while two round-trip tickets from Tampa to Detroit were around $200 each, tickets from Tampa to Pellston – a small town much closer to home – were closer to $750 each!

For reference, flying into Detroit leaves you with another 4 hour car ride to get up to my hometown, whereas flying into Pellston is maybe an hour’s drive at best.

So a few thoughts here:

  • How does the airline justify charging 3x the ticket prices when they’re also getting excess of a million dollars a year in taxpayer subsidizes just to operate out of that small town airport?!
  • Is this a good use of taxpayer funds, particularly with a sizable national debt?
  • Who really benefits from these subsidizes?

I’m kind of torn on this because up until reading this article, I assumed that the higher ticket prices in these smaller airports were what the airlines needed to charge to justify doing business in those regions … but to hear that they’re also getting taxpayer funding on top of those high ticket prices??? Sure, it’s the same thing that we did with telephone surcharges and now do with cable and broadband taxes in order to require those companies to service rural areas, but at the end of the day does it all just come at the fault of our country being way too spread out in the first place?

I’m not sure if there’s much argument for transportation access for locals simply because – granted, depending on the area and the carrier – it’s hard for me to imagine most small town residents being able to afford those rates to fly local anyways! I know that whenever we flew and even now, we’d fly into the larger airport farther away purely because the time cost was easier to justify than the ticket cost.

Still, it makes it easier for travelers to come and visit these areas, and I’m ok with tax dollars going to support tourism … though I might suggest that the local states would be better off funding this reason than federal dollars.

There are jobs created – both direct and indirect – that the locals can enjoy, but again, I’m not crazy about taxes funding job creation if the markets can’t support them on their own … at least with regards to for-profit entities, for the most part.

So at the end of the day, is this just a $300 million Christmas present to an industry that’s kind of struggling, but let’s not kid ourselves when they still clear $16 billion a year in profits???

I’d be curious to know how much taxpayer funding it costs us as a nation – between transportation, telecommunications, and whatever other subsidizes like this are out there – simply to support everyone living so far apart. You’ve got to figure it also costs more in roads and bridges, there are probably expenses related to energy and other resources … what else?

And don’t get me wrong, there are certainly plenty of beautiful, natural areas around the USA that I wouldn’t exactly call for scrapping, even if the most utopian configuration called for populations in dense towers all crunched into a state the size of Texas!

Still, it’s interesting to discover a nearly unknown program that realistically affects a pretty small segment of our population, and to try and better understand the justifications for why it exists in the first place.

More Home Automation Talk

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So I’ve been thinking more about home automation lately – which in itself is a bit comical because apparently the last time I wrote about it was a year and a half ago – but nonetheless I think that it’s going to become a project of mine for this year, at least from an introductory perspective.

The thing that I’ve learned the most so far is that, simply put, there’s a lot to take in, and I’m seeing at least the potential for the same conflicts we’ve seen with audio and video where different companies have their own formats and aren’t necessarily eager to work together. And I hope that’s not the case because a big part of this for me is really going to be getting all of these various things to do that as much as possible…

…though I’m entertaining the idea that if everything is controlled via an iPad and different functions have their own apps, maybe that would be ok.

I think that comes much later, though. For now I think my best approach is to narrow down just a couple areas of focus – primarily ones that offer some real function to my home and not just ones that sound neat, but admittedly I’m not really lacking or anything. 

For example:

Lighting
I’m still trying to wrap my head around the traditional lights because although having the ability to change colors and put on light shows and all of that sounds cool, at $50/bulb the cost is just ridiculous with very little objective value. Plus I’m not entirely sure that it makes sense to have “connected bulbs” that burn out in favor of switches that control many lights, as is the case with most of the rooms in my house.

Still, I have a shelf up high that spans the main wall in our living room which we decorated with lit up garland for the holidays and we kind of grew accustomed to the ambient light when the house was otherwise dark, so I thought this might be a good trial to run a strand or two of LED strip lights along the top that can be controlled remotely.

Keyless Entry
This is a simple one. I’ve got three kids now and thus I almost never come through the front door with nothing in my hands, so just like I’ve loved not having to dig out my car keys to open the door anymore, now seems like the time to introduce that same technology to the house as well.

Pool Temperature
I’ve tried a couple of floating sensors from Home Depot over the years and frankly, none have lasted more than a couple of months tops. But I think that it would be really useful to be able to compare air temp and the actual water temp in our pool to gauge if taking an afternoon dip is realistic or not.

Three fairly simple tasks – I think. Two of which should just be configuring products out of the box, with the pool thermometer possibly needing some creative fabrication to make an underwater sensor where others in the past have failed. But I think all of these are reasonable, and more importantly, each would serve a worthwhile role to help really sell me on the other stuff that seems cool, but might not be as instantly beneficial as not having to fumble for my keys when I’m trying to get kids and groceries through the door! 🙂

Because in everything that I’ve looked at so far, there is a bunch of neat stuff out there to pick up – a Nest thermostat, the indoor and outdoor cameras for security, fancy smoke detectors that run for 4x what regular ones do, and maybe even one of these Amazon Echo discs to control everything via voice command … if we can prevent Alexa from rattling off porn phrases, anyways!

Of course, the other side is that this stuff isn’t exactly cheap and although I’d like to think that a well-designed system might help to raise our home value when we’re ready to sell in a couple of years, it’s definitely something that will need to be done in phases rather than just going wild with an Amazon order and getting a box of robots in the mail two days later! It should be fun, though, and I’ll plan on writing more about it once I’m able to start picking a few of these things up later on this spring.

Super Mario Run is surprisingly fun!

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So I’ve been playing the new Mario game for iOS on and off since it came out a few weeks ago, and I’ve got to say that despite some of the negativity that I read, I personally found it to be pretty enjoyable.

I’ll admit that when I first heard the news, the idea of seeing a Mario game on a platform other than one created by Nintendo did seem very weird, and I can’t help but wonder if it was more or less published in response to Pokemon Go – a game that was immensely popular, though I can’t see making a lot of revenue for the company because they only charged for add-ons and not for the game itself.

Super Mario Run, on the other hand, cost a whopping $9.99 after a relatively small number of trial levels, which is more than I’ve paid for almost any of my apps except for maybe business-oriented ones, but I was curious and I haven’t bought a new Mario game since that weird cat one, so I figured I’d give it a try…

The look and feel is identical to The New Super Mario Bros, with the only real difference being the continuous running aspect, which took a while getting used to but after a while I found really grew on me. At first it seems weird playing a game with literally only one action – tap to jump – however a lot of my complaints about other iOS games is that they try to cram in a full controller’s worth of buttons onto the screen and it ends up looking just like the console version, but essentially unplayable.

I didn’t get that with SMR and although I sped through World 1 pretty quick, the worlds to follow offered quite a bit of challenge – I certainly didn’t just blow through them all in the course of an hour!

Lately I’ve been going back to the earlier levels and trying out the various coin challenges where you have to collect five pink, purple, or teal coins from each level, with each color getting increasingly difficult. I’ve gotten all of the pink and purple for several levels, but I don’t think I’ve cleared all teal for any one level just yet – they’re pretty tough, even at the very beginning.

But it’s nice to see that challenge in an otherwise pretty simple game. In a way, it almost has a Lemmings quality to it, or maybe that Mario vs Donkey Kong puzzle game for the DS … they’ve taken the Mario universe and put an interesting spin on it to make a new experience for the purely touch-oriented iOS world, which is kind of what they do if you look back to the likes of Super Mario Galaxy, or Mario 64, or whatever the new Mario title was for each Nintendo console on down the line.

Again, it’s a little odd for Nintendo to release a game from their flagship brand for a platform other than one of their own, but maybe that’s ok. I don’t really play the Nintendo DS simply because I’m getting older and the screens don’t work for me anymore, but give me a simple Mario game that can entertain me for a few random minutes here and there on my phone and I’ll play it, and I’ll like it, too! 😉

Paying the Cost of Journalism

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When I first moved to Florida, I was a proud subscriber to our daily local newspaper – the now defunct Tampa Tribune.

I had actually started getting the Sundays mailed to me about a year prior so that I could look through the classifieds for jobs and places to live, and I ended up extending it to a full subscription when I got here admittedly because it felt like the grown-up thing to do, plus it cemented the idea that my new city warranted a seven day newspaper whereas the papers back home in Northern Michigan were only published something like twice a week! The paper would get delivered to the front door of my apartment every morning in time for me to take it to work with me, and it would end up getting passed around my team throughout the day until I had a chance to read it myself during lunch.

That went on for several years until eventually I stopped carrying it to work with me and the growing pile of unread papers on my floor became more of a guilt-trip than an honest source for news. By then it was probably 2007 / 2008 and I was getting the vast majority of my news, including stories from the paper that got delivered to me by hand, off the Internet before I ever got around to even unbagging the day’s newspaper until finally I just bit the bullet and canceled the thing altogether.

I remember literally sitting on the floor with several dozen newspapers, flipping through them methodically to skim for anything I may have missed just because I felt guilty throwing the papers out without ever even opening them!

So fast-forward to today, like many of my like-minded colleagues in the wake of the election season and particularly this fake news hysteria, I just recently subscribed to a couple of newspapers … electronically, that is. For me, I chose The New York Times because they seem to hit on most of the biggest national and world stories and the Orlando Sentinel because I enjoy their tourism and theme park coverage.

The total cost once their promotional periods are over is less than $4 a week.

Mind you, I’m a bit torn about paying for online content across the board just because I don’t think I want to see the Internet turn into a place where micro-payments are the cost of access, although between my own dwindling ad revenues and the awful user experiences that more and more sites are willing to subject readers to in exchange for ad dollars once again, my opinion on the topic certainly isn’t set in stone…

But I think when it comes to real journalism – not opinions that are a dime a dozen, but true, ethical reporting – as the information age continues to grow in ways that we’re not entirely sure how to contain, it’s important that we put our support behind those news sources which we rely on so that money isn’t a reason for them to fall off the edge of the earth like countless newspapers have done in the last decade. Sure, it’s becoming harder and harder to know what represents honest reporting these days and I’ll sincerely admit that my own selections aren’t 100% unbiased, but I think we need to start somewhere and for the stories that I’ve found myself wanting to read more and more lately, these are two of the papers that consistently deliver.

Plus I’m getting sick of seeing that “You’ve exceeded your 10 free articles for the month!” pop-up from the Times and they’re like every third story in my Facebook feed, so I’m willing to pay a couple of bucks a month just to get rid of that alone! 😛

#ServerProgress

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Update: Got the scottsevener.com network of sites moved back over to its new home, everything is resolving correctly and not in 48 seconds per page load, and it’s being served through Varnish + Apache … woohoo!

Mind you, I’m not entirely sure that it’s configured correctly because speeds aren’t tons faster, but we’ll work on configuration tweaking another day … I’ve got so much catch-up writing to do now… 😛

Troubleshooting page load speed, part 45…

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For the record, I’m painfully aware that the page load times on several of my sites have been, well, unbearable as of late!

Admittedly it’s a problem that I’ve been stalling on for some time now, despite the regular high load emails that I get from my server. A few days ago I got one saying it was as bad as a 5-minute load average of 68.94 … and this is on a VPS with three CPUs and 5 GB of RAM that does honestly pretty light traffic right now, unfortunately…

I had been hoping that most of it could be chalked up to an OS issue because I recently discovered that cPanel had stopped updating on me after reaching a version threshold where the latest would no longer run on 32-bit operating systems, which I was kind of surprised to learn that I had, but again, this VPS was setup back in 2012 so I suppose 32-bit could’ve still been the default four years ago.

The trouble is, there’s really no clean way to upgrade my server from 32- to 64-bit leaving everything intact, so it requires spinning up a new machine and migrating everything over to the newer OS.

Plus, the way I migrated four years ago to VPS from my plain, old shared hosting account of maybe eight years was using cPanel’s built-in account transfer features, which although made it incredibly easy (plus my host did most of the work!), lord only knows how much random garbage has accumulated in all of those files over 8 + 4 years of shared history!

So I had planned on making the migration sort of a clean-up effort along the way and only copy over the guts of each WordPress install, leaving behind whatever caches and other nonsense have accumulated over the years.

And then terrible performance got even worse!!!

When it got to the point where it would literally take upwards of a minute to move from one page on my blog to another, and the admin pages would randomly get disconnected because they couldn’t touch base with the server when it was super overloaded, I knew that it was time to finally tackle this pig. So within a few hours time, I created a second VPS with my awesome web host and gradually let it go through all of the OS and app updates while I staged just one install – my multisite that contains my blog, Thing-a-Day, and about half a dozen other sites – and everything seemed to be going fine…

…until I switched my domain over to the new server…

…upon which usage started blowing up like crazy, again despite little traffic, and even though I started this new VPS a bit smaller than my main server (figuring I could upgrade once I’m ready to stop paying for the old one), it quickly became unusable just like the old machine had been.

From here I started doing some digging into WordPress itself because no longer could I point fingers at the 32-bit OS. I downloaded a couple of plugins – P3 Profiler and Query Monitor – and with the latter’s help, that’s when I noticed that apparently I had a plugin that was just GOING NUTS against MySQL day and night:

To walk you through this fun graph, the orange is your normal SELECT queries that happen when anyone hits a page and WordPress queries its database to build it; the purple, on the other hand, is somehow all INSERT queries, which should really only ever happen when I’m publishing a new post, with a few exceptions.

And those two big valleys in the purple that you see around the 18th and then again between 19 and 20? The first is when I had temporarily pointed my domain over to the new server; the second is keeping the domain back on the old server, but turning off the plugin in question … which apparently solves just about everything!

By the way, the last little purple sliver is me turning the plugin back on so that I can capture some logs to send over to the plugin’s developer to help him look for a fix…

…because the thing is, I actually really like this plugin – it’s called WP Word Count and I’ve used it on just about all of my sites for years and years to summarize how much writing I’ve put into my projects. I love it, and if I can spare the time next year, I want to make use of its work to pull together a running total of word counts for all of my work combined so that I can ultimately put together a fun, little dashboard to help motivate me to keep putting words on the screen!

Luckily after finding another multisite user with the same issue, I left a quick comment expressing the same and got a reply from the plugin’s developer later on that evening, so it’s awesome that they’re actively interested in patching this bug because I’ve evaluated a lot of other options and honestly never really found ones that I liked better than theirs.

In the meantime it’ll have to stay off, though, as I continue with my fun server migration. During this whole effort, I’m also trying to really hone in on The Perfect VPS WordPress Configuration, so I’m doing other things like tinkering with Varnish and considering adding Nginx in front of Apache, and then eventually I also want to fine tune W3 Total Cache so that I have one reliable set of caching / compression / minifying rules to use for all of the different sites that I publish … because I figure if I’ve seriously been doing this publishing on the web-thing for over fifteen years now, my pages should be some of the fastest loading around!

Stay tuned for more as I struggle through more issues to come! Now if I can only get this stupid thing to post… 😛