Dream Journal : Hello, Mr. President…

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It started off as some sort of thing with the Boy Scouts … like I was going to work at summer camp and I was waiting for word back from the camp director who eventually told me that my position had already been taken. Instead, he had this other thing that he thought I might be interested in… 😉

So we were in this big, marble building in Washington, D.C. and the President was about to give a speech – possibly the State of the Union or something that was going to be televised because it was a really big deal! I don’t really remember why the scouts were there, but they kept moving us around in the crowd as more people showed up – first it was a small-ish gathering and we were under a tent a ways away from the stage, then as they started filing in school kids and other people, we were right up next to the stage.

By the time it was ready to begin, we had been moved back to where we were right at the opening for where the President would appear before going on stage. It was kind of strange because there were picnic tables and catering, so at least I got a little snack in that somebody else immediately came and cleared away as soon as I was done, so that was neat! But most of my time was spent fiddling with my camera in hopes of getting this once in a lifetime perfect shot…

Apparently this attracted some attention because at two points someone from the Secret Service stopped by my table to chat – he wasn’t mean or anything, but just asked for my name and email address, scribbled it on a piece of paper, and then walked off.

This happened just after they opened a curtain enough where I could see a bunch of people mingling backstage, so I took a few pictures. It wasn’t long after that that my Dad appeared behind me (in his scout uniform … I wasn’t wearing one) and discretely slipped me a memory card of some photos that apparently he had taken that he was afraid was going to get confiscated.

But the real cool thing happened when it was time for the Prez to make his appearance, for when he came out of the curtain, somehow it brushed up against my table and he was able to grab my camera before I could really say or do anything! He grinned at me and asked me my name while the crowd was going wild, and then made a comment into his microphone about me trying to get a picture with him, calling me out by name on national television.

Then President Obama handed the camera back to me and posed for a quick selfie with me before going on stage.

😯

Dream Journal : Part 2, The Mystery Surgery

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The second part of this dream, which coincidentally came first, was admittedly even weirder than the pterodactyl pet thing.

I was in the hospital for some sort of surgery.

It was apparently a very lax hospital because I spent a lot of time wandering around and laying down on a hospital bed in the middle of a hallway. I guess they were very short-staffed and were borrowing people from other departments, but somehow nothing was very urgent because occasionally somebody would come by and glance down at my chart, then say, “Oh – Steve already looked at you…” and just walk away.

Eventually one doctor came by and said that I needed surgery, but that they couldn’t do it today so I’d need to come back tomorrow, as if just coming and going from a hospital at your leisure was the most natural thing in the world!

There was also some sort of weird bureaucracy going on because she noted that my nurse had wanted me to ask him for my pain medications instead of asking the doctor, which in reality sort of makes a bit of sense but during the dream it seemed kind of shady.

Anyways, I never did find out what the surgery was actually for. When I left the hospital, I went back home and did the pterodactyl thing for a while, then eventually told everyone I had to leave and went back to the hospital for my mystery surgery.

It wasn’t until I was walking through the doors that it clicked that I’d never actually had surgery before, and suddenly I felt very vulnerable and nervous and just wanted to tell my Mom and my wife that I loved them before they put me to sleep.

Dream Journal : Not a Good Pet

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We were all staying at my grandparents’ house, though it was much bigger than in reality with several extra bedrooms and bathrooms off of each. Company was a mixture of family and friends and co-workers…

…and this thing that looked sort of like a baby pterodactyl…

Most of its similarities were that it was freaking nasty. I don’t remember how we had found it, but in the short time after we did it had trashed two rooms and killed a couple of people. Its beak was deadly – very long and very sharp, but also with crazy teeth on the inside of its mouth much different than what you would expect from a normal bird.

Of course, somehow *I* ended up holding it – under my arm with both hands clamped around its beak trying to keep it shut, and I spent twenty minutes frantically running around the house, trying to get someone to help me subdue the thing before I lost my grip and its killing spree resumed. It was flailing a lot, but we just didn’t have any place to put it – the closest was a dog cage, but we figured with teeth like that, it’d probably make short work of the thin metal bars.

Finally settling on duct taping its beak closed like you would an alligator, we found a roll of neon pink duct tape and managed to wrap him up, though we still didn’t know what to do with him from there. My friend said surprisingly seriously that I should put a leash on him and take him for a walk like a dog because he probably just needed to be outside, but I just looked at the droplets of blood all over my shirt from its past victims and said that wasn’t going to happen.

During this whole ordeal, somebody else had our employers on the phone, who saw the situation as more of a marketing opportunity than the extremely dangerous kill zone that the house had become. The boss wanted us to just hold tight so that they could think about it some more, and that on Monday they were going to setup a press conference to announce him to the world.

I pushed back very hard, saying that they had no idea what this thing was capable of, and that it had already killed two of our friends and needed to be contained in a proper research facility NOW.

Surprisingly, they said ok.

HealthyBlog ’14, Day 2 : Eat Actual Food, Part 1

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So I think I did ok for my first day yesterday.

I’ve decided that for my first week, my two simple goals are going to be:

  • Eat a healthy breakfast everyday
  • Drink more tea

I should probably note that “healthy” in the first bullet point isn’t defined by mountains of virtue or anything … my goal is just to eat real food to start my day – whatever time of day that actually happens to be! 😉

Yesterday it was a simple scrambled eggs (with cheese) and a glass of OJ.

Today was a little bigger because it was a bit later – I added an extra egg and also a couple of pieces of toast.

And that’s that.

I’m not even trying to get into calorie counting or scrutinizing every little turn – the only major change is that I might need to switch to egg whites (on account of old man heart health), but it’s not like I’m making pancakes with a huge pool of maple syrup, so even with a couple slices of toast on occasion I don’t think it’s a very bad start. Next week I’ll probably pick up some ham to dice into it as well as some veggies … my main goal with this meal is just quick and simple, healthy, and filling enough that I won’t be lunging for a snack 2 hours later.

And hopefully bullet point #2 can help me a little with that as well because my main driver for tea is simply that in the past it’s tended to help cut down my cravings for other snacking when I have something to sip on that isn’t water.

I even bought a little mug warmer thingy to keep at my desk so that I can stop pouring out half-empty cups of cold tea!

That’s it for changes at this point, though – again, the real goal is small, simple changes that months from now will all add up to a healthier routine for me across the board. And it’s admittedly weird because even yesterday I felt the drive to add just a couple more things to my list because I was in the mood and wanted to dive in headfirst, and I had to actively tell myself, “No – this is enough for now … we’ll add more next week.”

I mean, there’s definitely plenty to tackle – carbs, junk food, other meals, sleep schedule, late night snacking … I fought with that a little last night, which to me oddly enough is actually sort of a good thing because it tells me that my body is sensing a change. It’s fightin’ it, too, but it honestly wouldn’t surprise me if after a month or so of tweaking other things with my diet, the midnight snacking cravings just sort of manage to dissipate on their own.

Last night I had a big bowl of Reese’s ice cream with whipped cream and that chocolate shell stuff that I’d bought at the low of my being sick, and even though an hour later I wanted a plate of pizza rolls, too, I was able to distract myself long enough until it wasn’t on my mind anymore. The eating while I’m sleeping thing is a little different, but I think it’ll go too with time.

One day at a time… 🙂

Good news and bad news, Link…

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So the good news is, apparently Christopher is fairly easily entertained simply by watching his Dad play The Legend of Zelda…

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The bad news is…

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…I’ve never actually beaten the second quest before – or even gotten very far in it, for that matter… 😕

Also, I feel like I had some non-Hyrulean things that I was also supposed to get done tonight. Dishes? Clean bottles?! Here’s a lesson in choosing your battles, kid – saving the princess always comes first! 😉

WordPress vs. DSO & APC

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I’ve put off writing this post for a while now, partially because I’m still not sure that I understand it and partially to make sure that my “fixes” that I’ve put into place actually work! 🙄

So about a year ago I started having issues with the server that runs all of my websites running over-utilized. It was a big, nasty affair that we had a hard time tracking down, on top of being a nightmare because we were supposed to be celebrating my birthday over at Disney after having just started our second round of IVF with the embryo which would eventually become Christopher … needless to say, it was VERY stressful!

After we got things back up and running again, I spent about a week researching how to make sure that it never happened again and one thing that I dove heavy into was caching. There are some plugins that are decent, but you can also do caching at the server level on top of all that and this is where I met my new friend, APC…

Now, the good thing about my friend APC is that it’s extremely efficient at what it does – like, it’s one of the best PHP accelerators you can run. Facebook uses it, which sometimes you wouldn’t know, but still, even I can’t deny that they’ve got a fuckton more users than I’ll ever have, so I’ll take their word for it! 8)

Of course, the bad thing about APC is that you have to change the way that PHP runs on your server to enable it … or at least I did. And that’s where the problems began…

Normally most shared environments will run under the SuPHP handler because it’s secure in the way it runs scripts under the users that actually own them. For WordPress, this makes permissions simple because everything just works right out of the box as it always has for me for the past blorgteen years.

Now to run APC, however, I needed to switch over to DSO, which from a security standpoint didn’t seem like a big deal because I run on a VPS, not a shared server now, so there’s not really any risk of “other users” running anything on my machine because there simply aren’t any.

That said, what DSO does do is royally hose up permissions in WordPress because the settings that it needs to upload images, edit themes, update plugins, etc… don’t work because now the web server runs as a separate user (“nobody”) instead of whatever user happens to own the files that it’s trying to execute.

…SOOOOOO…

I finally decided to spend some time digging in to fix this. For a few months, I actually did this very much the wrong way by chmodding the uploads folders of the main sites I was using at the time to 777 … which is bad, so don’t do that!!!

Instead, it seems that the solution wasn’t too crazy after all – to fix the file uploads, I just did a chown -R nobody:nobody uploads and that cascaded the new ownership recursively through all of the subfolders … no need to change any actual permissions, except to change them back from 777, anyways!

I was also able to do this for my Disney site that runs NextGEN Gallery and the results were the same (sorry, can’t remember the specific folder, but it’s in there somewhere!).

Now as for plugins and theme updates, this got a little trickier because I tried the same above and that didn’t seem to work, and I really didn’t want to open up permissions on these folders … even though there’s apparently a way to mask them back to normal by inserting something like these into your wp-config.php file:

define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', 0755);
define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', 0644);

Instead, I inserted these into my wp-config.php file…

define('FTP_HOST', 'localhost');
define('FTP_USER', 'username');
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');

You may have noticed as I did many times throughout this ordeal that if WordPress tries to make an update, but can’t because it doesn’t have the right permissions, it will jump to a screen asking for FTP credentials and then make the changes it wants to do via FTP instead. For the longest time I just entered these manually out of frustration, but now that I think I’ve settled on as close to a “solution” for this as I can get, the above three lines prevent it from prompting me for credentials and I’m now able to install, update, and delete plugins and themes from within WordPress just as if I was running under SuPHP!

Admittedly, I am a little curious to know if there are any other security flaws with having some folders owned by nobody, but from what I can tell it’s still feasible and loads safer than 777. And I get to keep running APC, which I’ve now thrown enough memory at to keep roughly 99% of the php files from all of my sites caching out of system memory instead of parsing off the disk, so that’s a nice little speed improvement that you may have noticed around here!

…but if you do know something I should know about setting up permissions and ownership this way, do be a good samaritan and let me know, though, would ya? Right now I’m cautiously content … so take that for what you will… 😕

a healthy blog post thing for … 2014?

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So I’ve been thinking about weight loss stuff again over the past couple of days…

Yeah, it’s been a while! 😯

I don’t know … maybe it’s the 5 pounds less that I weighed in on the scale yesterday – mostly on account of being sick for the past week and a half, but this topic has been on my mind yet again and I think I want to talk about it. And this is going to seem odd because despite this big, old blog just recently passing 800,000 words, in the last couple of years I’ve kind of steered clear of talking about weight loss and dieting efforts – frankly, I think, because I did so much of it early on and it feels a little embarrassing to keep writing the same stuff over and over again.

It’s true that a lot of what I’m going to write is probably stuff I’ve said already, but who knows – maybe I’m finally in a better place to actually be able to do something about it.

In a way, there’s a lot to be learned in looking back at those failed attempts. One high level thing that I noticed just now is that for each time that I fell off the wagon, it was easy to cite some big thing that had just happened that threw us all for a loop – got married, got a puppy, got a house, dealing with pregnancy stuff – and the funny thing is, despite having the mother of all excuses to be thrown just down the hall from me, thankfully sleeping soundly at this very moment, I guess that almost-34-year-old Scott has learned that … there’s always going to be something to throw you off your game…

For the next few years it will be baby, or maybe even another baby, and then school, then teenagers, then high school … holy cow, how did this turn into a post that whipped through the next twenty years of my life in the better part of a sentence?!  😯

I think the takeaway from it all is just what I’ve said before – I need to find a way to maintain a healthy diet that fits with my day-to-day life because if big chunks of time were only sporadically available in my 20’s, I can tell already midway through that my 30’s aren’t looking any better and I don’t even want to think about the decades after that!

The funny thing is, despite my existence feeling kind of topsy-turvy right now with the introduction of a new human to care for, at the same time this is kind of perfect timing to start making some changes like this in my life for the better. My current work arrangements after the baby was born have had me working from home almost exclusively, which means that in both a bad way and a good way, the refrigerator is only a 15-second walk away from me at any point during my day.

What this should mean in the positive way is that instead of eating whatever I can scarf down in the car on the drive in for breakfast, there’s really no reason I shouldn’t be eating something simple and delicious like a quick omelette or some scrambled eggs and juice every single morning.

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And for lunch, not having questionable cafeteria food within walking distance (and super good, 400-calorie cookies…) and tons more fast food options a quick drive away, there’s really no reason I shouldn’t be throwing together the types of lunches that I always avoided taking to work – sandwiches that would get soggy sitting in the fridge, pretty much anything not frozen for simplicity’s sake.

Snacks can be healthy stuff like fruits and vegetables that I don’t have to carefully portion out in the morning when I’m already running late.

My tea can … well, there’s really not much different about the tea because that’s where I actually started drinking it in the first place, but I can start that again, too!

And that’s all just food!!!

I’m not going to ramble here incessantly because just like the changes I want to make, I’ve been reading a lot of posts that remind me that it’s small, consistent changes over time that will really make the difference in the long haul, so that’s what I want to do. Long term, I’d love to see a slightly more photogenic me by Christmastime so that I don’t have to be as crop-happy when choosing which family photos to post as I have been lately; in the short term, while I’m still trying to get over this sick stuff, I think I’m going to start making some small tweaks here and there and we’ll see what happens.

I’m sure we’ll talk again soon! 😉

movie thoughts … The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

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MV5BODYwNDYxNDk1Nl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwOTAwMTk2MDE@._V1_SX214_AL_[1]I’ve been wanting to see this movie for a while, but the wife didn’t want to. We finally sat down for a few quiet hours together and she gave it the ok promptly before falling asleep for roughly 85% of the movie, but whatever – welcome to married life… 😛

I actually really liked this movie, though!

If we’re being honest, and I see no reason why we wouldn’t be, the only part that didn’t really jive with me was Walter’s daydreams because sometimes they got a little too in depth for me … I can appreciate the concept that they were going for, but like when he had the battle with the new jerky boss guy, it more reminded me of one of those chicken fights from Family Guy than anything that fit the feeling of this movie.

It’s interesting to read the development notes on Wikipedia to see not only just how long it took them to actually get around to making this movie (1994?!), but also how much comedy is actually intended. I’ve never seen the original, circa 1947, but apparently it’s a very satirical story the first time around, whereas I rather enjoyed this as more of a dramatic adventure of a man who finally figures out that life has more to offer him than the plain and ordinary.

Also, not for nothing but I couldn’t picture any of the earlier actors slated for this role doing it any justice. Jim Carrey? Owen Wilson?? Borat?! 😕

All in all, I think the reason this movie kind of struck a chord with me was in a not trying to sound depressing-sort of way, in a lot of ways I could kind of see parts of my life today in the life that Walter Mitty played on screen. You work your job, day in and day out, and you do all of the things that you’re supposed to do, and one day you’ve been there for 15 years and suddenly you have to worry about randomly getting fired. I think a lot of people can relate to that story because you sort of hit a point in your life when you look around and think, “What have I really done with it all???”

Which is why I’ve also got this post flagged as a creative-type post because after watching this movie, I came up with what I think is a neat little project that I’d like to put together inspired by this movie. I don’t want to share too much just yet because it’s honestly going to take me a while to pull together – not necessarily time-wise, but more so because I need to spend some time going through old memento, a lot of which are up in Michigan that I don’t have easy access to right now.

Believe me, if I did I’d probably just stay up all night to do it tonight because I’m that excited and I don’t often have neat, little projects that are both this in depth without also requiring an ongoing commitment that I’ll have to figure out how to schedule later!

So look forward to that … I don’t know, sometime after the next time I get a vacation up north? I don’t know – we’ll see… 😉

But I really did enjoy this movie, and it made me do a lot of thinking about accomplishments and bucket lists and I guess just doing things each day that you’d actually be proud to look back on doing years and decades after the fact. Everyday life tends to be exactly that, but I don’t necessarily think that it has to be, and this movie was a quaint reminder that life is happening out there whether you go out and pursue it for yourself or not.

So why not?

🙂