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Category: Geekery

And We’re Back – Again

Blue skies today – but cold-ish, with temps in mid-40’s. Great visibility – I can see all the way to Mt Baker to the northeast – about 100 miles or more. Blue sky = blue water on the Puget Sound.

The “Light Blink – Book 1” book has a few sales, and three good reviews. But the process of promoting a self-published book is just as hard as writing one. I’ve got the web site (http://bit.ly/2IH9RdS ) and the Facebook page, and promote it via FB posts. Also tried a weekend ‘countdown’ promotion on Amazon, but no sales there.  Will have to try other techniques.

“Light Blink – Book 2” is still in progress. At about 40K words, heading towards the ‘big climatic finish’, but unsure of what that exactly is. Some ideas, but nothing concrete yet.

I was getting a big of automated spam from the Contact page here, so added my FormSpammerTrap contact form. In WordPress, that just means to make a Child Theme (quick and easy with the “Child Theme Generator” plugin), copy over the ‘page’ template from the parent theme, and then add four code lines to it. Upload, and the change the Contact page to include the FormSpammerTrap shortcode. That process took only 5 minutes, and works really well to block Contact form bots.

More work on Book 2 today.

November Debug

Today started out cloudy, with rain forecast starting tomorrow. Overnight low of 29F, current temp is 45F, with just a little wind under 5mph.

Continued work on the programming bug that has been vexing me for the past 4 days. Found the error finally with some help from a programming forum, although I still don’t understand why the program worked on one site but not another. Adding a new feature to the program as long as I am fixing the bug.

Reminds me of when I first got a computer, way back in the dark ages of 1982. It was one of the original IBM PC’s, and I’d spend hours goofing around with BASIC programs, staying up way later than I should. I’d get a program working by late evening (maybe 11pm), and then I’d decide to add ‘just one more feature or tweak’. So I would work on that enhancement, and it would be 2pm before long.

Hoping that doesn’t happen here, although I don’t have to get up as early as I used to.

Did all the laundry today, plus a trip to the recycle bins to drop of the weeks worth of boxes and stuff that accumulates with all of the things that keep arriving on my doorstep – almost always a new scrapbook thing that Pam has ordered.

Web Site Tweaking and Hot But Cooling

A web site that I’ve been visiting for years needed a quick update. So I talked the owner – we’ve been virtual friends for decades – into letting me do a few tweaks to his site. It’s a WordPress site, and he changed to a responsive theme that I recommended, but some minor visual tweaks were needed to make it more readable with better fonts and font sizing.

He gave me admin access; I spent about an hour on some odds and ends. A bit of changing some options, plus a little custom CSS, and his site is a lot more readable. Looks good, if I do say so myself.

In other news, it has been a bit hot lately here on the Olympic Peninsula. Now, ‘hot’ is relative here: temps above 80 are categorized by the locals as a ‘heat wave’. Many of the houses around here don’t have air conditioning; many heat with wood stoves during the winter, so don’t have any forced-air systems. Newer houses (like ours) generally have heat pumps: forced-air heat in the winter, air conditioning in the summer. So temps today that got really close to 90 F were a bit uncomfortable for most.

We fared OK, though. We are a bit closer to the Puget Sound, which keeps us a few degrees cooler. And most of our windows face due east (which makes for really bright and early mornings), so afternoon heat transfer through the west side if minimal. So we didn’t need to turn on the A/C.

How ‘hot’ did it get? My little weather station (here) still reported a high of about 92F around noon. But around 5pm, the temps started a big drop-off to 70F at 7pm, and now down to the low 60’s. Tomorrow is supposed to be 15 F cooler overall, so it looks like a good day to do a bit of weed-whacking around here.