Category: Everyday Chit-chat

The case of the missing right sidebar

While my schedule has kept me completely busy with other things, I haven’t had much of a chance to post here. Part of the reason is that the back end (the inner-workings) of this blog have had quite a few problems. It’s been quite sometime that I made the switch from Movable Type to WordPress (these programs that this blog relies upon to operate) and have never regretted it. Just the same, that transition has also been a nightmare. First I had to find a theme that I liked – then, WP went through several updates that broke some of the code on the now defunct theme. That, in turn, led me to try another theme (the one I’m running now) and, of course, WP went through yet another update. Heck, everything seemed to stop working! Well, not quite – things stopped working only when using Internet Explorer, but no problems were evident when using Google Chrome or Firefox. Maybe WP didn’t like IE.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve gone in and started tweaking and repairing the messes left behind by all of the upgrades. As to be expected, that too caused additional problems. (Geez, will it ever end?) I even found problems left over from when this blog used MT and didn’t surface until some of the latest updates were done with both WP and the theme. That problem was an especially obnoxious one – some pages had stopped displaying properly (for example, the right sidebar didn’t show up on some pages) a very long time ago and, despite repeated efforts, I simply couldn’t find the cause. I tried changing themes: that didn’t work. I disabled widgets: that didn’t work. I even exported all of the content to and placed it on another site (as a test): that didn’t work!

The interesting thing, however, is that when I recreated this blog on another site and the problem still existed, other test blogs on the same site, did work. Okay, so now I was really confused – could it be the content of each blog that was the problem? (Yeah, I know, I write some pretty heated stuff –  maybe my topics were just too hot! LOL!) If there was something wrong with the content, then if I deleted ALL of the posts (on test blog, that is), then the right sidebar should reappear on the home page (as well as on a few other pages). Well. . .that was it! After deleting all posts, the right side bar worked beautifully!

Now that I had isolated the problem a bit further, I had to find out the specific post or posts that was/were offending WordPress (BTW, I don’t care if the content of my posts offends anyone or anything), I’m referring to the CODE behind them. In order to do that, I had to recreate the blog yet again on the test site and this time, I started removing several posts at a time (I did this in reverse chronological order under the assumption that the older posts had originally displayed properly and were not to blame). Interestingly, that was not the case: I’ve already made well over 100 posts on this blog and it took a bit of time to delete a few posts, test the blog, and then remove some more. I had already removed a large number of them when suddenly, the right bar started to work again. Aha! I had found something! I noted which posts were remaining and recreated the blog yet again. This time, I looked at the last set of posts I had removed: at first glance, I could find nothing wrong with them except one seemed to have had some content missing – that was strange – sure, I make stupid mistakes when I write (who doesn’t?) but most of the post seemed to be missing. Odd, very odd!

To isolate the problem further, I went to the edit screen (dashboard) – the location where I actually write my posts, as well as deal with all of the administrative components of this blog – and looked at the cranky post. It was there that I noticed something unusual that did not show up on the blog itself (the part that is viewable by everyone) – the title of the post contained additional characters and that these characters were HTML code (which should not normally show up here as I was looking at the code using the default “visual edit” screen where everything should display normally. This was the finally clue that led to the solution!  Given that HTML was showing up in places where it shouldn’t I switched to HTML view in the post editor and guess what?! I found a LOT of extra HTML garbage that shouldn’t have been there and that garbage was the extra crap HTML that many Microsoft programs generate – something that millions of people have complained about for years – most Microsoft programs such as Word and other Office programs output so much extra HTML that many other HTML programs contain commands to remove this junk. Unfortunately cutting and pasting materials from other web sites and from Microsoft programs leaves their junk code, even though it is not visible except when using an HTML editor.

Assuming that the junk HTML was the cause of the problem, I then removed all of same posts as I had done during the previous test except for the one that I knew contained it. This time, I suspected that the side bar still would not display properly and, sure enough,  I was right. The next step was to go into the HTML editor for the problem post and manually remove Microsoft’s junk. Guess what? (You get one guess.) After removing the extra needless and worthless code, the right sidebar now displayed properly and the blog worked again! Even more disgusting though is that I had mentioned earlier that there were no problems viewing the blog, even with the bad code, with Firefox or Chrome, the problem only appeared when viewing it with Microsoft’s IE. That’s right, Microsoft’s own junk code is what caused IE to not display the blog properly. Geez! What a huge waste of time it took for me to uncover this problem only to find that Micro$oft was to blame.

How did this happen? There appear to be several reasons: there were other posts that also had the same code – all of those appear to have been written when this blog still used MT. These same posts were originally displayed in older browsers (and I use the updated versions of all of them) – the latest version of IE has compatiblity problems with many web sites (it doesn’t like some of M$ own junk HTML code). Also, WordPress has gone through several major updates (wish they would add a feature to clean up offending M$ HTML). It appears as if I had used cut and paste to copy a press release I was commenting on in the post were I uncovered the solution. Interestingly, the other posts that contained the junk code did not break the right sidebar – I will often us M$ Word to write something and will then use cut and paste to add it to my posts – I manually removed the problem code from those posts too.

Now that this blog is finally working again (it’s been broken for a very long time), maybe I’ll write a bit more.

It’s been a long time . . .

since I’ve had a chance to update this blog. I’ve had another series of extreme (and personal) series of crises and have had to devote my time to dealing with those. While I won’t go into the details now, I decided to mention that for some unknown reason, the corrupt Orange County Superior Court decided to finally dump the National Traffic Safety Institute (which, I thought, had recently signed another long-term contract with them, even though they were the HIGHEST bidder) and is now, like all of the other southern California counties allowing victims for the speed capital of the world to attend a traffic school of their own choosing (including online traffic school). As I’ve previously reported, the National Traffic Safety Institute is owned and operated by a CONVICTED FELON – which the Orange County Superior Court knew about – and yet speed-trap victims were required to wasted their time going to Orange County Court Houses to set through abusive and meaningless drivel conducted the National Traffic Institute (which, of course, had a court-sanctioned monopoly on all traffic school business here in the OC). It is not known what happened but, hopefully, enough disgusted citizens raised their ire at about the corrupt courts in OC to case this change.

In some ways, this is too bad (I’m being sarcastic) – as I noted in my previous posts about the National Traffic Safety Institute, I created quite an uproar when I brought up the fact that their “school” was owned and operated by a convicted felon. At that time, others also shared their disgust at getting stuck in speed traps (heck, I just got an idea – maybe I’ll create a photo album of photos showing some of the most popular speed traps in the OC – LOL) – one victim was a doctor who was rushing to the emergency room to help a patient in extremely critical condition (yes, the cops gave him a ticket and delayed his arrival to the hospital and no, they didn’t give him an escort). Of course, there were many, many other horror stories about how OC cities use speed traps to make money to fill coffers. Good riddance National Traffic Safety Institute!

They call me Clicker, Clicker . . .

Okay, so I’m not going to rant today; instead, I’ll discuss a little behavior mod I’m doing with my @#$% cat. 🙂

I just finshed reading a FANTASTIC book on behavioral modificiation techniques and training animals so I thought I’d give it a try on my cat. Turns, out, it seems to be working spectaclarly well and we’ve only had two “training” sessions. So far, I’ve taught her to sit and she’s working on giving me a “high five” (which seems a bit more difficult for her). Just the same, the prognosis looks amazingly GOOD and I’m going to keep trying. This is almost too much fun but, then again, you can never have too much of that with your own pets. 🙂

The good news just keeps rolling in

. . . and I’m not complaining! Yesterday (September 17), the House of Representatives overwhelming voted (i.e., unanimously) in favor of the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendment Act of 2008 as it was passed back to them from the Senate! Furthermore, both the House and the Senate NAILED the Supreme Court for their bigotry in “creating” their own version of the ADA by ignoring the intent of Congress when the ADA was first passed back in 1990. Congress also blasted away at the Supreme Court for their egregious rulings that not only ignored the intent of the ADA but that have subsequently harmed millions of Americans. There are few times when Congress gets something right and this time they came through with flying colors! Bravo to both the House and the Senate (although the Senate took far too LONG to get off their duffs and pass the bill that was sent to them by the house THREE MONTHS AGO). Just the same, the end result is what was important and the rights of those with disabilities have been restored (unless, of course, other bigoted judges or the Supreme Court decide to make up their own laws again).

My phurbas

Last weekend, I acquired a new phurba. As I noted on my previous blog entry, it was one of the largest I’ve ever seen. While I would have liked to have gone out for another walk today, gas prices are simply too high so i decided to stay home and do a bit a Spring cleaning (that’s almost as much fun as doing taxes). As I was straightening things up, I came across my other phurbas – two that I acquired from classes I’ve taken on sacred sound healing (a very strange but wonderful set of two week-long classes I took a couple of years ago), as well as a couple of others I’ve acquired since then and was rather amazed at the tremendous sizes differences between them.

My Phurbas

The photo on the left (click on it to see a larger image) shows my current collection and are as follows (from left to right), my latest and obviously huge phurba, one I acquired elsewhere (I can remember where I bought it), a very old and beautiful wood phurba which my teacher claimed was a very “powerful” one, another one I acquired during my studies, and a very small one which I also don’t remember where it came from. I would also like to mention that the wood phurba has a coin sewn into one of the pieces of cloth that is tied to it – this considered to be very sacred and increases the phurba’s value as a powerful shamanic tool. All in all, it’s a rather interesting set. In writing this entry, I also came across a rather interesting article on phurba’s and their use; that article may be found here. While I won’t reprint that article here, a sidebar gives a very good description of what phurbas are used for; specifically as a:

  • “weapon for subduing and exorcising spirits and demons.
  • meditative tool to pin down the distractions of greed, desire, and envy.
  • means to banish, neutralize, or transform negativity.
  • ritual object to symbolically slay enemies and remove obstacles.
  • therapeutic process for healing physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual dis-ease.
  • vehicle for pinning down the ego, one of the main obstacles to enlightenment.”

Obviously, Tibetan shamans place a great deal of importance on phurbas.

I’ve just finished reading the above mentioned article and also took a look at the rest of the site where it is located: as it turns out, it’s a fascinating site with lots of other interesting articles and photographs. Perhaps I’ll comment more on it later.