Matthew Botos

It somewhat bothers me to admit I’ve gone to 4 speed dating events, but no one seems to worry about how many nights they’ve spent in bars trying to meet people. Besides, it’s a pretty decent way to get introduced, actually talk a bit, and gauge how much personal chemistry there is. It also confirms for me that the real challenge is just creating the opportunities to meet people; I have no problem chatting once the ball is rolled.

The mix of people was good, and it seemed to fall out pretty easily who was still of interest. Of the 7, 2 definitely had potential, 1 would be fun to hang out with as a friend, 2 just didn’t click, and 2 weren’t my type. I also had a nice chat with the woman who hosts these, and tried to recruit several people into the ski club. Not a bad way to spend the evening; now I just have to sit back and see if I read their interest as well as I read my own.

Making a quick plugin tweak proved to be more challenging than expected. For starters, though it was documented in English, the Automatic Reference Plugin was coded in Spanish! As a testament to the author’s coding skills, that was actually the least of my worries. Good code is readable code, even if the variables are in another language.

Instead, lesser pitfalls drug out the exercise: changes not being actually uploaded, and another plugin parsing the same text before I got to it. Compared to those problems, Spanish variables and regular expressions were easy! I did discover a handy way to debug plugins on a live site, though: activate debugging using conditionals comparing the post id to that of a test draft.

The finished feature, minor for all this effort, creates links other blog posts using words other than their full title using [title|full title of entry].

After A Long, Short Local Trip, I knew I was in for a bit of a car repair bill, but the magnitude of it still gave me a shock. The immediate culprit was the slave cylinder and hoses for the hydraulic clutch, all of which had to be replaced.

The second wallop was from the lingering “check engine” light, whose vague phrasing must’ve tested better with the focus groups than an “open wallet” light. Not one, but both oxygen sensors were broken, and carried the usual price tag of anything electronic. As an aside, the trend of expensive electronics in previously “dumb” mechanical devices is only going to increase; Brian just told me that his recent air conditioner problems were purely due to incorrect settings on its electronic controller.

So, two major repairs, plus towing and diagnostic fees topped out just shy of four figures. The latter does bug me a bit; one of the excuses for doing the ScanGauge Installation was to save a few bucks by just telling them what the error codes were. Alas, computerized engines are too sophisticated for that; there’s a whole slew of information that has to be extracted for an exact diagnosis.

On the plus side, the Maxima is paid off, so after the equivalent of three months worth of payments, it’ll be free and clear again. Actually, better make that four - the radiator hoses are getting worn…

This Fark thread on 80’s Music Videos is good for killing a bit of time and firing long-dormant synapses. There are too many classics to highlight, but the oddest has to be this number featuring David Hasselhoff and Knight Rider.

A quick trip out to run errands on a Saturday afternoon turned into a long, car-towing odessy. I did meet some nice people along the way, though, which is a rarity for my introverted nature.

My last stop was a Lowe’s, where I didn’t find what I was looking for. Instead, as soon as I pulled out of the parking spot, I found the clutch on my Maxima just sunk to the floor. Using instincts finely honed from using computers every day, I restarted with no gain. After some tinkering and grumbling, I found the clutch fluid reservoir under the hood, which was bone dry.

Luckily, across the barren expanse of two big box parking lots was a Target. Two engineering degress came in handy in a staredown with bottles of brake fluid that made no mention of also being good for the clutch. I finally reasoned that both were hydraulic and covered in the same section of the manual, and that if it didn’t work, the system would have to be flushed anyway.

Back under the hood, the grimy reservoir cover confirmed my assumption before taking a paltry amount of fluid that didn’t do anything to solve the problem. With my cell phone safely at home, I trekked into Lowe’s to find a phone. Pay phones have become extinct in our cell phone culture, but the folks at the service desk were nice enough to provide a phone and deliciously dead tree phone book.

My luck wasn’t so good with the complimentary Firestone MasterCare road service. After providing all the details of my situation, just shy of smart bomb worthy geographic precision, they came back from a long hold to offer me an hour wait and a $250 bill for a 5-mile tow. I must’ve dialed the sucker hotline. The first local place recommended another one (usually a good sign), who in turn offered me a similar wait but a much more reasonable $55 + $3/mile.

With time to kill, I pulled up a barstool with anthropomorphic legs at nearby Max & Erma’s and ended up chatting with a guy who restores older cars. Discussing cable versus hydraulic clutch activation was much more entertaining than the golf tournament that was on TV.

Steve showed up a little early with his tow truck and placid dog Gracie in the back seat. The truck was quite the marvel of modern technology: the rear view camera and wireless controller were only reined in by the paper note pads carpeting the dash. We discussed the relative durability of the Maxima on the way to Firestone, which was surprisingly still open.

The local Firestone, despite being a large chain, has earned my trust over the years. One of the early times I took my car in for a mystery problem, they spent all day swapping parts that didn’t fix the problem and charged me nothing for the effort. They earned extra points today; one of the mechanics, Chad, was kind enough to offer me a lift home after they closed.

Which leads me to the final twist in this little vignette: while waiting, the TV was tuned to an ungarage-like choice: Alton Brown road tripping on the Food Network.

I recently discovered that StatTraq’s tables can easily grow too big to email with WordPress DB Backup. Hosting companies, including Purehost, limit the size of server-sent emails to about 1 MB, which can be overwhelmed by several megs or more of visitor statisitcs, even once zipped. To get around this limit, use the automated daily backup for only your core valuable blog content and download a complete backup including the less critical statistics manually on a regular basis.

Optimizing your blog for search engines has some good tips with specific implementations for WordPress, including better meta descriptions and titles.

Google Sitemaps lets you provide Google with your site’s structure and update frequency to help them index it more efficiently. It’s particularly useful if you have a site without a real physical file structure, like WordPress. The Google Sitemap Plugin handily creates one for your blog.

It also lets you include additional pages, but my 2252 static pages (mostly the photo album) called for another approach. This Perl Google Sitemap generator did the trick, and even exposed a few bad filenames. The resulting file then needs to be manually submitted to Google; one last step would be to add an automatic ping to Google when it’s updated.

My Mac Firefox profile mysteriously stopped working, but the following steps repaired it:

1. In ~/Library/Application Support, rename the Firefox folder to Firefox Backup
2. Restart Firefox, which will create a new folder and profile
3. Exit Firefox and copy over the files from the old profile to the new one
4. If you have older saved passwords in a in file with a .s extension, rename the file to signons.txt
5. Start Firefox and your old profile should come up again

I joined my family for a long weekend in Brigantine on the Jersey shore, just north of Atlantic City. Though the accommodations were a a bit run-down, the location was a nice balance of normal beach town and proximity to the nightlife. After getting a little too much sun during the day, we checked out the Borgata and the boardwalk after nightfall. My mom got a wonderfully truthful quote from the parking cashier at the Borgata. She asked him if all his customers were as happy as us non-gamblers and he answered: “Can I tell you something? Hehhhllll no.”

View the Brigantine photos