CoffeeBear.net

The Great Cedar Rapids Flood

Just to let everybody know, we're still here and doing ok. Our house is approximately 1 mile outside of the 500 year flood plain¹, so hopefully we won't have to evacuate. Our main problem around here at the moment is a lack of usable water. The city only has one well working at the moment, so they can only output about a fourth of what they normally do. I've read various reports indicating it will at least a week if not more like 2 or 3 until things start returning to normal. If I get a chance to safely take any photos of the flood, I will do so. However I'm not going to run out and do that right away, as it's both dangerous and possibly would put me in the way of safety/emergency workers. Those are the sort of people you want happy with you, so I'm not going to go out and do stupid shit to piss them off.

¹ You can view the flood plain area via Google Maps.

Tags: Cedar Rapids, Flood, Iowa, Rain, Weather

Now-Reading: Default Filters on Book-Meta

Ever since upgrading to the latest version of Rob Miller's Now-Reading plugin, I noticed my single book pages were working but not displaying everything correctly. Specifically books I'd marked having been borrowed from my local library were being displayed as:

• I borrowed this book fromlibrary

When they should simply have a line reading "I borrowed this book from my local library". I had spent much
time fiddling with my templates trying to figure out how the upgrade broke them and today I figured it out. The truth is my template was just fine. The problem is the newer version of Now-Reading was applying a new filter to book-meta¹. That filter is wpautop and it was wrapping my variable in <p> ... </p> tags. Those tags screwed up the display and made my variable checks fail. To correct the problem, I went into now-reading/default-filters.php and commented out add_filter('book_meta_val', 'wpautop');. Now my single book pages look like they're supposed to again. Yeah!

¹ This is a custom field available in the back-end of the plugin and it is where I store the information telling my template if I borrowed the book and from whom I borrowed it.

Tags: Now-Reading, PHP, Plugins, WordPress

Review: Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull

What a wretched, steaming pile of poo this movie was. Two thumbs all the way down. The wacky, over-the-top stupidity of the script turned what should have been a fun night at the movies into a constant groan fest as things went from bad to worse to crap. I'd been warned off the film by friends with good taste in movies, but we were heading down to the in-law's anyway.... And while we'd been warned off we'd heard from others that the movie wasn't too bad. Unfortunately it was worse than I'd been expecting and I knew within the first 15 minutes or so that I was going to hate the film. Near the beginning of the film, Indy & a friend are captured by the bad guys and taken to a government facility out in a desert. The bad guys do some weak exposition and we're taken inside a warehouse. If you hadn't realized they were at Area 51 yet, the filmmakers decided to pound the point home with a 80lb sledge by painting 51 in 2 story tall numbers on the inside of the warehouse doors.  *sigh*

And things just went downhill from there.  True there were moments in the film which were enjoyable, but they were the exceptions not the rule.  I highly recommend staying away from this wretched, steaming pile of poo.

Tags: Indiana Jones, Movies, Reviews

Fixing Entries

A recent visitor to the CB pointed out a problem on some of my older entries.  It's something I was expecting to have to fix but got sidetracked and never got around to.  Basically with the upgrade to WordPress 2.5.x, there are a couple of new settings in the wp_config.php file which have WordPress to use UTF-8 character encoding to better handle non-English langauges/characters.  However as older versions of WordPress automatically converted standard quotes/astrophes to their fancy/curly versions and those fancy versions are dependent upon which character encoding scheme they are written in.  Since I wasn't sure how many entries I had that are affected by this and I wanted to leave the UTF-8 encoding enabled; I ran this SQL query to fix at least some of the problems: UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content,''','\'') WHERE post_content LIKE '%'%';

There are probably other characters I need to fix yet, so if you happen to see something like hieroglyphics on this site or other gibberish, let me know what entries you found it on so I can fix them.  And my thanks to Lynsey for prompting me to fix these entries.

Tags: Encoding, MySQL, WordPress

Fraking Weather and Fraking Weather “Reporters”

The one thing I don't like about my house would have to be the weather we seem to get around it.  In the 10-12 years I lived in that stupid apartment in Coralville, IA, I only remember going for shelter from tornado warnings maybe 4 or 5 times.  I think we've done that many so far this spring alone.  In the house, we hunker down in our basement in the sauna.  Unfortunately the door to the sauna doesn't close properly so I have to hold it shut.  At the moment I'm doing so by wrapping a belt around the door handle and around my leg.  It sucks.

What sucks worse is while I'm doing it, the weather "reporter" announces that there is no warning for my city but there is for my county and doesn't clarify WTF she's talking about.  Never mind I've been exhausted all weekend from sinus issues and would love to be asleep in bed, nope.  I'm stuck in a sauna in a basement during a tornado warning with an idiot broadcasting nonsense.  *sigh*

On the bright side, the sauna is small and my lovely wife is with me.  Now if we actually get a proper latch on the door so I don't have to hold it shut next time this could be kind of cosy.  *grin*

Side note: We brought the cat down with us as well and he's getting petted by the wife at the moment.  I mostly know this because he's twitching his tail in bliss and smacking my arm with the tail.

Tags: Life, shelter, tornado, warning, Weather