Category: Generic

The Great Image Replacement Project

You are all dying for an update on The Great Image Replacement Project, I’m sure. Well, here it is.

Last week I tried to post an image using the WordPress mobile app and it failed because I was out of storage space.  The six gigs I have on my account were all used up.  Well, that’s not good because I just upgraded from three gigs to six gigs back in April.

I figured out that the main culprit was a handful of concert videos I had uploaded back in August.  I deleted them from the account (but strangely they still play on the posts?  I haven’t figured that one out yet) and my free space went up dramatically.  Still though… I didn’t want to risk getting rejected again so I started replacing the images hosted on the WordPress account with the same images hosted on my Flickr account.

I have now replaced the vast majority of images for all posts made in 2019.  The exceptions being things that I never uploaded to Flickr, mostly screen shots and such, and a few posts where I pulled images from Google Photos searches that took things from random dates over the last 13 years.  I will eventually fix those posts, but for today at least they are just more trouble than they’re worth.

As I went through the posts I was deleting them from the WordPress account’s media folder as well.  This resulted in me accidentally deleting my header image (whoops) but it also freed up a lot of space.  At the time of The Incident I was at 100% full.  Now, with a year’s worth of posts updated, I am down to 43.6% full.  Maybe I’ll go back and start updating everything prior to 2019, but for now I think I’m done.

The only potential issue going forward would be what if something happens to Flickr.  If things disappear from Flickr, they disappear from WordPress too.  If our new Flickr overlords over at Smugmug should decide to fuck with us… I don’t want to think about it.

Time to Start Being Afraid

Yeah, I think the time to start existentially fearing for my musical life has come.

My band’s next gig is a private party.  That private party just happens to be my (and Mike the Bass Player’s) 30th high school reunion.  The date in question is a little more than a month away.  I’ve known that this particular gig would be more terrifying to me than any other as my high school fears and hangups were bound to come flooding back to me and mess me right the hell up.  Fortunately that was all sort of hypothetical before.

Now that the date is getting close though… panic time.  I’m going to make an utter fool out of myself at this thing.  Notice I said I, and not we.  The band is going to be fine, it’s just the fat ass guitar player who is going to die a brutal on stage death (again, existentially not literally).  Everything that can go wrong will.  All of my gear will fail.  In over 30 years I’ve never broken a string on stage.  At this thing I am going to break them all… twice… at least.  My ears are going to stop working and I won’t be able to hear myself playing everything in the wrong key.  My fingers are going to stop working.  My central nervous system is going to stop working and I am going to stand there in front of everyone with my arms limply hanging by my side as a steady stream of drool falls from my useless face.

It’s going to be bad.  I’m going to be bad.  At graduation I won the award for being the top student in the music department.  In my yearbook I got the most musical male senior superlative.  All of my fellow classmates who remember useless shit like that are going to laugh at me and then take those awards away.  “You suck,” they will yell as they take that little music department trophy that is in a closet upstairs at my parents house (I think) away from me.  It’s going to be a nightmare that I will never wake up from.

Damn, I need to start practicing.

 

Sleep

I’m having a pretty bad sleep week.  I got some replacement parts for my CPAP machine and have been adding them into the mix and it seems like the result is that I’ve been transported back to day one.  Sort of.

I got a new mask with a new cushion.  On the first few days I had the issue where the mask seal let go a little.  I had to take the mask off entirely and put it back on in order to fix the seal.  I’ve also had random wake-up moments through the night.  Last night I even took off the mask in my sleep and stared snoring.  All of those things happened in the first month or two but had more or less stopped.

So… is it the equipment?  I don’t know.

All in all, as we’re into month four of the apnea therapy existence, I have to say that using the machine has helped.  Instead of running out of gas after lunch, I now run out of gas after dinner.  Also, last night not withstanding, I don’t snore so loud that I wake my wife in the middle of the night.  That’s all kinds of win.  No more taking my noisy snoring out to the couch at 3:00am.

All kinds of win.

I’ve got a new mask, a new humidifier filter, a new hose that I can install once it’s time to get rid of the old hose.  I’ve got a new harness too, but I don’t think I need it.  At least not until the Velcro on the straps starts to fail.  Things are going well.

Now if I could just stop eating M&M’s.

Does This Work?

It looks like it’s going to work!  When I hit preview it shows up!  This would be awesome if I can finally use hearthis.at to post music instead of soundcloud.  I still have to hit publish and try it out, but my fingers are completely crossed!

Clicking publish… post-publish addendum to follow……

 

ADDENDUM: It worked it worked!!  It kinda sucks on mobile as it won’t play when the phone goes to sleep, but it’s playing and life is good!

The site offers two embed codes.  One is an iframe HTML tag.  That pulled into the wordpress.com editor’s preview, but when I published it was translated into just a link.  The second is a BBCode and that didn’t work at all.  The third option was to let wordpress do the work for me.  For youtube and soundcloud and vimeo (and probably other sites as well) if you paste a simple link into the editor it automatically replaces it with the site’s embedded media player.  So when I posted the playlist for the Lizardfish cookout a couple of weeks ago, or the trailer for Star Wars Episode IX yesterday, I just pasted in the link and that was it.  For this case the editor did not immediately replace the link with the media player, but when I published the post the link was translated correctly and I can play the song!  File this under: WOOHOO!

Note, the song I used for the test was from Sunday’s band practice.  It isn’t a particularly great take on the song, but I did something in the solo that was good enough to get a, “whoa!” out of Kevin.  It was loud enough that his vocal mic picked it up.  That made me happy when I mixed down the rehearsal recording the other day so that was the file I picked for this monumental test.