Our RV Adventures

I didn’t finally get Sunday’s blog posted until about 3:30 this afternoon due to a rogue plug-in in my WordPress setup.

The problem first appeared about 1am this morning when I finished the blog began to upload it. About 5 seconds into the procedure, I would get an error message that said ‘500 Internal Server Error’. Now I didn’t think much of this at time because I see it every now and then. But usually I just wait a little while, try it again, and it goes through with no more problems.

But not this time. I continued to try it about every 30 minutes until I headed back home at 5am, still with no luck.

Thinking maybe it was a laptop problem I tried it again from my desktop machine in the rig with no better results. So I went to bed. And that was it until I got up about 11:30.

At that point, though, the first thing I did was to check with the real estate office (the lady owns also owns the RV park) to see if our absentee ballots had come in. But no luck yet.

I spent the next hour or so trying to figure out what the baseline problem was. Finally, I decided to just use WP’s built-in editor to publish the blog. And after copying and pasting the blog text into the editor, I began to upload the photos into the Media folder so I could then paste them into the blog.

And that’s when the problem became obvious. When I tried to upload the photos, I immediately got a HTTP Error message. And got it over and over again, no matter whether it was GIF, JPG, or PNG, and no matter how large or small, I even tried to upload a 5 byte text file with no luck.

First things first, I logged into my Godaddy account to check the file permissions on the Images folder, It the permissions had somehow gotten changed to Read Only, then no new files, i.e photos could be written to the folder. But the permissions were fine.

So having reached the limit of what I could do from my end, I put in a call to Godaddy Tech Support . . . and was told there was a 37 minute wait. That’s what I get for calling in the middle of the day. Usually I’m calling at 2 in the morning and I get right through. But Godaddy has this neat feature where they take your phone number and then call you back when there’s a tech available.

When he did call back, he was immediately able to recreate the problem on his end, which is always a  relief. I told him nothing had been changed or update in the last week or so. It was just working fine Saturday night and not working Sunday night.

So we went down the list, with Mark the tech guy trying different settings and then I would try to upload an image. He even temporarily changed out the Brava theme for another one. And nothing worked until he turned off all WP plug-ins. And then suddenly it worked. Now to figure out which of the 40 odd plug-ins was causing the problem. Lucky for us, the plug-ins are listed alphabetically and the rogue began with a ‘C’ – CAPTCHA for Login.

As soon as we turned that one off, everything worked again. But why was it causing the problem?  The CAPTCHA is one of those plug-ins that makes you type in the letters from a distorted graphic. Like this.

It took some sleuthing, but we finally figured out what happened. Well, kind of.

Turns out the CAPTCHA plug-in pulls its graphics from the company’s website, and it looks like the company went out of business yesterday, and the website is gone. So we know what was causing the problem, but we never figured out why it was keeping photos from being uploaded to the Media folder.

But it’s fixed and I don’t care. But now I need to find a new CAPTCHA program, hopefully one that won’t shut down.

Originally tonight was supposed to be my last scheduled night of gate work, but just as I hung up with Godaddy, Todd texted me to let me know I’ll be working at this gate again tomorrow, Tuesday night. Said he didn’t know yet about Wed, or any further along.

So we’ll see.

Thought for the Day:

There is no government-created problem so large that more government can’t make it worse.

qerqewrqe

If I’d Known I Was Going to Have to Chase Cows and Dodge a Brahma Bull.

This is Sunday nights blog for 10/30/16. I couldn’t get it posted last night from the gate, so here it is now.

The gate I’m on now is slow, very slow, with only two trucks coming in yesterday to drop off one of them, and then other truck leaving with both drivers. And tonight two trucks left about 6pm that had come in on the day shift. And that will probably be it for tonight.

But what I do have is lots and lots of cows. And one VERY big Brahma bull. This gate, which is right off the highway, is in the middle of a cow pasture, a well-populated cow pasture. And yesterday evening about 6:15 I saw movement out my right window. Suddenly I realized I was in the middle of a large herd. And right about then is when the earthquake hit.

At least that’s what I thought it was until I looked back over my left shoulder and out that window. The VERY large Brahma bull had walked between the guard shack and the potty trailer and then decided that this would be the perfect place to scratch his itch.

But finally the bull wandered off just in time for one of the motion sensor alarms to start going off intermittently . Looking out the door I could see the reason why. There were several cows down by the sensor setting it off. Apparently unlike my Mighty Mule alarms that only sense metal, these also sense beef.

Our sensors are kind of kludged together, being a large orange traffic cone with 3 foot stake jammed in the top. The sensor itself is zip-tied to the top of the stake. Crude, but effective.

Unless of course a cow decides it’s her favorite new play toy. This became apparent when the alarm started up again with a constant beeping. Sticking my head out the door, I saw this.

One of the cows was kicking and head-butting the sensor cone, knocking it around the roadway. After listening to the beeping, I decided to just walk down the road, run the cow off, and get the cone back.

But as I passed the the generator trailer and then my truck, I heard a loud ‘SNORT’ off to my right. And there about twenty feet away, stood Mr. Bull, who again snorted and then pawed the ground a couple of times while looking right at me.

Now having come out on the losing end of bull-me interaction when I was a vet assistant back in high school, I decided the cow could play with the cone all she wanted.

A while later I saw the bull mosey pass the shack and head off in the other direction out across the field. Thinking this might be a good time to retrieve the cone, I walked out of the shack only to see there were now 3 cows fighting over the cone. So figuring the bull was now off in the other direction doing . . . well, bull stuff, I headed down to get the cone back. But it didn’t work this time either.

As I got within about 50 feet of the cows, one of them, like a dog with a big bone, grabbed the stick in its mouth and took off down the road, being chased by the other 2 cows. Or maybe they were running interference and blocking for her.

At this point I don’t know any more. 

At first I was thinking I would just follow the cow down the road until she got tired and dropped the cone. But realizing this would put me out in the open, with Mr. Bull somewhere back behind me, I jumped in the truck and took off after the cow, who was now several hundred yards away.

But the cow didn’t seem to want to relinquish her new toy, so I ended up driving back and forth across the road and out into the pasture, trying to herd her back toward the shack. Finally she gave up, dropped the cone, and took off across the field. Probably to tell Mr. Bull how mean I’d been to her.

But when I got back to the shack, I found more havoc had been wreaked. Both the Sign-In boards had been knocked over along the marking cones.

Well, at least they LEFT the cones this time.

In last Tuesday’s blog, Extra Fluffy, I commented how standards have changed in how women’s weight is perceived. Referring to both a 1959 Perry Mason, with bikini models, and the early 60’s Beach Party movies, I noted how today these women would be considered at least ‘chubby’, if not plain overweight, according to today’s standards.

And it’s still happening today.

This is Miss Iceland, Arna Ýr Jónsdóttir.

She’s was competing in the Miss Grand International pageant in Las Vegas when she was told by the pageant staff that she had no chance of winning because she was too fat, and her shoulders were too broad.

So saying, “Miss Grand International doesn’t deserve my face, body, personality or heart.”, she quit in disgust.

Good for her.

Wrapping up, we had a lot of nice comments, both on the blog and on Facebook, about the neat robot Halloween costume that his Uncle Chris made for Landon.

What Brandi didn’t realize until later was that the big yellow button in the middle of suit is actually a ‘Fart’ button. When you press it, it lights up and makes a ‘fart’ noise.

Who knew robots could fart?

I guess it’s a guy thing.

Thought for the Day:

The easy way is usually mined.

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