I’ve reset the post.php to its intended form (well, kinda — I only commented out the stuff I added in, just in case).
Let’s see how long it takes. Uh. Faster, but not working…
(oops, forgot to uncomment the php call that feeds the iframe)
There! All better. Though I wish I’d had some warning about this.
I commented out the admin stuff that generates the live preview, and replaced it with the old-style preview. Hopefully it’ll be a little faster to generate the draft. (edit: it is)
Also, I’ve turned off my one plugin (Auto Close Comments) to see if *that* makes any difference.
I’ve tried looking around the WP support forum, but it’s really broken. I can’t ever seem to find anything I’m looking for. But I caught a glimpse of something that might be useful — apparently there should be a cache folder somewhere in my WP directory, which I don’t seem to have.
I’ve posted in the forum — here’s hoping that someone will be able to help me figure it out.
Never mind. I do have a cache directory, and loading it up is what’s taking so freakin’ long. I just keep pushing all the archive buttons and eventually it’ll all be almost-fast 
Maybe I’ll try the live preview thingy again… it is kinda cool. And I wonder if somebody has made a nicer CSS for the admin pages…
I’ve updated the Rock Pile to the latest Wordpress.
Not quite sure I like the gooeyness of the Write Post page. It seems, well, galumphy, like I ought to be using a fat pencil.
Lemme know if you experience any problems. You shouldn’t — most of the changes are behind the scenes…
*some time later*
Is it me, or is the live preview thingy fucking slow? I pushed “Save and Continue Editing” about 2 and a half minutes ago, and it still hasn’t completed loading. How do I turn that off?
*More later*
Every &**($#^ page is fucking slow. What’s up with that? And searching the support forums is less than useless, because even if I find some thread that might be useful, the links are broken!
*and still later*
I’ve edited the post.php to use the old code, instead of the iframe crap function.
My father’s birthday is coming up soon, and I’m feeling a bit melancholy. It’s a cliché, you know, thinking that “I should have asked him more about…” but we’re not storytellers in my family. There are very few incidents in my parents’ lives that I could relate with any degree of confidence (and none in my grandparents’), because we just don’t talk that much about it.
Why didn’t I ask him more about his time in the Navy? Why didn’t I ask him more about his life in California? Did his father die, or were his parents divorced? What happened to his half-brother? Why did he get married at 19, and why did he get divorced at 21?
Does it matter that I don’t know? Only in moments when I want to tell of the kind of man my father was. I know only the barest outline of his life — fragmented, ill-formed, suspect (is that a memory, or a memory of a memory, or a memory of wishful thinking?). However, I think that I don’t really need to know the details of his history to tell you his story.
He was a large man who always tried to avoid intimidating people. He learned early on that size matters. He’d stopped hanging around with “the troublemakers” as a teen because even if he hadn’t done anything, “they’d always remember ‘that big guy was there.’” As he got older, he was considered a “big ol’ teddy bear” by women (most often young and good-looking) who always wanted to hug him. He thought that was a reasonable benefit for putting up with not being able to buy clothing in his size.
He was a good mechanic and would have made a good engineer, if it wasn’t for that school stuff. He had a way with mechanisms, and could almost always make a mechanical object “go,” even if it was held together with baling wire and duct tape. His motto: “It doesn’t have to be pretty, it just has to run.”
Puppies loved him.
He liked to read science fiction, and left it lying around so I could read it, too. Then he’d complain that I was “reading the words off the page” when I’d devour a book before he’d finished it. It became a game with us — could I finish the book before he got back to it?
He had a nice baritone voice and occasionally burst into song, often parodies of songs from the ’50s.
He retired from “the most boring job in the world” — a short-haul truck driver. But he liked it because he was home every night, his boss was 700 miles away, he could control his own schedule as long as his work got done, and being on the road gave him a chance to think about his race cars and how to make them better.
Perhaps I know more about my father than I thought. But really, what more do we need to know?
Just this: He was never stingy with the words “I’m proud of you” or “I love you.”
I love you, too, Daddy.
In a story about the announcement of Pfizer’s inhalable insulin being approved by the FDA, there’s a chart similar to this one:
Source: National Diabetes Statistics, National Institutes of Health.
When Plagioclase’s mother read the article to me this morning while I was trying to read something else (a bad habit we all have in this house), she said “15% of diabetics don’t take their medicine.”
Where’d she get that? I thought she was better at statistics than that. And me, being pedantic, wanted to tell her so, until I read the whole article for myself. The last paragraph in our newspaper (under the byline of Andrew Bridges, Associated Press) reads “About 15 percent of diagnosed diabetics do not take the insulin or pills they should, according to American Diabetes Association estimates.”
Huh. This chart says, to me at least, that 15% of people diagnosed with diabetes don’t take any medicine at all (oral or injected). It could be for any reason, perhaps their diabetes is being treated with diet and exercise (always the first resort). Plagioclase’s mother didn’t misinterpret the chart — she simply read me the words of Mr. Bridges.
So I looked around online for other copies of the article, to see if our local rag inserted this statement, and nope, it didn’t; it’s part of the original syndicated story.
Then I thought, “maybe the American Diabetes Association uses some more up-to-date information, or has a different survey?” I surf over there, and go to their statistics page, and am offered a pdf that says exactly the same thing as the NIH website does. No big surprise as the fact sheet is put out jointly by “Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the American Diabetes Association, and other partners.”
So I’m curious. Did Mr. Bridges misread the chart? Is he assuming that all diabetics must take medicine? Did he have information available to him that I can’t find? I’m not meaning to pick on Mr. Bridges — I’m sure he doesn’t know nor care that I noticed this discrepancy. But I do wonder how often this apparent lack of proper interpretation goes on in the newspaper. I (obviously) can look for corroborating or conflicting reports from other sources. Plagioclase’s mother (and others like her who don’t or won’t use the internet) can’t.
This is a little point that occurs late in an article, so in many cases it would likely be trimmed to fit the space. At what position in the article does it become important enough to get it right?
