Sunday.  1st.  Summer!! Final countdown to Christmas!!  Christmas music on the clarinet!!

:)

Also, Tony and Karen&Frank and I are doing the Plonk beer advent calendar again this year!

Roasted up some veggies and had it with leftover turkey from the club night.

Black Museum on Black Mirror.

Oh did I mention I picked up my new glasses last week?  The vision in them is *ok*.. I mean it's a bit better than it was.. but I certainly did get that whole "oh wow I can see" feeling from them.  Sigh.  Should NOT have gone to Specsavers. Also the ones with the anti-reflective coating are too tight and keep sliding down my nose and they're driving me NUTS.

Monday.  Slept fairly well.  Busy time before work just trying to catch up with life.

My washing dried in about five minutes outside.

Did some work on some decom tickets, and was able to use my new scripts to do the hard work for me, which was super exciting.  A few copy/pastes and it's done.. whereas to do it manually would be like twenty or way way more clicks per group.  Late finish.  Had a brief break before dinner and looking at holiday stuff after dinner and suddently it's nearly 20:00.  Sigh.  Labelled pics from our recent Queensland trip.  At one point it smelt like aviation fuel coming through the cooler.  Maybe that Virgin plane on its way to Adelaide that just flew over was leaking fuel.. hrmm.  Striking Vipers on Black Mirror.  

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Another busy morning trying to keep up with life.  More decom work at work, and did up another script.  Cooked more veggies for dinner and finished off the lamb from last week.

Started into the 2024 season of Futurama, whatever they're up to now.  Mum photo picking then Smithereens on Black Mirror with Moriarty heh.  An episode with "present day" technology for the most part, but gripping.

Wednesday.  Restless, took a while to get to sleep, but still woke up early.  Busy day.  Got some bulk deleting scripts working to save me even more time on decoms.

Went back to Specsavers to try and get my glasses adjusted.  They pinched the nose piece a lot closer together, so now they don't slide down my nose - they just stick out way too far and hurt.  Sigh.

Have I ever mentioned how TRASH Windoze 11 is?  Today I opened a text file.  It opened in notepad on my main desktop no issues.  Five minutes later I opened the text file again.  This time it decided to open ON MY OTHER DESKTOP!!! WHICH I HAVEN'T EVEN USED TODAY!!!  What the actual F MICROSOFT?? 

Rachel, Jack and Ashley Too on Black Mirror.  Miley Cyrus as herself much?  I found the house they filmed in on Google maps.  It's actually a place you can rent for like $8000/night.  And it's surrounded by a lot of electric fences.  

And that was the end of that for Black Mirror.  I've finished watching all the episodes so far.  I could easily rewatch them all (if the sweetie ever wanted to watch them).  I found the show fascinating for the most part.  Although it's usually very dark and often twisted.  

Thursday.  Slept okish. 

I have a jungle in the back yard

Had to take the bus to work (the sweetie came out at one point a complete zombie from a few nights in a row of not sleeping on account of being so stressed out by work).  Got to try out the MyWay+ app QR code.  Which you have to hold low enough for it to read it.  And currently you're not meant to tap off until they can work out bugs.  Half the people got free rides.  Kids just didn't even bother trying, they just walked on.  They're doing road works near one stop, which meant the GPS wouldn't activate because the bus wasn't close enough, so everyone there got a free ride.  Other people weren't scanning things the right way or tapping properly, so some of those just went meh and ignored it and got a free ride.  And there's still no real time location tracking of buses.  Lame.

Busy day.  Ok drinks.  Pizza/ice cream/Death in Paradise 10.6.

We had some slippage...

Friday.  Restless sleep - too hot and humid.  Awake from maybe 4.  Another decom day and more looking at scripts.  Made a lemon cheesecake after work.  Leftovers for dinner (too stinking hot and humid to run the oven for kievs).  Christmas movie season started with Die Hard.  I've learn almost all the words in German to sing along at the end :)

Saturday.  Slept somewhat ok.  Did I mention all the rain and storms this week?  Busy house day doing All The Things.  Went out for a bit of food shopping and errands.  Apparently Knead's sourdoughs mostly failed because it was so humid they wouldn't rise.  Tried two places to get a replacement light for Stumpy's tank which started flashing on Friday.  Failed.

Twin buses...

Pork/parmesan/truffle sausages for dinner and cheesecake!

Death in Paradise 10.7.

Sunday.  Took forever to get to sleep - hot/restless/itchy.  Did I mention the humidity?  Everything is damp.  Not looking forward to this being the new normal for Canberra with global warming.  At least today was a lot less humid.  The cooler was actually useful as a cooler and not just a humidifier.  Went out to the Reptile Zoo at Gold Creek after lunch to try and get a UV light for Stumpy's tank.  I actually even called them before we went to see if they had one.  They said they should.  They didn't.  They had a 5% one in 48", but she reckons blue-tongues probably need like the 12% ones.  Which of course they didn't have.  They barely had any four foot lights at all.  There's all sorts of random sizes nowadays, like 46" wtf?? 

If/when Stumpy carks it, we'd be very tempted to get a bearded dragon.. they're so awesome!

Made some French onion soup, although probably made it too liquidy.  Might be an epic disaster.  Also blogged Notre-Dame in Lego.  Been meaning to for a while, but they just reopened it this weekend, so thought it would be a good time.

Sunday.  24th.  Had a very nice butterfly lamb roast which turned out really well and it wasn't too gristly.  There was even a crackling of sorts, which may have turned out better if I hadn't put a lid on the baking dish!

Finished watching the Lego Masters Christmas special from the American series.  For some reason channel 9 didn't put any ads through it.  Go figure!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up early.  Busy hour before work trying to catch up with life.  Frustrating day getting nowhere with my script cause I'm dumb.  Leftovers for dinner and blogging.  Watched Crocodile on Black Mirror - distracted by the scenery in Iceland!

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  More frustration with my script.  Had some time off it and went to figure out some other stuff which was cool.  Gave up trying to work out the bug with my script and ran it over prod anyway.. where the server promptly said piss off and disconnected the script.  Sigh.  Leftovers for dinner.  Mum photo picking then Hang the DJ on Black Mirror which was kinda sweet.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Oh the humidity!!!  But hardly any rain - ripped off!!  Someone decided that we could save a fortune in electricity during the energy crisis in the extreme heat wave by mandating that we close all the blinds and turn off monitors not in use.  Property peeps didn't even say excuse me as they pushed past me to get at the blind handle.  Never mind that these blinds are flimsy AF and closing them would make very little difference, or the fact that it was 21.5C outside when they did it.  Then they turned off the aircon.  

Yeah it was a pretty miserable afternoon.

Had some success with my script though - managed to get it to hobble along and generate a nice report for me which was pretty cool.  No progress on the powershell module though.  Leftovers for dinner then Metalhead on Black Mirror.

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok. 

Tiniest poppy ever??

Wanted to get a few things done in the morning but derailed by people wanting stuff.  Work Christmas party in the afternoon which was pretty chilled. 

Photobomb!!

Ate way too much.  They wouldn't give me extra crackling as I went through (even though we were right at the back of the queue and there was heaps of crackling left).

But after the speeches when serving was all done, I grabbed a little bit more.  And then XL grabbed us a bunch more as well.  I may have eaten way too much.  Whoops.  Didn't have anything at all for dinner.  

Friday.  Took a while to get to sleep but then slept mostly ok.

Had a catchup morning - dealing with several weeks worth of mail.  Had a bit of fun in the afternoon redoing our links portal.  Made the sweetie pizza for dinner since he missed out last night.

Treehouse of Horror XXXV then John Wick.  With a phone call from the mother type person in the middle.

Saturday.  Slept ok I think.  

Some house stuff in the morning.  After lunch we headed out to the club.  Helped out with dinner prep and with serving.  It was a feast of epic proportions!  It was a pretty good night, with over 70 people there!!  Might have accidentally stayed up til nearly 2am.  !!!!!

It might have rained A LOT over Canberra which was pretty awesome.  The Christmas tree .. and all of us.. got a little.. moist .. ! ;)

Who's gonna make the gravy..?   Me!!  I've never made this much gravy before!  A whole packet!

Sunday.  Woke up around 5:30 and 6 briefly but slept through til 6:25.  Got ready and headed up a bit after 7 only to find most of the cleanup had already been done.  But I did spend ages doing a heap of washing up.  People took some of the food and I brought home what was left.  Tammy also found this little tortoise!  She had to run though so didn't have time to wait for it to come out fully.

Quiet day at home.  Tired after only four hours sleep funnily enough!!!

Sunday.  3rd. 

We got another rump cap beef roast to cook.  I didn't realise how expensive it was - 1.8kg was like $50!!  eeep!!  This one wasn't as epic awesome as the last time we got one.  It was cooked nicely to medium rare but it was a lot tougher than last time. 

Watched The Entire History of You on Black Mirror. 

Speaking of Black Mirror.  The other night's episode Fifteen Million Merits had a scene in it where the dude literally couldn't even close his eyes to block out ads.  This is disturbingly close to being a thing in real life.  The only time I ever have to sit through ads on my phone is when I'm playing Candy Crush.  Yeah, still playing it.  But only when I have the spare 45-50 minutes to play an entire episode of 15 levels.  And I only do that so I can "win" the round against other people and get the 40 gold (it used to be 45).  Point is, when you don't finish in the requisite moves you can watch ads to get more moves and a bonus.  I don't watch the ads.  I literally just lay the phone down and count down the number of seconds until it's due to be finished.  Most of the time I have no idea what the ad is even for.  The point is, apparently Apple are thinking about monitoring eye contact during ads.  This could either be a good thing - they'll see that I'm not watching the ads and so not bother to give me such long ones, or they'll figure out a way to force you to watch them.  At that point I'll quit once and for all.

Monday.  Awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night.  Hurray.  Meh day.  Cooked lemon pepper chicken for dinner.  With maybe like 0.3% of the lemon juice I have in the house.  I think I'd keep the veggies separate next time.

Did some catchup blogging in the evening.  Watched Be Right Back on Black Mirror.  I reckon some of that sort of thing is really not that far off (apparently in the decade since the episode has aired there's been a few apps out there that have tried).

Tuesday.  Remember remember the 5th of November.  I always do cause it's the day I started at my current job.  17 years ago.  Eep!  Meanwhile, Neil has been there 49 years.   !!!!!!  Did some futzing around with powershell scripts.  Even managed to get something to work in our new environment which was pretty exciting.  Leftover beef with salad for dinner, photo picking and White Bear on Black Mirror.  

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Frustrating day with scripting at work - not nearly as successful as yesterday.  Late home, late dinner, then sorting files, backing up computer, washed hair, bed.

Twenty or so years ago when I was still living in Sydney there were the first mumblings of a plastic bag ban.  As such I started keeping all my plastic bags so that I would be able to have bin liners for years to come.  Then I moved to Canberra (brought all those bags with me!) and continued until we got supermarket green bags.  Even using those we still managed to accumulate plastic bags, except they were thicker (hurray!).  Except now our supply is dwindling.  We still only put out a bag or so of rubbish a week, but they're not being replenished.  I've got very few bags left now.  This was a bag from Sydney from 17-20 years ago.

The lake is very very low at the moment.

Thursday.  Oh the humidity!!  Juiced twenty lemons for Jim - like 1.8 litres worth!! 

Clouds were a little ominous.  Barely any rain though :(

Had some success with scripting which was cool.  Drinks, pizza, Death in Paradise 10.3.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok.  Went to the doctor late morning.  Had a list of 11 things to talk about (booked a long appointment).  Getting old sux donkey balls.  Just saying.  Decided to drop into Herbert's to have the very last of the TRBC beers (the blood orange sour).  Messaged Tony to see if he'd want to join me, so he did.  Even ran into Fred and family who'd come for lunch which was pretty funny.  Had some tenderloins with mustard sauce which were quite nice, but quite small for $21 and did end up hungry later.

Stu also bought a new toy...

Only cause our old one, which we've been using for like fifteen years since Grant sold it to us, died when the rip cord.. ripped off.. hmmmm.  Frustration with scripting at work.  Mostly cause I'm dumb.  But in the end cause the API I'm working with is crap and to do what I need to do I'd need to make like 3000 api calls.  Hurray.  Think I'll wait to see if powercli updates will be any good.  Kievs and veggies for dinner.  

Then watched Goodbye, Farewell and Amen on Mash.  The only thing I remembered from it was the chicken, so was watching the whole first half in light of that.  It was a pretty good ending to a tv series.  Apparently still the most watched episode of a TV series airing, like, ever.  Even after forty years.  I have all the DVDs from Dad, but I guess I'll probably never watch them now.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got some stuff done, but not nearly enough.  

My first strawberry of the season.  Photo taken in the morning.  I was going to go back in the afternoon and pick it.  I forgot.  By the next day it was GONE.

Stu tried out our new toy.  It's a lot quieter than the petrol one!  And a lot easier to start.  I always hated mowing the lawn as a teenager.  Our yard was huge and we had a heavy clunky lawnmower that always managed to hit me in the face with twigs even with the catcher on.  So I probably haven't mowed any lawn in thirty five years.  I might take it up again though!!

Pretty flowers on the walk to Herbert's

In the evening was a tap takeover at Herbert's.  I was half not wanting to go (would probably end up drinking too much and spending too much).  But went along anyway with Tony, Frank and Karen (J was busy).  The takeover was from Hopsters Co-operative Brewery.  Shared some nachos with Tony to start with and had a couple of beers.

Mitch the "only paid employee" came and sat with us for a bit which was pretty cool, and he told us about the brewery.  It's actually a democratic co-operative and they choose the best beers from their user's home brewed productions and brew them up at scale.  Very cool.

The gang!

After that I went to get more food and that's where the wheels fell off.  I asked for the "kids gems" ($9).  And Dino was like.. oh, we try to save those for the kids.. So I looked around and I'm like, there's literally no kids here.. and he's like, oh it's cause people "take the piss" and order a kids meal between four people.. and so I'm like, well don't worry about it then (I was literally ready to just not order anything at all), but he said he'd give them to me "just this once" (never mind the time I had them at the TRBC night a few weeks back).  Anyway so I sat down again and pretty much just lost it.  Like, I could have ordered a bowl of chips for $5 or a bowl of gems for $9.  I love gems.  I'd much prefer to have gems than chips.  HOW IS THAT A PROBLEM????  I could barely finish the beer I had (and missed out on trying the last one).  I couldn't even face the gems.  Forced myself to eat a few of them.  Tony had the rest.  And then I went home.  Sigh.

Sunday.  Slept mostly okish, except for hurty for a while in the middle.  Still upset/depressed about last night.  The whole drama, combined with a massive increase in food costs (their pea and ham croquettes were $16 the last time they had them in 2022, now they're $20; and the tenderloins I had yesterday were incredibly expensive for their size (for $5 more I could have had a burger and chips and like four or five times the amount of food)) means I probably won't be going back to Herbert's any time soon.  So didn't achieve much all day.  Did some food shopping.  Did a nice roast pork for dinner.  Fat spatter all over the oven though.. eep!

I'm just so over it all at the moment.  I'm almost at the point of giving up on everything.  If I didn't feel the need to travel I could retire now and just stay at home and do my hobbies and never go out and just have a quiet life.  

Monday.  28th.  Cranky cause I was meant to do a time use survey over the weekend.  Except they mailed me on Thursday.  We went to Queensland on Friday.  I never saw the emails til Monday.  When the survey had closed.  With only a "noreply" email address to reply to.  "noreply" email addresses should totally be outlawed. 

The congo tetra that hadn't been eating had died.  I was also trying to fix the outflow to the 620T tank, and found the stone that I'd previously used to pin down the filter wool from flowing away had gotten stuck there.  Just trying to deal with all the crap and suddenly it's 8:40.  Sigh.  Catching up and dealing with crap all day.  Blogged last week.  Cooked some frozen chicken pieces I had in the freezer with some veggies for dinner (cabbage bake and brussels sprouts).  Watched Mazey Day on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.  Another one where they can't keep the damned camera still.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Pissed off at one of my lovely poppy plants being knocked over.  I blame retarded cats.

So I brought the flowers inside.  As you do.

Bits and pieces day, mostly watching security talks. 

Leftovers and random stuff for dinner.  Demon 79 on Black Mirror.  Another "low tech" one.

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok (once I finally got to sleep).  Of note is that I finally finished uploading all my Queensland 2014 photos!!  For those of you reading along at home (hi Mum!) you can go back and see food and hotel photos.  Noone else will ever care, I'm sure.  Took an early mark and went with Neil and Tony to Herbert's to finally try the very last TRBC beer - a blood orange sour.

The sweetie decided we had to have pizzas on a Wednesday since I'd be out Thursday night.. 

Thursday.  Slept mostly ok.  Stu thought it was Friday cause I'd been out drinking the night before and we'd had pizza for dinner.. 

The lake is very low at the moment...

Crap all day.  Drinks, trivia night.  Heaps of trash, like a whole round on exec baby/kid photos, and some super specific stuff that if you worked in the right area you *might* know, or crap like when does a full moon next fall on Halloween (and when did it last).  ie, not a whole heap of actual real trivia.  The exec table won.  Yeup.

Friday.  Slept mostly ok although woke up very early.  Crap all day again. 

The poppies that I brought inside.  I didn't think the unopened buds would open but they did!  But with a delicate peach colour rather than the bright orange they'd normally be.

The neighbour's bamboo is making a break for freedom.. hmmmmmmm!!

This can't be good!!

The sweetie ordered Dumpling Inn for dinner nom nom nom.  The National Anthem on Black Mirror (for some reason Netflix started me at season 6, so back to season 1).  Early night.

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok.  A day of All The Things.  Starting with the broken lemon tree..

Yeah .. 112 of them .. !!  I put 20 of them on the letterbox with a sign that said "free".  Only four left by the end of the day.

Changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au over to CloudLoop.  Did some hosting tidying up and clearing stuff out of Vodien.  

Same plant, two colours...

Leftover Dumpling Inn for dinner.  Watched an episode of Donna Hay's Christmas special from 2022.  Found her house in Avalon in a few minutes.  Although I guess it could always be some family/friend's house.  Edit: or probably just hired - there was a thing in the credits about "Katy Young, Contemporary Homes" or something.  Also.  I wish she'd stop saying "perfect".  !!  Fifteen Million Merits on Black Mirror.

Sunday.  Slept ok.  Another day of All The Things.  And still didn't get nearly enough done. 

Put another 10 lemons out on the letter box.  All gone by the end of the day.  Still have like 70 on the family room table...

Finally posted my dramas with Vodien over August/September.

Also this little bastard nearly dropped on my head.  I heard it go *thonk* right next to me as it fell down from the roof!

Hot today.  Like 31.  Gross.

Dear Vodien, 

Here's a bowl of petunias:

Tuesday 27.8.24.

I went to update my blog because I realised I'd forgotten to add a photo from last week's entry. Loaded the blog interface but got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

Loaded terminal through cPanel. Which luckily worked (no CageFS errors this time). Ran my test perl script which connects to SQL and got this:

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
DBI connect('db:localhost','<user>',...) failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) at common.pl line 18.
Cannot connect: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2)

In phpMyAdmin in cPanel I got:

mysqli_sql_exception: Access denied for user '<user>'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

Fricken great. Just what I need. Feeling like I should be buying a bowl of petunias for Vodien.

Wednesday 28.8.24.

I remembered that I'd had the phpMyAdmin error before, and the fix was to just reset the cPanel password. So I did that. Great, phpMyAdmin loads.

Except.

My MySQL database had been reverted to a point in time from last October!!

!!!!

AGAIN!!

Yeah so the exact same problem as in June where they reverted it back to the same spot in October. In June, after a week or two of yelling at them, they restored it.

So of course I yelled at them.

I didn't send them a photo of a bowl of petunias. I should have.

Now before you ask, yes I do have recent backups of my database, having learnt my lesson from last time, but that's not the damned point. In fact I'd taken a backup the Sunday before, so I was only missing one entry from my blog. But as it turned out, having my own backup was not going to help. But we'll get to that later.

Thursday 29.8.24

Vodien ticket escalated (supposedly) to the sysadmins.

Friday 30.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Saturday 31.8.24.

Still no response from Vodien about the database restore.

Sunday 1.9.24.

Still no response from Vodien - three days now. Started a new ticket. Which they promptly closed.

I changed the permissions on mt-comments.cgi so noone could post any comments. They would either fail because the entries don't exist, or break the site with a republish. And I didn't want more mess to clean up.

Monday 2.9.24.

Vodien provided a restore of the database in an .sql file and said here you go. But it was the database at the "bad" restore point from October last year - so it didn't have any recent data in it.

Tuesday 3.9.24.

One week in.

No progress getting Vodien to restore the correct database for me.

Wednesday 4.9.24.

Vodien basically keep telling me I have to restore my database myself. Which I was considering doing, assuming I actually had the right data. I did end up getting a copy that was taken a few days before they broke it, but I decided to keep pushing for the whole thing.

Then I went to my blog interface to check it and got

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@<domain> to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

And logging into the terminal in cPanel I got

cagefs_enter: Error entering cagefs jail: Unable to mount /var/cagefs/35/<user>/home2 -> /usr/share/cagefs-skeleton/home: Too many levels of symbolic links.

So either they were trying to fix it or just making it worse.

Thursday 5.9.24.

Slept like crap. Stressing about my website. At least the cagefs file system on my website was working again in the morning. But the database is still bad.

Friday-Sunday.

Long weekend in Port Macquarie.

Sunday 8.9.24.

Checked my mail when we were near home. I shouldn't have, because the lack of useful response was just making me more and more depressed.

Monday 9.9.24.

While not getting to sleep last night I wondered if maybe there were two database servers on the server. It always used to be MySQL, but the restore they did recently (and I think I might have noticed this previously) was from Maria DB. Same only different. My latest theory is there's actually the old MySQL database server still on the host, and for whatever reason the pointers for Perl and phpMyAdmin have been pointed back at it (again). I mentioned this to them, but their only response was "what's the URL of your blog entry manager?". Yeah right like I'm going to let you into that. So I gave them a command line command that they could use to query my address book database, which has also been impacted by this whole drama. That was in the morning. No response by evening.

Tuesday 10.9.24.

Two weeks in.

No response from Vodien. Eventually they responded with something that didn't make sense, so yelled at them again to put this through to a senior sysadmin.

As an aside: if you Google "Vodien is trash" (I literally did this) you'll get links to review pages that have page after page of people ranting about how utterly trash Vodien is. One star reviews all the way.

Wednesday 11.9.24.

Awake from after 3. Vodien sent me a database restore. But restored from 19 August which was before my last backup anyway.

Tried to reload my blog index, but I got:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator at webmaster@kazza.ciapics.cia.com.au to inform them of the time this error occurred, and the actions you performed just before this error.
More information about this error may be available in the server error log.
Additionally, a 500 Internal Server Error error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

Turns out they've blatted all my cgi scripts permissions to 644 instead of 755 or 744. Every single one of them.

WTF?? I mean seriously, WTF???

So now what. Do I take their database, restore it, and hope they don't flip over to the other database at some random point (which I couldn't even find out from them if that's what had happened). Or do I just give up and take my clean backup to a new hosting company. Ok I'd pretty much made up my mind I was going to move. They've broken my site multiple times in the past few years, and it always takes days or weeks of yelling to get it resolved. I'm sick of it.

Thursday 12.9.24.

Apparently they've restored a database again.

Friday 13.9.24.

Tried opening my blog interface and got this:

Got an error: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (111)

Yet my Address Book scripts still work. Ok, gave it some time and it came back. But database was still from October 2023.

Saturday 14.9.24.

Resolved myself to spending my entire weekend sorting out this mess.

Step one: find a new hosting company.

Back in 2020 I tried VentraIP. It looked to have everything I wanted and was a good price. I talked to them online before I joined and said I had a Perl/MySQL setup and they said that was fine. But when I went to get it going I found they didn't have the DBD::MySQL perl module and my blog wouldn't work. So that was a complete waste of time. So I wasn't going to try them again.

Had a look on https://www.productreview.com.au/ and someone recommended CloudLoop and they had excellent reviews. So had a look. $10/month for a basic plan which would cover what I needed. They didn't have an online chat, so I emailed them asking about Perl/MySQL. This was fairly early on a Saturday morning. They responded in MINUTES! I was impressed. So I joined up. Pro-rata til the end of the month it was only around $5, so even if it didn't work out I wouldn't lose much.

After the account was activated a short time later, I logged into cPanel only to find they don't have Terminal enabled. Fricken great. So set myself up an SSH private key to try and use ssh. But Internode blocks ssh doesn't it. Fricken fricken. So tried to log into Internode, but their MFA is trash and I had to log off/on a few times before I could finally get in. Also, Stu's phone number is out of date, but we can't update it because:

Your contact details cannot be changed at this time
Unfortunately, your contact details cannot be viewed or changed online at this time. Please contact us to update your details. We apologise for any inconvenience.

Thanks Internode, sorry iinet, sorry TPG.

Anyways, eventually got in and turned off the firewall, now to wait and see if it will work.

In the meantime I emailed support about Terminal in cPanel. Again they responded in minutes. They said it was not available for security reasons, but they enabled ssh access and I had to whitelist my IP address in the firewall. Which I couldn't actually find.
But.
Terminal now showed up in cPanel! Great! That's really all I need anyway. Let's do this thing!
(I think they may have mixed up ssh/cpanel terminal - so ssh is disabled which is fair enough, but the terminal in cpanel had been enabled which is all I needed anyway).

So first step is to make sure Perl will work with MySQL. I imported my address book database (it's only tiny) and tried out one of my scripts.

Can't locate CGI.pm in @INC (you may need to install the CGI module) (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib64/perl5 /usr/local/share/perl5 /usr/lib64/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl /usr/lib64/perl5 /usr/share/perl5) at quickie.cgi line 3.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at quickie.cgi line 3.

Turns out CGI.pm hasn't been around since Perl 5.22. Vodien has 5.16. CloudLoop has 5.26.

So I get CGI.pm from CPAN. Add a line to my script to use lib and the path of the file. Works!

Next up my blog script (mt-check to start with). It wanted Util.pm so copied that up as well.

But then it wanted FCGI.pm. Got that too, but this time I got this error:

Can't locate loadable object for module FCGI in @INC

Which I think means it needs to be properly installed/compiled for binaries, which I can't do. hmmmmm

Ok so then ran mt-check on the web. It actually ran! It complained about a bunch of modules, but then it complains on the old site as well. It loaded enough that I might be able to work with it.

So next I need to get my database imported. I still didn't have the most current database export from Vodien (their exports are a different format to mine), so I used my own backup. But I was running into all sorts of problems. phpMyAdmin wouldn't import the file, giving sql errors when importing the "blob" data. And the file is 50MB so trying to edit it and cut it down to just do individual tables was proving problematic. Now I didn't have these problems when I tried VentraIP a few years back, so I'm guessing there must be some versioning problems or something?? But I was getting super frustrated with it. I did have a go at using Vodien's sql file and that one did import, albeit with old data.

Sunday 15.9.24.

So with some actual blog data in the database I next had to get an eighteen year old release of Movable Type working on a modern server. Yes yes I know I should update to something else. But newer versions of Movable Type are $499USD. PER YEAR. And I've seen the dramas people have moving to WordPress. Stu has threatened to spend his retirement moving it to a more modern platform heh. But in the meantime, I just want my blog to work.

So first up I try running mt.cgi on the command line to see what sort of errors I'd get.

[user@server MT-5.2.2]$ perl mt.cgi
Possible precedence issue with control flow operator at lib/MT/App.pm line 1821.
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Got an error: Unescaped left brace in regex is illegal here in regex; marked by <-- HERE in m/{{ <-- HERE support}}/?/

Yeah so now you need to escape {} characters in regex strings. Think I fixed that.

So then did a test post and that actually worked!! (using a hosts file entry on my computer so I could test it out on CloudLoop before changing DNS anywhere)

Well that was good enough for me to commit to moving the site across.

Tarballed my directory up on Vodien. ~2.5GB. !! Downloaded it to my computer, extracted it, saved into a number of smaller zip files, uploaded them one at a time, extracted them. Uploading large files must be a bit upsetting for Internode, and I kept getting dumped out of FTP because our IP address kept changing. Have I ever mentioned how trash Internode has become since they got bought out by iinet then TPG? Also I have a 5GB size limit on CloudLoop. Anyways, got there in the end.

Now all that's left is to get a proper copy of my database from Vodien. They did have a restore file taken on the morning of 26 August - the morning after my last blog post. But the files were owned by root and I had no read access. After a few chats/emails back and forth I realised there were actually two copies of the files, one in the root and one in my website. So got them. And they were perfect! Well, they had my latest data in them anyway.

Right, so tried to use phpMyAdmin to import it, but got errors again (didn't record what). But then I found this command

mysql -u database_username -p database_name < file.sql
from this site https://support.hostinger.com/en/articles/4536306-how-to-import-a-database-over-ssh
And that worked perfectly.

But it was at this point I realised that the export sql file was full of funky characters. Somewhere along the line "special characters" from foreign languages lost encoding and were broken. Tried doing search/replaces in vi, but it didn't want to play. So put that aside for now.

Tested posting some blog entries and they worked, so hopefully the database is working well enough.

But I was getting SSL certificate errors - saying it was self signed. I changed the DNS A record in Vodien and waited for it to change over, but I was still getting errors on https://www.sslshopper.com/ssl-checker.html#hostname=kazza.id.au

Emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a response in minutes. And then sslhopper was picking the certificate up properly. Not sure if they did anything or not, but I was blown away by the responsiveness and usefulness of CloudLoop support. It's like a breath of fresh air after dealing with the faceless Vodien.

Monday 16.9.24.

Before all these dramas started I'd already been meaning to fix up my blogs properly. I'd fixed the style sheet on my main blog to be hardcoded to https, but I hadn't published it to everywhere, comments were still broken on https, and I wanted to get all my holidays blogs using a consistent design. I also wanted to replace the defunct Google Analytics scripts with the new ones. So after dinner I spent ages working on my holiday blog templates - fixing everything so it all works in https, fixing style sheet locations etc. I picked the Americas 2023 blog (the last one I did) and made sure everything worked properly, then made a Theme from it.

Tuesday 17.9.24.

Working through all my holiday blogs using the updated theme/design. The special characters in my Turkey blog were proving problematic :( Some of the characters I can do a search/replace in the blog interface and it'll go through and change them all. While this works for some characters (eg umlauts) it wouldn't work for some of the characters in the Turkish language :( I also found and fixed a time zone setting in my blog that has been annoying me for twenty years haha.

Wednesday/Thursday/Friday

Work on fixing holiday blogs.

Saturday 21.9.24.

Finished fixing up my holiday blogs (including the Australian Holidays blog which has a slightly different config to it, although have since found a couple of problems I still need to fix).

So then it was onto my behemoth of a main blog. There's over five thousand entries in it. The last time I tried to publish after design update it took over a day. Look I even took a screen shot! 

So I was dreading the pain it was going to cause. I'd taken notes during the fixing of my holiday blogs design, so it was pretty quick to repeat the changes in the main blog. But before I committed, I wanted to test the design with a test post to make sure it picked up everything ok.

Took a while and then BAM..

500
Internal Server Error
An internal server error has occurred.

The good news is the entry did actually post. Although not properly, and it was intermittent. Like it'd mostly update the entry page, but then not the archives page etc. So thinking there might be resource limits. I didn't see any real spikes/errors in the cPanel Resource Usage thingie though.

I tried clearing out the entire activity log. This cleared nearly 9MB out of the database. But it didn't help. I tried a few other Movable Type config options as well with no luck.

So I emailed CloudLoop support again. Once again I got a super quick response. And a stack trace. And they looked while trying to reproduce the problem themselves. This was all well and truly above and beyond the level of support I would have expected. I was astounded. But a definite possibility was the Assets. Since Movable Type 4, whenever you upload an image it would save it to the database as an asset. This annoyed me when it first started because of all the extra clutter, but I did like it simply because it'd read the image and put height/width info into the html. But after sixteen years, I had 14000 assets. !! So I deleted them all!! (well, firstly I tested what would happen if you did. I found it would delete the asset and the image itself, but it left the html alone. So all I needed to do was restore the images once I'd deleted the assets, and all would be well).

Then I did a test post.

It published.

In SECONDS.

!!!!

After a bit more testing of posting and commenting I was ready to release the hounds. I republished the entire site. I did it in chunks, but it was all done in under ten minutes. And search results are returned super quickly too now. My blog hasn't been this fast in YEARS!!!

The only real remaining issue now is the foreign characters. I download the mt-entry table (16MB) and did some search/replaces and was able to fix a lot of it. But there's some characters that I just can't publish because it won't talk to the database. There might be a way to fix it. Something about telling perl to talk to MySQL with the right version of utf-8. But I'm too dumb for that sort of thing. Replaced a good chunk of the bad characters. Almost accidentally blatted the .bak table because I forgot to change the table name in the insert into lines (yay for it not importing duplicate entries). Had to redo the whole thing again because I didn't escape ' and " characters. Then republished again. Nine minutes, fifty seconds. I should probably republish all my holiday blogs too.

Sunday 22.9.24.

Spent most of the afternoon blogging entries from the past month.

Monday 23.9.24.

Wrote up this post so far.

I still haven't changed my mail or DNS configs over yet. Or the websites for my subdomains. I'll do that first before I post this.

I haven't decided what I'll do with johnson.id.au or trainman.id.au. I'd actually prefer to keep trainman where it is, because then I'd be able to email David again (currently using my account as an SMTP server, which intercepts mail for trainman.id.au and delivers it to me instead of David).

I also need to figure out how to backup my database properly. I'll have to do some testing of exporting/importing the data on the same version. Otherwise I'm going to need to figure out a better way to backup the blob data in the database. If I hadn't been able to get the Maria DB dump from Vodien I would have been a bit stuck as I wasn't able to properly import my own database backup, which is quite upsetting.

Tuesday 24.9.24.

Started going through and documenting everything in my Vodien cPanel setup. Found a place for mail forwarding, so tried setting trainman.id.au to an external MX record to see what would happen if I sent mail there from my account. It hasn't bounced back to me, so maybe it did deliver to David. This is good to know if I end up moving trainman.id.au to CloudLoop. Also found another backup section which lets you download MySQL databases. This has the same format as what Vodien sent to me. Interestingly the Vodien export is full of trash characters, while the CloudLoop export is fine. This is good news. Dropped my TTLs on mail to 300. Setup my mail accounts on CloudLoop. Tried them out in Eudora. TLS errors to start with, but easily fixed by setting TLS to Required, Alternate Port in Eudora. So changed the DNS for mail.kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. So inbound mail all working. Had a look at migrating ciapics over. But it's half a gig. And I only have five on CloudLoop. Considering leaving it there, but I really want to take all of kazza.id.au off Vodien. Next up - SMTP. Got it to auth and send ok, but now to battle with the SPF record. Adding the IP address of my host didn't help. Or adding relay.mailchannels.net. hmm. On a lighter note, cPanel and DNS are actually integrated on CloudLoop which is nice.

Wednesday 25.9.24.

Tested mail again and my SPF record has propagated around so that's nice - can send to gmail now. Although this is all likely to be moot once I switch the nameservers across and use CloudLoops DNS which already has all this stuff. While clearing stuff out of Vodien I discovered that at some point they'd actually fixed the ownership of the db restores. Lolz.

Friday 27.9.24.

Setup johnson.id.au as a domain on CloudLoop.  Copied over the content (there's like, one page).  Then changed the nameservers from Vodien to CloudLoop.  Tested email once DNS propagated.

Saturday 2.11.24.

Been on CloudLoop for like six or seven weeks now. No issues. Today I changed the nameservers for kazza.id.au to point at CloudLoop. Pointed a few A names of my photo subdomains back at Vodien. They have a lot more storage so keeping my photos sites there.

Sunday 3.11.24.

Cleaned out most of kazza.id.au off Vodien, including my blog database. Left an entry in my addressbook database and make sure the scripts were working to access it. So I'll be able to tell when Vodien break it again.

In conclusion.

I knew as soon as Vodien broke my database AGAIN for the second time in three months that I was going to have to finally move my blog. This was reinforced over the next few weeks by being impossible to get anyone who actually cared or had the capability to look at the issue and fix it. No matter how much pleading and yelling I did I just couldn't get anywhere. It made me seriously depressed for weeks. I was also upset that the backups of the database I'd been dutifully taking weren't necessarily going to work properly.

On the flip side, the support and responsiveness of CloudLoop (Karthick) was utterly outstanding. They definitely deserve their five star reviews.

In the end my blog is a lot happier. The holiday sites are consistent in design and everything works properly in HTTPS. The culling of the assets out of the database means my entries publish in seconds. Every new year I'll clear out the previous year's assets to keep it trimmed down.

Let's hope I don't have to write another one of these posts any time soon...

Sunday.  29th.  Backdating.  Leftover lasagna with salad for dinner.  Mash, then I watched Inside Out 2.  I think I actually liked it better than the original.  

Monday.  Restless legs so took me ages to get to sleep.  Woke up at 5:30.  Overwhelmed with All The Things that need doing.  I don't have time to go to work.  Then of course work was crazy busy and I couldn't leave early like I wanted to.  Did some weeding after work but no time for music :(  Leftovers for dinner.  Life is all too hard.  But I did do a heap of catchup blogging - seven entries!!

A four and a five!!!

Tuesday.  1st of October.  Ok sleep I think  More migrations at work.  Met up with Luc who was in town again.  Had a couple of drinks at Hippo, then dinner at Akiba.

Sex panther on the left (I tried a sip of this and really liked it), and penicillin on the right

PB&J on Rye

Akiba

Balmain bug bun, pickled baby gem, creamy ponzu 

Kingfish, coconut, nam jim, coriander

Sweet and sticky squid, lime, crispy Thai basil, chilli, mint

Wednesday.  Slept mostly ok.  OMFG I FINISHED THE MIGRATIONS!!!  Took an early mark but didn't even have a celebratory drink hehe.  Leftover lasagna for dinner.  Mum photo picking.  Went to wash my hair, only to find I'd bought the wrong bottle of Head and Shoulders AGAIN!!  OMFG their packaging sucks donkey balls.  

Thursday.  Mostly ok sleep.  Did some planning for some post-migration cleanup work.  Quiet drinks.  Made pizzas.

Friday.  Awake some time before 3 til some time after 5.  Sigh.  Did the cleanup work I'd been planning.  Kievs for dinner.  David Graf was in Mash haha.  Amazing Race and early night.

Saturday.  Somewhat restless sleep but better than Thursday night.  A day of doing All The Things.  I've been scanning the filing cabinet on weekends (when the sun is out to power my old computer).  Decided I didn't need to scan development application notices.  But it was funny to go look at them on Google Maps/Street view now they're done.   So many knock-down-rebuilds!!  Chong Co delivery for dinner.  "Larry" Fishburne in Mash haha.  Then watched Golden Kamuy, which Stu said is like 6/300 of the manga.  hmmm.

Sunday.  Mostly ok sleep I guess?  Woke up at 5:25.  Oh wait, that's 6:25.  Cool I guess.  Another busy day of All The Things.  We went out and bought a new printer.  I didn't want to get HP because, subscription trash (didn't do any research to see if there were any that didn't have it, but I refuse to support companies doing subscription trash).  And didn't want to get Brother because our last one had the "known bug" with the fuser slipping and blurring prints (not to mention the paper jams) after only 15000 prints.  So we're trying Oki.  LED rather than Laser.  See how it goes.  Then did some food shopping.  It didn't feel like a Sunday so forgot to backup phone/do music/blog.  Whoops.  Watched a bit of a YouTube video on The Easy Life in Kamusari.  Then I watched Salt.  Bit of Hollywood fluff.  And how cute is Liev Schreiber?!?

Back in the early days of blogging there all sorts of widgets you could post on your blog.

My favourite was the Weather Pixie.  I didn't think her clothing choices were all that practical, as she was wearing pretty skimpy outfits when it was quite cold.

Here were some examples that were on my blog.

Because I'm a weirdly obsessive person, for a while I was compiling a spreadsheet showing which outfit she was in for a given combination of temperature and humidity.  I found it recently while filing crap in my in tray.  It was mostly in Sydney but in Canberra for a while as well.

(humidity y axis and temperature x axis)

I miss the Weather Pixie.  Maybe I should learn how to code pngs and read weather apis and make my own...  yeah.. in my copious free time..

Sunday.  15th.  Actually blogging on time for a change.  Overdone roast beef for dinner.

Monday.  16th.  Slept okish I think. More migrations at work. Working on blog after dinner.

Tuesday.  Slept okish. Rinse and repeat really. Mash had Patrick Swayze! Updating holiday blogs with new styles and fixing everything.

Wednesday.  I dunno.  Much the same really.  Work and fixing my blog.

First purple poppy!!!

Thursday.  Rinse and repeat really.   Decent drinks (thought it was going to be just us but another group came up as well).  Watched the first episode of Amazing Race Season ..? 6..? I dunno but it's another "Celebrity Edition" race, with mostly peeps I've never heard of.

Friday.  Woke up at 4am never got back to sleep hurrah. Another busy day.  Fake kievs for dinner (still Inghams, but not the proper sort, Coles didn't have them).  Into season 10 of Mash.  Pretty sure I watched a movie but can't remember what.  Maybe it'll come back to me.

Saturday. Logged onto work to start a big batch of migrations, that will likely take all weekend. Finished fixing up my Australian Holiday blogs. Then it was onto my main blog.  I asked the sweetie if he'd cook dinner.  So we had Dumpling Inn delivered.  Then watched South Solitary.  Been there!  Well, to Cape Otway Lighthouse where they filmed the interiors anyway.

Sunday. Bit of a restless nights' sleep but mostly ok. Did some tidying up on my blog, but have some other things I want to tidy up too. Read through all of John Heald's Smoke on the Water series on the Carnival Splendor fire. Really just procrastinating doing the hard work of blogging the past month.  Notepad in Windoze 11 is trash. I'll be editing a large file, go to another window, come back to notepad, and it dumps me right at the bottom of the file, not where i had the cursor.  Stoopid.  Then most of the afternoon after food shopping doing catchup blogging.  Including having to redo last week's because I accidentally hit control-v instead of control-c while it was publishing.  Watched Wonka (2023).  It had hints of music from the 70s movie.  With Rowan Atkinson (one scene) and Hugh Grant (haven't seen him yet).  Slugworth, Fickelgruber and Prodnose.  Sounds like something out of Fantastic Mr Fox.  Anyone would think it was by the same author or something heh.  OMFG Hugh Grant as the Oompa Loompa.  And he sings a variant of the song!! hahahaha.  That'll do for now.

I've updated the design of this blog to swap out the Google Analytics code for the new stuff, fixed the path to the files, and fixed all the scripts and style sheets to https (hard coded).

So just doing a test post to see if it .. works.. before republishing the entire site (which could take all weekend..).

Oh that reminds me, I need to take tags out of the published pages..  Done.. I think..  

I also cleared the activity log - cleared nearly 9MB!  Down from 56.4MB to 47.8MB

And then in a very long battle with timeouts.. I deleted all the Assets.  

!!!

And now things post super quickly..!!

Sigh I just blatted this entry.  Let's start again shall we..

Monday.  9th.  Backdated.  Long story.  

Took forever to get to sleep. Stressing about my database. So a crappy nights' sleep. Then another busy day at work. I was going to try and sneak off a few hours early to catch up with crap but just too busy. Went to Chris's and got some chicken and cooked up some Chicken Tonight, but it was a bit.. gelatinous.. Not bad, just not super epic awesome. Did some culling of Tassie hotel photos. Not that I can post them any time soon.

All the pink and purple crap this week!!

Tuesday. Awake from some time before two til after three. Hurray. Depressed about hosting. Depressed about my health. Everything is awful. Although we did do a prod cutover and noone's screamed yet. Cooked up some mince/pasta for dinner. 

Wednesday. Awake from after 3. Never got back to sleep. Busy day migrating. Got results of my sleep study. Yeah a bit of sleep apnea. Hurray. Depressed and overwhelmed at everything.

Thursday.  Woke up. Wondered what the time was. Estimated about 5:30. Looked at my phone. 5:29. Cool. Busy day of migrations. Nice drinks but only a couple of other people. Made pizzas for dinner.

Then watched Mean Girls. Aww man I don't miss high school one little bit.

Friday the 13th. Slept mostly ok. Feeling overwhelmed at life. Today was ten years ago that we left for our Queensland trip. But I can't post it because my database is still broken. Two and a half weeks later. So this weekend instead of catching up on everything, I have to find a new hosting company for my blog. Because even if Vodien fixed it this time, they'll still break it again in the near future and I don't have the mental capacity to deal with their BS. I'll be putting one star reviews wherever I can find places to do it. Leftovers for dinner, Mash, then I watched TRON, which I think I might have seen once when I was a kid.

Saturday. Slept mostly ok. Did some house stuff then went looking for new hosting.  Went out for lunch and shopping.  Hungry Cracks are doing a parmi burger.  It was a sloppy mess.

The flowers at Jamo were pretty

Saw this in Coles.  I have a mandolin.  It's awesome. But it doesn't have a gaurd.  So I have to be EXTREMELY careful using it.  Yes I have cut myself on it.  No I wasn't drinking.  But I was distracted talking to people.  So it might be kinda nice to have another one for when my current one gets too blunt to use...

Leftover pasta and salad for dinner, Mash, then I watched Tron: Legacy. I didn't think I'd ever seen it, but then where they go into Jeff Bridges' fancy house I was like, that seems familiar.  Weirdly Disney kept changing the aspect ratio.  In some places it'd be widescreen, but others it was much closer to 4:3.  Weird. Oh and there we go - I have seen it.  Yay for dementia and not remembering anything.

Sunday. Spent much of the day trying to fix my blog. Had leftover raclette from Chris on toast for lunch.

Then.. OMFG TRBC is closing down!!!!!! Drank one of the last of three we have in the house. Stu is drinking one of the others. The other is a dark lager so Stu will drink that. I'm half tempted to do a sneaky trip down for one last visit. But aint noone got time for that.

Roast beef for dinner but overdid it :( (1.75 kg in 1.5 hours).  Stu liked it though. And I guess it will do well as leftovers.  Then watched the 2018 version of Freaky Friday.  Wait, what, it's a muscial?  Lolz.  Only 3.8 on IMDB too heh.  I think there's one more version I still need to see.

I wanted to have a hanami party this year.  I messaged Nat and Andrew ages ago but they never got back to me.  Then I was going to invite Chris and Glenda (they're going to Japan in October).  But with all the stress and drama going on, I just didn't feel up to it.  You know I'm not doing well if I pass up an opportunity to have peeps over for a little party ...