This weekend was spent mostly in-front of the computer (again). The host provider for our website emailed me last Thursday – saying that they have just improved their service and moved my home directory into another server. They said not to worry – the effect to me would me very minimal.
Minimal my a…, I’ve spent all weekend trying to fix all the broken symbolic links in our Gallery site and just about every site I have were affected. I asked for a shell access to make fixing a bit easier and they give me the crap (pardon my French) – that it’s a security risk. If there’s anything, it made me become inventive with FTP and their so called web-based file manager. (I discovered it is a lot easier to move directories around, using the cut-n-paste feature CuteFTP, a feature that FileZilla do not have.).
Lesson Learned : If you do not have a shell account for your Web Hosting Service – avoid symbolic links. This is my number one source of grief, most of my support calls are to clear broken links which sometimes need a super user id to fix.
My frustration was compounded when I decided to tweak my WordPress site to support Lightbox2. I was doing all my work using FireFox because it has great debugging adds-on. All is going well and I was so pleased with myself until I tried opening a page using Internet Explorer. I got the error message box saying – “Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site …. Operation aborted”. On pressing OK, it goes to a “The page cannot be displayed” page. It took me hours and several reboots to deduce that it was the combination of Lightbox2 and Flash (SWF Players) that was causing the error. So after all the work I did to get Lightbox working – I deactivated it – and waited – WAIT FOR EVERYONE TO STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER!!!!. Try Googling this error and you will see all the frustrations of Web writers about this IE bug.
Nothing would beat what surprised me last Friday night though – I got a traffic fine for ‘Stopping on a Mailzone’. I drive my daughter to the train station regularly and there is a post office where I drop her off. There are a lot of traffic in the area and if 3 cars stop in front of you – you can’t help but be on the mailzone. Usually the cars in front of you will be setting down passengers and you get held up long enough that passengers could quickly get off and be done with it. This action will now cost me $79. At first I felt like contesting it, as the time I was reported to have been sighted doing this is 8:00am – the post office don’t even open until 9:00am. But the council knows that most people would just pay the fine, to contest it would mean court fees and a day of lost work when you attend the hearing. It will end up costing you more.
It’s a blatant revenue generation exercise. I can understand if it was a Fire Hydrant, an Ambulance or Police Parking Zone – these zones need to be free all the time as emergency can happen any time. This is a MailZone!, the mail van needs the area at most twice a day – one in the morning and in the afternoon. It’s not as if I’ve parked in the zone. The council is printing money just issuing this kind of ticket.
That’s my rant for the week.
as i always say… sh*t happens and sometimes it just happens to you. 🙁
You got that right. Nevertheless, have a nice week 🙂
kaya ako i walk with the kids, i hate driving 🙂