511 – eBooks

The past week has been characterized by two, massive technical failures – the eSLib site I’m reworking and my highly influential, world-renowned, life-altering blog – and trying to get them sorted out.

For some completely unknown (to anyone) reason, the eSLib site (which I carved out all day Sunday October 3 to migrate and test thinking it might take me the day, at most, but would be officially up on Monday) stopped permitting uploads.  Lame. I spent the next 2 hours changing passwords, testing files, clearing out the caches on my assorted browsers (and on my laptop – command line prompts, baby!)  and whatever else I could think of all to no avail. I’ve worked on websites, intranets, blogs, all sorts of CMS (content management systems) from the front-end to the back-end and everywhere  in between (yes I did teach myself a bit of PHP, HTML and MySQL) and I’ve never had an issue like this.

I ended up repeating this process several times over until I just had enough. I contacted Dr. Qin (the PI on the eScience project) who was understanding but, understandably, wasn’t too happy, who in turn contacted the iSchool Systems Administrators. The next 3 days we all banged our heads against the wall, computers and whatever else was within distance. Nothing. Then finally Lisa Pawlewicz, Systems Administrator extraordinaire, rewrote the php.ini file and everything worked. I really have to hand it to her as she really tried everything and was terrific about helping out. So much time was lost/spent on trying to fix the thing but now it’s finally up.

As if on cue, as soon as the site gets fixed, my blog goes kerplunk. I’ll spare you the details, but my awesome interview with Thomas Mann of the Library of Congress would not load. No not the WordPress entry the ACTUAL interview. I cut and pasted and created new entries (literally, embarrassingly) all day long and I could not post more than the first paragraph. Every time I tried, I got the dreaded 404 page. I beat my head against the wall again, upgraded my hosting, uninstalled plug-ins one by one, troubleshot everywhere I could, read forums and nothing worked. It still isn’t solved. I eventually uploaded the content via the SQL table, but even there I couldn’t add Categories or Tags. Strange.

What I find to be the worst thing is the massive loss of time. Hate it. Especially with so many bigger things to work on (umm classes?).

So I say all this to say…eBooks? We’ve been talking about it off and on and would I hate to be at the end of some gripping novel only to have the thing fail on me. I’ll get one sooner or later, but outside of fire or flood, a book isn’t going anywhere fast.

And what pray tell does this image have to do with anything I’ve written about? I went to the Flickr Commons (a great place for stock photos with varying levels of copyright/ownership per Creative Commons), typed  ‘crazy’ into the search box and this was the first image that came up. In an odd way it’s pretty fitting as I probably would have driven myself nuts looking for an image that was, well, of a person looking like they had driven themselves nuts.