Dispatches from Blogblivion

I managed to get a solid experiment in today to get an idea whether Henry reacts to artificial colors, which was the most logical reason he’d react to Kool-Aid and, ultimately, Country Time.  This would apparently be far from unheard of.

There is a Kool-Aid flavor, which happens to be an especially good one, that has no color at all.  They use that as a marketing coolness factor.  Maybe there are other clear flavors, but the one we’ve had is kiwi watermelon, and we had another packet.  I decided to make that the next one I made and to give the baby some, after reading the ingredients.

Nothing.

No.  Reaction.  Period.

If anything, he’s having an unusually calm day, except the runny nose in the morning from the diesel trains and/or honeysuckle or other growing things and/or wood smoke last night and/or dust.  He barely even got itchy as he tends to when he was ready to sleep again.  The itch sensation can cross and be confused with pain or unhappiness/discomfort, so he’ll itch, for instance, in response to tooth pain, gas pain, or emotional distress.

All he has had today has been a couple Club crackers, a piece of toast, and the clear Kool-Aid.  He’s napping at the time I’d have offered him more to eat.

He drank a large quantity, too.  When he steals Kool-Aid from the sisters, it can be little more than a sip to set him off, usually pretty quickly.  It’s gotten to where we infer he’s gotten it by his reaction.  I managed to keep theirs completely away from him, as they had the tail end of berry flavored blue Kool-Aid.

In a way, it’s onerous knowing that he reacts to at least two or three colors, but it’s also a relief to know and to be able to screen accordingly.

Guess I’ll have to figure out what else to post.

I played with Expression Engine to WordPress migration last night.  It’s complicated.  You have to take the RSS feed, save it in a text file, import that into WordPress, and then do some other stuff if you want the comments.

It doesn’t port unpublished posts, like some redacted ones from earlier this year.  That’s fine.

The default is only 10 in the RSS.  We have, after this post, 2251.  Instead of 2249, Control Panel said we had 2030, so I used that number.  If you removed the limit from the RSS template, you get 100.  If you specify 2030, you get that, and actually the wait wasn’t that long.

A set that large hung at 349 when importing.  That means either finding a way to specify a range in an RSS template, or systematically grabbing a smaller number and then deleting posts and then grabbing the next so many, and so forth.

No pictures came through.  That may be a setting on the RSS template, allowing pictures to show in the feed.  Never had reason to look at that.

We do full feeds, but presumably partial feeds wouldn’t work for this.

Multiple categories per post aren’t handled gracefully, turning into one long string and creating a new category like “kids pictures tv” in WordPress.  Not sure there’s a way around it, but I think it might be wise to create matching categories in WP ahead of time either way.  Might be possible to do a series of queries or replaces or something.  Or just change every imported post to one category.

Apart from whatever URL customization is needed to make them match the old format, if desired, it appears to be a good idea to do the URL format setting to make them “pretty” before the import.

A small number of posts during the import, say one of every 30, claimed to have been imported previously.  I thought it was a URL building problem with duplication, but I had it at the default where they end in numbers, so it may have been the way it identified each post during import.

I’m still intrigued and would like to know just what it takes, but it may be that the better part of valor is to archive the old blog, even if it means hacking .htaccess to redirect permalinks, and starting with a fresh one.  We’d also considered that option.

To which I have come to dislike posting here because I can’t use an offline client directly.  Definitely time for a change.

So I spent $28 we don’t have for gas to go meet with a recruiter for 15 minutes yesterday, throwing in a stop for Sadie’s birth certificate on the way.  It was kind of an obligatory thing they do because they promise their client companies that they have personally met and screened the prospects.  It mainly consisted of a get to know you slightly better and discuss what want to do.  Which, as I told him, is part of my problem, but the obvious option of project management sounds good to me.  He could get me DBA (database administrator) work with SQL Server if I were more qualified.  That’s a case of probably could, but wouldn’t be what they really want.  Trouble with me is my tremulous “probably could” is probably more capable than half the people who assertively put themselves forth as such.

I have no idea whether he’ll really come up with anything for me, and it’s got to be just one basket.  Today I need to start invoking my plan weeks in the brewing for which now it may be too late, which includes begging for work here and to a mailing list of contacts*, begging for help with the gas & electric bill, and holding a fundraising CotC most of which would also go to the gas & electric so it doesn’t get turned off before I have more income.  All of this was supposed to go hand in hand and happen a while ago, though originally I hadn’t thought of having people send money straight to the utility and the emphasis was one fundraising CotC and hello, need work.

Today I also might want to run to storage for a while.  It’s paid through the 16th, so there are 3 more days on which I can go inventory it and remove stuff before it gets overlocked pending being able to pay for it.  Or clean it out completely and put the stuff somewhere else pending sale of whatever can and should be sold.

Anyway, if the recruiter gets me work, I can expect it to pay in the 60-100k range, sounds like most likely around 80k.  I’ll believe it when I see it, but it’d be nice to be in that kind of turnaround territory.

* I tend to assume most people already know my situation – needing work, if not the about to be homeless part – but recently one of the former colleagues I am closest to, to the point of being in the group of friends I get together with periodically, chastised me because he had no idea.  So apparently I have to advertise heavily.

Have to go meet a recruiter today.  The kids are crazy.

Sadie woke crying in wee hours with apparently a sinus headache.  Which happened to Valerie 24 hours before, though she’s prone to headaches and it may not have been sinus.

Henry a little while ago drank a substantial amount of Valerie’s coffee and has gone all puffy and squinty-eyed and a little rashy, but he’s also been miserable, as has Deb. and for that matter me.  People burning?  No!  Something blooming around the corner, smells like maybe honeysuckle, so strong it can be hard to sleep.

So we’re not sure how much is the coffee and how much is that.  The coffee is about 1 part coffee, some sugar and dry creamer, and 5 parts cold water.  He’s had black coffee with sugar before and not blown up, but the non-dairy creamer has dairy in it, along with whatever else, so who knows.  At least it’s not almost pure milk as it would have been before we realized Val had a problem with the milk.

Anyway, I have to go get ready to go to the Stoughton town hall for Sadie’s birth certificate to sign up for RomneyCommunistCare and decriminalize ourselves in the eyes of the state, then the recruiter in Burlington.  And other errands.