I enjoyed “A Prarie Home Companion” for many years. I especially liked the opening monologue and the commercials – one of my favorites was the one for Powdermilk Biscuits, which gave you the “strength to get up and do what needs to be done”.

Today, I had the strength to get up and do what didn’t need to be done. And I spent all day doing it.

Here’s what the first paragraph of yesterday’s blog entry looked like when I moved it to the new server – the text is garbled in places where I use special characters like a true apostrophe.

It took a little research, but I found the problem (a change in MySQL’s default encoding, for those who care). I even found a tool to fix the problem – it had been written in 2011! I ran it, and now the start of yesterday’s post looks like it should:

When I ran the tool, it issued a few error messages. I, of course, wanted to fix the errors. And I spent the rest of the day hard at work on the problem, migrating the site over-and-over to keep fixing one more error.

During dinner, it occurred to me that I really didn’t need to fix any of those “one more things” – the site worked, after all! So I migrated it one last time, and you’re looking at the result.

Good enough, right?

Tapering off the prednisone hasn’t slowed the dreams yet – I had an interesting and detailed dream last night where I was in Rio de Janeiro for a work assignment that was long enough to need an apartment. But the locks on the door of the apartment they’d given me didn’t work properly so I was reluctant to leave my stuff there; my colleagues convinced me to go down to the market with them anyway, and we had a terrific time. I woke up before I learned whether I’d been robbed or not.

I’m in the process of upgrading this server to a newer version of Ubuntu Linux; the easy way to do it requires just one command, do-release-upgrade. I’m doing it the hard way, building a brand new system and installing all of the packages I need (as well as copying my data!). That’s taken most of the day, and I’m (of course) 80% complete – the latest glitch came up just after dinner when I discovered that MySQL had changed its default character encoding and all of my pages looked wrong. It should be an easy fix, but I’m not going to work on it any more this evening.

I really thought I was going to get the entire migration done in one day – I guess I was a silly goose!