I spoke this morning at my Toastmasters meeting – my speech was titled “The Nose Knows”, and I talked about my experience losing and (so far) regaining my sense of smell. This was the first of a pair of speeches in the project; the goal is to take the feedback I got and use it to improve the speech, then deliver the updated speech and see how well I incorporate the feedback. My evaluator gave me very clear feedback to work on, which I appreciated.

Strangely enough, the speech before mine was titled “Pick Your Nose For Better Health” (breathe through your nose, not your mouth).

Beyond that, I continued migrating the rest of the programs on my old server. Once more, I failed to complete the project because I started working on a problem that I didn’t need to solve!

The weather has turned hot, but we managed a late-evening walk to Safeway to pick up a pillow from the Amazon Locker there. The box was smaller than I expected, but that’s because the pillow was shipped compressed (duh!).

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?