I have not posted here on this site in a very long time, and I miss it… Today, I ran across a video on YouTube that I felt that I needed to share.
My only comment is that if you can watch this with a dry eye, you have no soul.
For the first time in my life, I have a driver’s license from a state other than Texas. I moved to Tulsa in order to take a job writing software for FlightSafety International in Broken Arrow, which started in June. I write software for a living, and I teach violin lessons because it’s fun.
I have enrolled in the Tulsa Community College Orchestra. The opportunities for musical performance here in Tulsa are a bit limited compared to the DFW area, but after all, the population of the DFW area is about 40% more than the entire state of Oklahoma. My challenge will be to improve that situation, and I have some ideas on how to go about that — but first, I will be meeting and networking with other musicians in the area to see what opportunities already exist.
One thing that I discovered many years ago was that many engineers and scientists are musicians. The percentage of engineers and other folks in the “hard” sciences who play a musical instrument is several time that of the general population.
I always wondered if maybe there was a cause & effect relationship…
Here is an interesting TED talk that asserts that playing a musical instrument really does enhance cognitive function. And suggests some underlying mechanisms.
And, yes music works better than other activities, such as sport or visual arts.
Very interesting short video:
I managed to migrate several websites to a new host — but I forgot my “Fiddling Around” blog. I thought I had migrated it, because I had it in a separate WordPress installation on my main website, which I had backed up separately. When I migrated the main site, I saw the link to my blog, but I didn’t actually check it to make sure it worked. DOH!
Much later, I got a report of a broken link to my blog in another site. When I investigated it, I found that the restore of the main site did not restore the database of the blog (the database is probably the only really important part of a WordPress blog — everything else can be restored relatively easily).
I dimly remembered making a separate backup of the blog, just in case the full backup of the main site had a problem, but I could not find that backup.
After a couple of hours of fretting, I gave up, thinking that I had just lost the blog. Forever.
Then about 5am this morning, I awoke with a start. I remembered that I had moved a bunch of my website stuff to a large USB drive because I was running out of room on my main PC drive. I check that drive, and sure enough, there was the separate backup!
Instead of restoring it as a separate WordPress installation on the main site, which I didn’t know for sure would even work, I decided to install it on a separate domain. That did work.
I am considering moving the blog (by hand, over time) to my this site, but for now, I’m happy that I did not lose it. I have updated all the plugins (and removed some that I don’t want anymore), and applied the new 3.9 WordPress update. Oh, and I backed the site up again.
I can now worry about something else.
In my move to my new hosting service, I thought I had backed up my fiddler blog, but apparently I did not. At least, not properly. What I see in the backups is the complete directory structure, but the only really important file, the database backup, is missing.
Which means, in essence, that the old fiddler blog entries are gone. Forever.
So, I will be starting from scratch. And trying to figure out a way not to have that happen again.
For the more technically inclined, what happened was that I had two WordPress installations on the same domain. The backup utility I use appears to have a problem with that.
There were a few articles in there I wish I had saved. Sigh.