I'm reaching out to all my "more technically gifted" programming people with a desperate cry for help.

I'm trying to update a WordPress site for a client. I deleted the original home page because it wouldn't accept any edits, so now I've got the 7 pages he requested. They're done & visible when you visit his site. The problem is that the original home page still exits online - yet it's not available to me when I'm in the editor for WP. 

I've looked in different WP fora and all tell me to go to the "Appearance" tab or "Settings - Reading" but I'm discovering that my dashboard doesn't give me the any of the following options: Home/ Store/ Feedback/ Appearance/ Users. I'm running 4.0 and he updated to 4.0 also. My settings gives me virtually no options - and certainly not "reading."

I don't know how/ where to type in phpMyAdmin to try to change the site url or home values (and I'm not sure how to do that, anyway, but I read somewhere that it would help). I've cleared my cache, so it's not that the old page is lingering on my computer somewhere. I can't figure out how to get to the root install directory- or even if it's necessary.

Suggestions much appreciated!

I certainly like OPW better for the interface than certain other recently-launched blogging sites (although the small window for post creation could be bigger). I'm still not sure how this will fit into my overall social media ecosystem (which consists mainly of LJ, Twitter, and FB these days, although I've got presences elsewhere). For now, consider this a placeholder and a note that I am, indeed, here, with plans to post at least occasionally.

I'm very picky about beer. Through some experimentation, I've learned that the taste I don't like in beer comes from the hops. The hoppier the beer, the less I will enjoy drinking it. Apparently, there's a way to measure how much I will hate the taste of a beer, and it's called IBU. My three favorite beers are 19, 20, and 24, and all are malty, which apparently cancels out the IBUs somewhat.

But there's another thing about beer that makes me even more finicky, and that's the fact that it gives me a stomachache. There's a number for that, too, and it's ABV. The higher the alcohol content, the less likely it is to give me a stomachache. Only applies to beer! I can drink 5% ABV cider or Smirnoff Ice all night long, but one 5% ABV beer and I'll have a sour stomach for an hour. 7% seems to be the minimum for me to be able to drink a beer. How does this make a difference? How does  such a small amount make a difference? I don't know - and I'm rather unwilling to find out. Mostly, when I do drink, I just avoid beer.

All this is just to explain how there came to be a 4-year-old bottle of Maudite (http://www.unibroue.com/en/beers/17/product) in my possession. I was about to throw it out, when I figured I should check the Unibroue site to find out how long it would keep. Unibroue says: "Like good wine, Unibroue’s fine beers have flavors that develop with age." They suggest that it can age up to 8 years. So I kept it around. And then kept it around some more, never finding the right moment to open up what had suddenly become a potential treasure.

4 years later, I realized that a dream deferred is a dream denied, and now I am having far and away the best glass of beer I've enjoyed in my life. Unibroue, again: "Over time they become smoother, sometimes revealing notes of honey and candied fruit and developing a more assertive and lasting flavor." Yes, that seems about right. It's a 750mL bottle, and I'm enjoying half of it in a glass right now; I've corked it and put the rest in the fridge. And then it will be all gone. On the plus side, my habit of buying beer and not drinking it means that I have a 3-year-old bottle of Maudite maturing right now; only 5 more years and I can see how that one turns out!

I started making music as a young child, took the obligatory clarinet lessons in grade school, and then started to LOVE it. Through high school, I played four instruments (clarinet, sax, trumpet, and handbells), sang in two choral groups, was a drum majorette, I directed a small handbell choir at my school, and I toured for two weeks each summer with my church handbell choir (we were, I will say as humbly as I can, Very Good). I did not go on to become a music major; in fact my playing dropped off sharply in my 20s. I never did get far on piano, guitar (not for lack of trying), drums, or anything else one could reasonably expect to play casually as an adult.

Many years later, when the kids were babies, I began singing and ringing again, and it lit me up inside. My kids started piano lessons just over a year ago and my husband has set up his recording gear again and we've been slowly accumulating instruments in the living room which the kids can pick up and play with any time, and there is music everywhere and I am in heaven. Wednesday and Sunday evenings (choir and handbell rehearsal at church) are my weekly therapy.

When tendinitis in my wrists cut short my goal of becoming a halfway proficiant pianist, I had my clarinet refurbished, and started playing that again. Tried guitar lessons again too. Stupid RA had made my fingers stiff and sore, so those have been sidelined for a while as well.

Can't stop me from music now, though. Today I bought a (cheap, student) trumpet. Hey, if the kids are going to be well-rounded musicians they'll need a little bit of everythng, right? So I picked it up, 30 years since I've last played brass, and I did this:

http://soundcloud.com/tabinfl/angels-we-have-heard-on-high/s-N58fJ

It's still in there, somewhere! I can still music!

In early August, I agreed to sub-contract a cool program for Pearson's Wall Street English via a small LLC in New Mexico. My responsibility? To generate 1,000+ grammar and vocabulary exercises for a beginner-advanced online English course set to roll out in China some time next year. Start date for my part of the project? September 26.

The date came ... and went ... And I, who am trying to scrape together enough to pay the bills and not dip too deeply into our rapidy shrinking savings account, began to panic. Fortunately, a few larger clients for whom I'd done web copy revisions and additions paid me - and that covered September's mortgage, car payment and my little guy's preschool tuition (and a few odds and ends). 

And still I waited. I reminded myself each night and morning that I absolutely could earn a decent living freelance writing/ editing & adjuncting at Cedar Crest, and that a more nebulous income still beat the stress from my previous job - and the non-financial rewards of spending more than two hours a day with my 4 1/2 year old far, far outweighed the drawbacks.

I must say, however, that it'd be nice to have health insurance again.

So finally, New Mexico called, by way of Germany. Turns out the "middle" man needed to bow out. Where did that leave me? I determined not to panic - not an easy feat. Pan's floodwaters threatened to rise higher than my calves, but I trusted that everything would work out.

And so I waited, the start date now three weeks past due. On Thursday, a woman from Pearson's Content Creation divison called and followed up our conversation with a torrent of emails. Pearson's rewritten several scripts, realized more activities are needed to hit all unit objectives, and oh, by the way, the time to complete the project's shrunk by a month and doubled in scope.

Now the floodwaters reach mid-chest, but these waters teem with data, metrics, matrices, and a prototype deadline of October 24. Twenty levels with at least 100 exercises per level equals a minimum of 2,000 exercises to write between tomorrow and project end date- March 15. 

I determined several years ago that it was time to transition from full time to part time teaching and incorporate education writing into my life. 

And so it begins!

Today I'm grateful that;

Smart people like the podcast so far

I had it together to write a new sample article and apply for two freelance writing jobs

Vince cooked us a delicious healthy dinner 

Bebe and I went for a good fast walk in the beautiful fall weather

we can go to bed early. 

Above we see the number of new people arriving on One Post Wonder each week, back to the beginning.

These numbers are really too small to be significant at a weekly scale; after all, there are still only 128 accounts on OPW. (*)

So it's important not to get caught up in week-to-week fluctuations. I would have done a monthly graph but we just haven't had enough months yet.

But looking at the overall trend... wow. There's quite a pickup between the first and second halves of the graph.

Also, while I only recently started tracking "who invited who" information, I can tell you that everyone invited in that big bump last week was not invited by me!

I think this chart is even more interesting:

In the long run, content is what matters. And we're seeing impressive growth in the number of posts each week. I'm also seeing more signs of spontaneous connection between folks in my personal OPW experience.

Speaking of connection, what about comments?

Zoom!

Re: the last two weeks, for a while my personal, subjective impression was that folks preferred commenting to posting. But last week, that pattern reversed, with a significantly lower ratio of comments to posts.

As I mentioned, the data is noisy and will remain that way until the site is quite a bit bigger. But it's easy to see the signs of growth in these graphs. Not just growth in population, but growth in content and growth in connection.

(*) Yep, it's that small so far. It's easy to be surprised by this number if you've been participating, because the community is strong. Slow growth doesn't bother me; as long as we are showing signs of organic growth, we are doing the right things, and the community will grow with time.

http://radiofreetacony.com/2014/10/18/as-tom-petty-said/?blogsub=confirming#blog_subscription-2

Lindsay Harris !

That is quality!

The kid wants green lipstick. So far coming up with nothing at local drug stores. And I'm not paying $20+ at Sephora for green lipstick! 

I attempted to make some from crayons+olive oil just now. The trial on my lips gave just a vague green tint. Although on my skin it is a nice strong green. We'll see how it does on the kids rosebud lips tomorrow. I can report it moisturizers very well.

Aside: how is it possible that I can only find 7 crayons in this house -- only 1 green (well,none now) -- I have a 3 yr old !

I am a complete data dork.  I love extracting data from documents and finding new ways to look at it.  Consequently, after I made a list of all my GOG games with genres listed so that my kids (and spouse) could see what all is available for them to ask me to install, I of course was compelled to turn it around and analyze my own habits.

I mostly was guided on genre by what GOG says, but where I disagreed, I of course took my own opinion, and I simplified somewhat (I don't think first-person or third-person are genres, for one thing; if you disagree, that's fine, but this is my list.)  For the purposes of the breakdown below, I removed "fantasy" and "sf" as not being as interesting as the gameplay types.

Anyway, here's what I discovered:

Total games: 122 (note that some are actually multiple games in a pack; not much I can do about that.)

38.5% adventure
17.2% rpg
13.1% action adventure (as opposed to point and click)
6.5% space combat
6.5% simulation (e.g. Zeus, Pharaoh, that sort of thing)
4.1% puzzle adventure
4.1% shooter
3.3% strategy (ick)
1.6% puzzle (but not puzzle adventure)
and 3.3% other (stealth, racing, combat, action but not action adventure)

Yes, that adds up to 98.2%. Rounding error, I guess.  Shrug.

Anyway, that looks at a glance to be generally how I roll, indeed.  (I'm not doing this with Steam to make sure.)  Of course MMOs are excluded, but they'd fall under rpg, so.  My favorite franchises (Gabriel Knight and Wing Commander) fall under the first and fourth categories, and the fourth is only that small because (a) there are not enough good space combat games in the history of gaming and (b) that goes triple for GOG's library.

This is the kind of thing I think about.  So, yeah.