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Tired Tiffy

Tiffy, our eldest cat, died yesterday.

Melissa discovered her. It was very sad. We've been expecting it for a while: Tiffy was 19 years old, and had been progressively getting age diseases. I think only happy cats can live to be that old, so we know that we loved her and she loved us.

She was diabetic (controlled with diet) and had arthritis. She refused to take one of her pain medicines, so life must have been pretty painful for her near the end. It's a little hard to tell, since her favorite activity has always been laying on a cushion (or paper), and that's almost exclusively what she did during her final days.

We buried her alongside the ashes of her best friend, Hershey. We planted a red plum tree above them. Soon the circle of life will continue, as they turn into dirt to help the tree grow.

Farewall, Tiffy. It is a comfort to know that you no longer have any pain. We will always remember you.

Yesterday started off terribly: my youngest didn't want to go to school, and wouldn't get out of the car when we got there; my car smelled bad from getting rained on with the windows open; my eldest had an infection.

But everything turned around by the end of the day. The youngest loved her day at school. The car was still wet, but it was drying out. The eldest had her antibiotics.

Better yet, after three weeks of effort, my code finally worked. I also found an empty partition on my hard drive at work and fixed a persistent, annoying space problem. That seemed to speed up the whole computer. And then, with the help of the EVDL, I fixed my EV.

I'm ready to declare a family holiday: August 27th, the Day of Success.

When we decided that my controller was blown, Nathan and I were plainly demoralized. After I went through the five stages of grief, I did what any reasonable person would do: I griped about it online.

Luckily, my griping is pretty descriptive, and I griped to the brightest bunch of EV enthusiasts you could ask for: the EV Discussion List. Two of them found my problem immediately, although it took a second post to convince me.

Hosting Service No Help Whatsoever

I've gotta find a new hosting service. For... well, EVER... the PowWeb MySQL servers have been slow. Lately, I noticed even slower service and decided to do some debugging. I enabled a Serendipity option that logs all SQL queries and their execution times to the SQL database.

I quickly discovered that I was getting deluged with trackback spam. Each day I logged about 1700 trackbacks. I'd love to think I was that popular, but I know better. Besides, I've disabled trackbacks in the Spam Blocker.

I shut off the logging and started fooling with the comment.php and .htaccess files. I would like to allow legitimate comments, but stop the crazy trackbacks.

Yesterday, PowWeb blamed their MySQL problems on me and deactivated my account. They sent an email claiming that my index.php was being exploited.

Odd thing is, my webstat page (also provided by PowWeb) shows only 270 hits on index.php, for a total of 18K. And trackbacks don't even hit index.php: they go straight through comment.php, which showed 27000 hits.

So I called their 24/7 support line. What do I have to do to reactivate my account? That's right, remove my index.php, the main page...

I spent Sunday working on the car. I got everything rewired and checked; I even used my new access holes. Nathan was impressed: in his own words, "I thought this would be a tough job, but all I had to do was reconnect a vacuum hose."

But the car just won't work. And I'm nearly dead from all the stooping and lifting in a hot garage.