Currently blogging from B.B. Rover’s, a fine Austin establishment that I can commend without reservation to my readers. More about that in a bit, should it become relevant.
In my last post, I promised to install a what-I’m-reading-now gizmo in my sidebar, and to do so pronto. And that was 3 or 4 days ago. Let me say, in partial, but only partial, exculpation: I tried. (How much of the intervening time I’ve actually spent working on said installation, I will leave concealed, so as to also conceal the degree of exculpation claimed.) What I’ve discovered: the best such plug in is one called Now Reading, written by Rob Miller of Lancaster, UK.
I’ve downloaded and installed it, but when I try to activate it, I get an error message informing me that there’s been a Fatal Error, without telling me anything more.
Some folks might draw the conclusion from this that Now Reading is not, in fact, the most desirable of all possible apps for the desired purpose. I considered that possibility myself. I browsed around on the Internet, looked on a number of popular blogs, tried searching on various topics, and I kept winding up back at the same place: Now Reading is What I Need. (Among other things, it’s not primarily a marketing tool for the dominant online book retailer; it doesn’t require one’s prior membership in some other scheme that involves having a database of books hosted remotely, etc.) If I could only get it to work.
Which brings me around to the real subject of this post. I am sufficiently knowledgeable in these matters to visit my hosting service, look on the log, and see what information might be dug up about the error in question. I know enough to take that tidbit and visit my site with an FTP client, go to the relevant file, and find out exactly where that error message is coming from.
And that, my friends, is where it ends. Aye, there’s the rub; a little learning is a dangerous thing. My programming skills are so minimal that it is almost never an efficient use of my time to try to debug anything myself, as opposed to begging for help from every possible source from which such help might be obtained. Which include both the Wordpress forums and the Rob’s own bugtracker. A prudent man post his pleas for assistance there, wait patiently until help arrives, and in the meantime shift his attention to other matters.
Prudence, though, has never been my strong point. (Prudence was some chick the Beatles sang about.) And the fact is, I’m obsessed. Hooked. I’ve got to figure this thing out, no matter how long it takes. Periodically, when eyestrain or hunger becomes overwhelming, I manage to successfully convince myself, “I need to take a break,” stand up, walk out of the study, into the kitchen, and begin fixing a snack. But then — as the surface attention shifts away from the problem at hand, the deeper problem-solving part of the mind, the part that cannot let go of the thing, continues grinding away, and within 30 seconds or so it begins piping up: Hey! Here’s an idea! Try this! This is what you didn’t think of before! And so back to the keyboard I rush, half-made sandwich forgotten on the kitchen counter.
True obsessive-compulsives of whatever stripe will recognize the tragedy of this condition. The intensity of one’s drive to try out another of the n-to-the-gazillionth-power logically possible solutions bears no correlation to one’s skill at intuiting which one of those solution is likely to work. Such intuitions are only gained, except in the rarest of cases, through extensive experience with whatever-it-is-you’re-futzing-around-with: in this case, both the type of app and the programming language it’s written in. Such knowledge is available: in fact, the Wordpress folks have helpfully provided a link to an online PHP tutorial. PHP, THC, PCP, it’s all the same — the fact is that this kind of stuff is all like crack to the true geek obsessive. It offers the promise of omniscience — all I have to do is plow through this and I’ll understand it all. Grasp the big picture. The God’s-eye view! The Books themselves! Of course, the gimmick behind all Crash Courses in Omniscience are the Hidden Prerequisites — the bit in Lesson Two that you don’t quite understand, but if you go and work through my tutorial in the Ur-Grounding of Reality, then come back here and mere Reality will be a breeze!
And I was making such an effort to get this blog back on track. To focus my attention more narrowly, concentrate on matters philosophical, not have this be such a this-is-what’s-on-my-mind-today kind of thing. But, as somebody famous said,
The best-laid plan o’ the monkey mind
Slips into the sea
Eventually.
(Look it up.)
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