Aspie Dad

Thirty years ago today, the movie Star Wars (AKA: Star Wars: A New Hope) opened in theaters across the country and set the record for the largest grossing film to date. Several million people, some (perhaps many) of them on the spectrum, rejoice.

In my mind, which seldom accounts for much, there are only three *real* Star Wars movies, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. None of them have the “Star Wars:” prefix. Now, having made that rather absolutist statement, let me strategically redeploy. I have come to really enjoy all six films, even Phantom Menace, because I have now viewed them with a small boy. I see the six movies more as two separate but linked trilogies set in the same universe rather than a series of six. If that makes sense…

Thus far, our young padawan has seen four of the six movies. Star Wars: Attack of the Clones and Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith will come later. All in good time.

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It is often said that there are two kinds of computer users — those that have lost data and those that will…

Which is why it is important to have a current backup, preferably not on the same machine because the best backup won’t help if the box is dead. This backup admonition applies to you purveyors of bloggy goodness out there, too. Case in point, me.

I decided to update the software that runs Aspie Dad behind the scenes to its most current version. Which, like Red Ball Jets™, will enable me to run faster and jump higher. And be more secure against crackers, but I don’t think Red Ball Jets ever promised that.

Prior to the upgrade you are admonished to “backup your MySQL database and and any blog template files you may have altered.” Since I have been the victim of suddenly dead computers and the results of my own command line stupidity (“I thought that was the flag for confirm, not recurse and delete?”) I follow these directions and because I’m Aspie and I tend to follow rules fairly religiously unless I don’t want to, which is a whole other story, I backed up and verified everything.

Then I proceeded to shoot myself in the foot somewhere in the process of the upgrade.

I ran the upgrade script and got a ‘404 error, page not found’ and the like. WTF?!? Open the ftp client and am told something about directory trees and not being able to handle my request. After a couple of minutes of what I can only describe as bat-shit panic (complete with hand-flapping), I had an epiphany. I had a backup!

Sigh.

Things got real uneventful real fast. Log into PHP My Admin on the server to restore the databases from backup and Aspie Dad is back.

Now do the file replacements again – just not all at once – and nothing seems to happen. Which is good. Run the upgrade script and Bob’s your Uncle. Version 2.2 at your blogging service.

Take away message: “How is you latest backup?”

[update:] Thanks to MumIsThinking we now know where Bob’s your Uncle comes from. Thanks, Mum!

We got Mozart and the Whale from Netflix last week. Wow, talk about a movie about my people. I saw plenty of folks I know and have known in other places I’ve been. And I saw myself. Then, I ended up staying up way too late re-watching it with the commentary on.

In short, I loved the movie, perhaps because it felt so wonderful watching something so familiar. I recommend Mozart and the Whale highly.

Aspie Dad started a little over a year ago. That first anniversary just slipped by… Yea us and yea you as well for all your comments, emails and, of course, your own websites!

Wow! I see him every single day and had not noticed that he was getting to be such a big boy! But, the camera shows me that I’m just not ’seeing’ him how he is. He has a pretty passable ‘NT’ act going here, way past “big smile, make teeth”… (How does he pull that off?)

He’s about 49″ tall and weighs about 46 lbs. Pretty much out on the far quartile for a 5½ year old (OK, 5 years, 7 months).

We’ll be sending these out to the Grandmas and Grandpa tonight!

[note:] If you do not see a picture of my son, click on Aspie Dad above. Apparently the picture does not appear in all browsers if you are view the post directly, like through the feed from the Hub. I have no idea if the rss feed is broken as well. Why not, it is the weekend after all and I have nothing better do do than futz with the blog, right? Meanwhile, I’ll have a look at the files that generate the pages.

[2007/5/12] Web 101. Use full paths for images in a dynamic site served via database calls. individual pages break relative paths. DOH!