It has been a difficult week.
I started to catch a cold on Wednesday of last week and it has persisted until about today. I still feel a little weak but that might be to not working out in a while. In addition, for the first time in my life I got athletes foot. I’ve never had that before so was unsure of what it actually was until I did research. Well now I know and have it almost resolved. And the final problem was a flare up of gout in my right foot. I exercise and am very healthy but I do like to binge on pizza and soda some nights of the week. Well, now that I’m 41 my body lets me know when I overdo it and the gout acts as a check.
For me, the gout affects my foot and is so painful that I cannot even walk. This started to happen to me about 8 years ago but once I knew what was going on I cut soda, beer, shellfish and so on completely out and was fine. Well, I drank plenty of beer in Japan and coming home have had lots of pizza, soda and other things I shouldn’t have and my body just let me know in a very severe way to cut it out.
When it rains it pours I guess especially when you’re 41. I never had these problems before but now have to be somewhat careful. If I were to go to the doctor they’d put me on drugs just like everyone else in America. No, no doctors nor drugs for me. I prefer to just exercise and practice a healthy lifestyle.
Unfortunately my mind has been in complete chaos since Japan with jet-lag, the stresses of a new job and trying to get back into routine. I’m so busy with work, then the kids come home and I’m busy with them that the days and life in general just fly by as though I’m in a time warp.
To add to my stress I had server problems where it was just dropping the blogs connection and the CPU generally running at 100%. I went in and tinkered with it but ended up making things worse.
Ok, nerds only for the next couple of paragraphs.
At first I thought to upgrade Apache 2.2 to 2.4 and Maria 5 to 10. But before that I threw on W3 Total Cache in my blogs thinking it would help bring the cpu down a bit. Well, it didn’t. For whatever reason the NAS absolutely hated those plugins and so ran at a rock solid 99% forever. I couldn’t do anything at all as one little click would take 15 minutes for anything to budge!! It was so frustrating and took up a majority of my Saturday. It caused me more stress and as I was already sick didn’t help things.
I ended up having to just unplug it, plug it back in and then try to fix right there in the beginning before the cpu shot up to 99% again. I couldn’t upgrade Maria because even though it seemed as though I could download all the tables from AdminMySQL I couldn’t upload it because the connection would break….. and decided to break after waiting for an hour while uploading!!!! So frustrating!!! I really don’t know what is needed to upgrade Apache and have it work. Yes, I installed the 2.4 package but the blogs wouldn’t work if I stopped Apache 2.2. The forums weren’t much help because once they get into code I check out. I’m not messing with code….. yes I could probably figure it out after perhaps 4 hours of trying but have found those modifications just go away in subsequent upgrades…. so no, no code for me thanks.
So, after a hours and hours of frustration, a mountain of a headache, and being sick on top of it all, a thought occurred to me. What was it I had done that caused my Synology box to go completely haywire? W3 Total Cache!!!
Since the machine was too sluggish to go in through the WordPress Blog and uninstall I had to unplug the box, plug back in, then go straight to the actual files. I went into content-Plugins and deleted not only W3 Total Cache, but also every single plugin that wasn’t absolutely essential.
The result?
A perfectly functioning, low-spec Synology NAS!!! My God I was so relieved. So I let it sit for a while but my blogs still weren’t loading very quickly. I was anxious to go the plugin route again since it was by deleting plugins I had solved the 99% cpu problem. But, I was confident that should I install Super Cache by Auttomatic, who is the maker of WordPress that it should work flawlessly. They are from the same company after all. So that is what I did. I installed Super WP Cache by Auttomatic on all of my blogs then crossed my fingers.
Well, we’re now going on 5 days and everything seems to be functioning beautifully as far as the server is concerned.
It is Friday, work is going well and I’ve accomplished a lot. There are still a few things I need to get done however to get the stress out.
The first is actually do karate. I’m still not 100% but am thinking about going tonight and tomorrow. Not sure if that is a great idea but the test is next month and I need to be ready.
The second is we need a new Blu-ray player, and TV. The Blu-ray player died a while back and the TV is 8 years old, way out of date. I’ve also decided to get an AV receiver so we can actually use the built in speakers that came with the house. I taught myself about AV receivers last night and so know what to look for. I think we’ll get the Blu-Ray off Amazon and the AV Receiver from Costco…. unless the Costco one doesn’t have enough HDMI ports…. need to go and actually look at Costco because I did see one but cannot find it on their website.
The home theater system is in serious need of an upgrade but that also costs money. Therefore, I think we’ll hold off on the new TV until the good discounts are here which are around Thanksgiving or the Super Bowl. I’m not paying full price for a TV….. there will be deals.
Ok, glad I got this post written about a very tough week so I can look back on it and be glad it is over.
Oh, side note,,, I also stopped dipping again this week. I had picked it back up after quitting for 8 years when I was in Ohio with my old buddies. But the right time came along, I’ve got momentum and I’m done with it…… again.
