I haven’t made a computer hardware post for a while, mostly because I didn’t buy anything significant until this month. As the title indicates, I bought a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex 500GB portable hard drive. As with all of my hardware posts, this is not a review. It’s just a chance for me to show off my new gadget and write some thoughts on it. Read on if you are interested.
Picking Blueberries
My family went to pick some blueberries recently and I just thought I should write a post about the activity. Since last year, picking blueberries has become one of my family’s favorite summer activities. Picking blueberries is an easy, inexpensive activity that is not very time-consuming or tiring. Perhaps more importantly, blueberries are also touted for various health benefits, and they can be delicious too.
Day Trip to the Sunshine Coast
A few days ago I went on another day trip to explore places near and around the Vacouver region. I will be leaving the area to study in the US soon, so these are the last few weeks that I have to get to know British Columbia a little better. This time I went the Sunshine Coast, an area composed of several small towns/villages that’s located northwest of Vancouver. As a resident of the Metro Vancouver area, I keep hearing about the term “Sunshine Coast” but before the trip I didn’t really know where the Sunshine Coast was. Just likes the trips to Sydney (Vancouver Island), my relatives and I fished and crabbed during the trip, and below is the record of that day.
Badminton Portal and Travel Log Rebuilt
Over the last couple of weeks, I have been working on some of my other websites and the work is finally (nearly) complete. Firstly, the main area of Travel Log has been rebuilt using WordPress at the request of its authors. For this redesign, I used a stock theme and didn’t need to do any importing as there wasn’t too much content in that site.
On to the second piece of news, JP’s Badminton Portal has also been rebuilt using WordPress, and what’s more it has been combined with JP’s Badminton Blog and moved to it’s own domain, www.jpbadminton.com. Formerly, the Badminton Portal was run using a self-wrote PHP content management system and the Badminton Blog ran on Textpattern. I had the Badminton Portal separate because I wanted to make the site truly bilingual (in English and Simplified Chinese), but after thinking about it I decided to combine the two sites to make administration easier. My self-wrote PHP script was buggy at places anyways. Importing from the Badminton Blog to the new Badminton Portal was fairly easy as there is an import script available online, but all the articles from the old Badminton Portal had to be manually moved. I also built a custom theme for the site using Thematic Theme Framework. There are still some minor tweaks for the new Badminton Portal, but it’s ready for visitors.
Hopefully the changes to both websites will improve the visitors’ experiences and draw more traffic.
Summer in Whistler
My family and I went to Whistler, BC for a short vacation not too long ago. Located about 2 hours drive north of Vancouver, Whistler is best known as a skiing destination in the winter and the location for the downhill and sliding events in the 2010 Winter Olympics, but there are a lot of stuff to do there in the summer as well such as mountain biking and white water rafting. I didn’t do either of these, but I did visit a few places while I was there. This is not the first time I’ve been to Whistler during the summer, but this is the first time I actually did something other than just looking around. Here is a record of the things I saw and did during the trip in rough chronological order.
Day Trip to Sidney Once Again
Bakemonogatari – Final Thoughts
This post is my final thoughts on Bakemonogatari, the longest 15 episode anime I’ve ever watched. It’s been so long between episodes that I don’t remember a lot of the details anymore, so I don’t really have to much to say. Below are the thoughts I managed to put together.
Moved to a New Server
TonyJiang.com has a new home! These last few days I have been busy moving my websites to a new server. For almost four years, my websites have been hosted by 50webs.com on their Webmaster plan. Over these years, I never encountered any major problems with my old host and I am satisfied with their service. However, their plans appear to be a little outdated with the storage and bandwidth limits (or perhaps they are just being honest), so with my current hosting expiring in a month I started looking for a new web host. I have heard no shortage of shared hosting horror stories out on the net, so I spent a couple of days doing research. After looking around, I decided to go with StableHost, primarily because they had a coupon code that provided a very good lifetime discount on hosting. Their reputation seems to be decent too, so I signed up with them on their Stable Plus plan.
The move to the new host was pretty straight forward. I initiated the domain transfer process which took about a day, and during that time I transferred all my files over and set up the subdomains. Out of all of my websites, the only one that had any issues was this website. First of all, my new host uses the industry standard Cpanel which for some reason cannot point the default domain (tonyjiang.com or www.tonyjiang.com) to a subfolder within the public_html directory, so this WordPress blog didn’t work when I uploaded it as in a folder into public_html. Once I got that sorted out by uploading the WordPress files into public_html, I was met with the infamous White Screen of Death when I tried to access the admin panel. After searching on the web, I disabled all my plug-ins by renaming the plugins directory within WordPress, and my admin panel came back. After some troubleshooting, it seems that WP-Spamfree was the culprit, which is strange since I didn’t have problems with this plug-in on my old host. I killed that plug-in, but that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Afterwards, I tried to find a new anti-spam plug-in, but that caused WordPress to run into my host’s 32MB PHP memory limit. I didn’t want to delete any of my plug-ins, so I sent a support ticket to my new host, and thankfully they promptly replied by increasing the memory limit and everything was alright again.
I have settled into my new host, and everything looks okay so far. Hopefully my decision to move won’t come back and bite me in the behind. Since my websites receive little traffic, bandwidth and server load shouldn’t pose problems. Hopefully there will be no major downtimes or trouble with the host. Now that tonyjiang.com has found a new home, I’ll probably start working on some of my other websites.
Day Trip to Sidney, Vancouver Island
I recently went to Sidney on a day trip with family for some crabbing and fishing. It’s not the Sidney in Australia; it’s not even the Sidney in Nova Scotia, but rather the Sidney I went to is a town located on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada near the city of Victoria. Sidney is a nice little town with great views of the waters, and the fishing and crabbing was pretty decent. Read on to see what my family has caught during the trip.
TJ’s Guide to UBC
This is probably the last article I’ll write about my experience at the University of British Columbia. UBC has been a pretty good place to me, and so I decided to write a little guide about my Alma Mater. There is a bit of general information about UBC, but a lot of this post is focused on things that I found interesting and relevant through my five year experience at the institution. As such, this is far from a comprehensive guide to the university. More information can be found in UBC’s website, Wikipedia, and the other links contained in this post.