Blog

  • Moving WordPress Databases

    September 22, 2006

    Although I keep telling people I don’t do servers, I’m looking into moving a friend’s active Phorum-based BBS to a new host. I’m considering FutureQuest as the new host. I’d heard good things about them, though they’re a little pricey compared to other plans.

    This is a good opportunity for me also to evaluate new hosts for the blog. I’m currently using Pair Networks, who have been awesome for the past 8 years, but their database servers start pooping out when you get over a certain number of transactions per minute, and it’s starting to become an issue.

    This is the first time I’ve had to move a WordPress blog from one host to another, so I’m documenting the process. WARNING! GEEKY NOTES FOLLOW!

    (more…)

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    DSri Seah

  • Personality and Productivity

    September 20, 2006

    In hindsight, the past 8 weeks have brought some changes in my perspective:

    • For the first time in my life, I have a pretty good idea of what it is that I’m good at, and for the first time people are actually able to see what that is. I know I have a lot of improvements to make as far as clarifying what that is: information graphic design and making stories by design are the two areas that I seem to be naturally drawn to. Never has the path been so clear.
    • I have also started to meet some more people locally in a pure social context, which has been good for shaking me out of my rut. I am newly energized.

    With these two positive changes, I would have expected to be more productive than ever before! Instead, I find that I’m operating at less than peak efficiency. For one thing, I feel like there’s tons of things to create from scratch and it’s somewhat daunting. Another thing is that even though I know precisely what I need to build, I’m not particularly excited about doing it. Intellectually, I understand that the END RESULT would be fantastic and awesome. But something isn’t kicking off. In fact, it’s a bit depressing to be at home in my office working on these things by myself. What happened to the excitement of 2005? It’s like I’m a different person.

    Oh…now that is an interesting idea to explore.

    (more…)

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    DSri Seah

  • Mystery Email Referrers!

    September 18, 2006

    I’m noticing a lot of incoming clicks from yahoo and aol mail accounts to the Printable CEO Series Page…I wonder what’s going on?

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    DSri Seah

  • Cat Typing vs WordPress Publishing

    September 18, 2006

    I finally figured out the problem that several kind people had reported over the weekend about No Posts Found on The Printable CEO™ Series Page. I wasn’t able to reproduce it here at all…usually “empty pages” are the fault of (I think) WP-Cache getting a PHP timeout on my overburdened shared server, and a cache flush will usually clear that up. This seemed to work, but then I got another two reports, and I started getting suspicious.

    This morning it occured to me that it might have been my recent update of Bad Behavior, or possibly there was some cookie-related issue with WP Cache (it uses the wordpress cookies as part of its page hash key). I nuked all the wordpress-related cookies and lo…No Posts Found! Crap! I tested this on my Mac also, logging out, and saw that YES INDEED, NO POSTS FOUND. So apparently I was able to reproduce it as a non-logged in user. Hmm.

    I remembered a few nights ago that there was a MASSIVE flurry of activity by a very hungry cat (named Kat), as I was trying to get updates made to the website. Kat had jumped up on the desk and rammed his moist nose into my face, purring loudly and tapdancing on the keyboard. I might have made a wild click or two as I was spitting out hair and cat boogers, because the private flag had been set on that post. I just republished the article, and now it should be again visible to people.

    Thanks everyone for the headsup! You guys rock :-)

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    DSri Seah

  • The Printable CEO™ VI.1: Emergent Task Planning

    September 16, 2006

    Please note that this version of the Emergent Task Planner has been replaced. Please visit the official ETP Page at https://davidseah.com/pceo/etp for the latest downloads.

    As I wrote earlier, I found the new Menu of the Day form to be too cumbersome for my actual daily use. Conceptually, it ties together a lot of important functions, but my main design error was to forget about mindset and context. A good productivity form is one that provides focus and stability for the day as a support tool. If the form makes you think too much, it just isn’t as useful. Adding the weighted value points mixed planning and production together in a way that was not useful during the day.

    So here’s a stripped down version that I’m calling an Emergent Task Planner, AKA version 6.1.

    I’m not quite sure if it really is the mirror of the Emergent Task Timer, but read on and tell me what you think.

    (more…)

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    DSri Seah