Linda did double duty this week (Monday and Wednesday) in the babysitting department as she will miss her regularly scheduled shift next week while we attend an RV rally / photography workshop. So our daughter got Wednesday “off” will fill in for her next Monday. I took the opportunity to work at my desk and finally prepared the various materials that I have to supply to the members of our FMCA Freethinkers associate chapter for our upcoming annual business meeting. We also took care of errands and finished cleaning up from the open house.
One errand I had not ever been on was taking boxes of paper to a shredding facility (Royal Oak Recycling in White Lake Township). This place has you drive onto a scale with your car, drive to a dock and unload your stuff, and then drive back on the scale. I had 10 copier paper boxes of mixed paper and hadn’t really thought about the fact that “20 lb” paper means that a case of 10 reams weights 20 pounds. I didn’t think I had that much paper, but the difference in the before and after weight of the car was 220 lbs. ROR charges 15 cents per pound if you want to watch them shred your paper, or they pay you 2.5 cents per pound if you are willing to just drop it off. Since the papers to be shred were mostly old personal and business financial records, we wanted to verify that they had indeed been shredded, so I paid. They only take cash, so it was a good thing that I had enough to cover the $33+ amount.
At one time I sent updated rosters to the members of our Freethinkers chapter by attaching the PDF to an e-mail. More recently, I decided to put the roster and other documents in my personal Dropbox, generate a link, and just e-mail the link to everyone. That technology works very well, and is capable of even more sophisticated operating modes. But I have also been thinking about, and working on, a website for this group using WordPress. I decided that I would put some effort into giving it some structure and preliminary content, and use it to deliver documents and other materials to the members. The challenge is that some of the materials, like the roster, contain information that is for the members only and cannot be available for public view.
I was able to password protect individual pages, but the protection is less than ideal as web browsers apparently remember these passwords even when you ask them not to. It’s may be that this is being done using cookies, but however it is being done I could not figure out a way to defeat it. I also played around with WordPress user roles, but the only thing that WordPress seemed to have built into it was the ability to require users to log in to post a comment/reply. This is apparently one of the reasons for the “subscriber” user role. If have been looking at a WordPress plug-in called S2, or S2 Member, or S2 Framework, that appears to have the ability to place all or part of WordPress website behind a user login function, but I have not had a chance to install, configure, and play with it yet.
On Wednesday I drove Linda to her babysitting gig in Ann Arbor and then I drove back to Ann Arbor in the afternoon to visit with Madeline and her mom and dad. Shawna had an evening appointment so Linda and I had a quiet dinner with our son and then drove home together.
We spent Thursday re-loading the bus for our trip to Tennessee and Virginia. Phil from Precision Grading came by around 6:30 PM. We talked about the approximate location of the bus barn/garage and he set up his transit so we could measure the contours of the site, the driveway in from the road, and the surrounding yard. Based on his measurements, it looks like our planned site should work very well in terms of drainage, which is always a prime consideration.
Linda spent the rest of the evening working at her desk and following the Detroit Tigers in game 5 of the first round of the American League playoffs. I spent the rest of the evening updating the firmware in our Sony Alpha 100 digital SLR and updating the Sony Image Data Converter and Motion Picture Browser programs.