We started our morning with a trip to Panera in Brighton for coffee and bagels. We got a table for two right next to the gas fire logs, which have seating on all four sides. I discovered the other day that we had earned a free daily coffee for the month of September. The month was 2/3rds over so we wanted to use what remained of the benefit. We took our iPads and read for a while. We have always appreciated the free Wi-Fi at Panera cafes. We then spent the morning running errands that included visits to Lowe’s, Walmart, the Howell Library, the Howell Farmers Market, Home Depot, and finally Meijer’s. It was after 1 PM by the time we got back to the house. Pre-retirement we would not have spent that much time running errands together but would have split them up. It’s nice to just be able to “hang out” together now taking care of the simple things.
We had hummus sandwiches and black grapes for lunch and then settled in to work at our desks for the afternoon. Linda put in a couple hours of work on the bakery software conversion project, went for a walk, and then worked on our personal accounting. I created a couple of new pages for our website and then created a photo gallery (several, actually) with images of the natural gas project that Roese Construction has been working on for Consumer’s Energy in this part of Livingston County since early July.
The drag-and-drop feature of the native WordPress gallery function is definitely NOT WORKING on my computer and I have tried it on two different WordPress sites hosted on different web-servers. I can drag-and-drop other things on my computer, such as file names, so I strongly suspect this is a WordPress 4.0 problem. Since WP 4.0 was released over a week ago I am getting a bit worried that there has not been a maintenance update fixing this problem or even a mention that the problem exists. I mentioned this to both Mike (W8XH) and Larry (K8UT) at breakfast yesterday and both agreed that it was almost certainly a WordPress problem, not a Windows 8.1 problem. Neither Mike nor Larry had not tried creating photo galleries since WP 4.0 was released, so that had not personally experienced the problem.
We are still experiencing what appears to be a brute force login attack on the two websites hosted by QTH.com; this one and the one for the Great Lakes Converted Coaches FMCA chapter. The more serious attempt is against the GLCC website, which is still under development and almost totally locked down. I decided to tighten up the security options for both sites in the Wordfence Security plug-in. I also changed the passwords for all of the administrative user accounts. It’s a pain, and although I like to think of myself as a peaceful and non-violent individual, I will not put into print what I think should be done with the people (or governments) that are involved in trying to hack other peoples’ websites and blogs either for fun or for more serious (criminal) purposes. The Internet (World Wide Web) may well be one of the greatest technological achievements in the history of human civilization, and it’s a shame that there are those who would like to spoil it for the rest of us.
I got an e-mail from Bill Gerrie letting me know that he and Karen had arrived at the RV park in Frankenmuth, Michigan where they like to spend three or four weeks each fall. That puts them less than an hour north of where we live so we are now trying to arrange for them to come down to visit and have dinner. I know they would love to visit but I suspect they are not looking forward to a whole-food, plant-based meal. I know Linda will do a great job preparing something really tasty that they will like, but for some folks the mere thought of not having meat plays with their head to the point where they can’t enjoy the meal. For others, like a good friend who will remain anonymous, they just genuinely do not like vegetables. Sad, but true.
I worked at my desk after dinner uploading a few more blog posts while Linda read a novel intermixed with playing Scrabble and Words With Friends online. These are what she likes to do to relax. No TV for us tonight as Linda had to be up early tomorrow to get ahead of the morning traffic inbound to Detroit.