Carpentology :: … the study of family

Themes

Written on June 27, 2009 at 8:20 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

I tried to upgrade the Open Air theme that I was using, but things started getting a little wonky. That being said, I reverted to a previous theme. As I built this one, I am sure that it will work the way I intent it to work.

MCITP Database Administrator

Written on June 21, 2009 at 6:58 AM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

I received my new certification card for my MCITP certification in the mail yesterday. I have been like a little kid expecting a package. I don’t know why I was so excited by this, but it was almost like receiving a diploma. (I think I actually worked harder at this than I did to receive a diploma.)

School’s Out

Written on June 4, 2009 at 6:58 PM by Ron. There is one comment so far.

Tony completed his first year of pre-school last week and RJ completed first grade this week. Beth also finished her certification class this week as well. I feel kinda left out.

70-443

Written on May 30, 2009 at 8:37 AM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

So I’ve been a slacking a little in the exam department, but I finally got around to taking my next exam. I passed.

Note to self … just schedule the darn exam and then you will be forced to not put it off.

I’m a Quitter

Tagged with: personal development. Written on April 15, 2009 at 11:31 AM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

That’s right, folks. I quit smoking.

You can follow my progress on Twitter.

WordPress Database Maintenence

Tagged with: database, wordpress. Written on April 13, 2009 at 8:38 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

So the site has been getting unbearable slow lately and I just realized that I have not optimized the database lately. I have been meaning to get around to migrating to a new database since the current database has been in place since WordPress 1.2, with constant upgrades.

I tried the export/import feature, but the imported only imported about forty of my posts. It was pretty quick, but I did not want to do without the other 98% of my posts.

I ended up going into phpMyAdmin and doing a repair and optimize. I was looking around to see if there were some other utilities out there and found WP Optimize. I like the size of this utility, but ultimately thought there were better options out there.

I found WP DB Manager filled 90% of the reason I have to sign into phpMyAdmin. This plugin also includes some nice database backup functionality, including scheduling, that may replace WP DB Backup for me.

Lastly I tried Clean Options. This is a nice utility to help clean orphaned records from the options table, which in my case was the second largest table in the database. I quickly ran the utility and deleted 50+ old options. Once very nice feature of this plugin are the Google links to the option to help in determining whether the option is safe to be deleted. I am really indifferent with this plugin, especially since I could probably filter through the options just as fast manually as I could with the plugin, but it is nice to have GUI to work with.

In the end, it really does not matter what you use, just so long as you do it.

Flat Stanley

Written on March 29, 2009 at 5:12 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

One of RJ’s school projects was to mail Flat Stanley to another state and document his adventures. Well, Flat Stanley made his way to Indiana.

This short trip was action packed. Flat Stanley got to ride a train. But this was no ordinary ride, he got to ride in the engine! It also looks like Flat Stanley got to spend some quality time with his friend James Dean. As if that wasn’t adventuresome enough, Flat Stanley took a spin on Noah’s Ark. But this trip wasn’t all fun and games. Flat Stanley also volunteered with Habitat for Humanity. Lastly, no kids trip would be complete without a trip to the playground.

Check out some pictures of Flat Stanley’s adventures!

Another Blog

Written on at 4:53 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

I have always wanted to be part of a tech blog, but never wanted to include those posts here. I like to separate my family life and work life, although that doesn’t always work so well.

To that end, a couple of us have started a new tech blog. We are a bunch of .NET developers, so it will mostly revolve around .NET and SQL Server. So if you like hearing about the latest development technologies, check out Ctrl+Shift+B.

New Theme

Tagged with: theme. Written on March 21, 2009 at 5:09 PM by Ron. There are no comments so far.

I have been meaning to update the theme here on Carpentology for quite a while, I just never seen to find the time. For the first time (ever, I think) I have gone with an out-of-a-box theme of Open Air.