Archive for July 28th, 2025

My blog is broken. Day 8.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

I was busy over the weekend and didn’t have a chance to follow-up with Bluehost. I was planning to do so tonight…

…but Bluehost emailed me! The direct message I sent this morning to Sachin Puri (“CEO @ Bluehost Group”) asking whose leg I had to hump to get some action on this ticket may have been a factor in that.

Summarizing, Bluehost’s latest theory is that: “a script is being terminated due to execution time limits, specifically during image processing handled by WordPress”. Which is actually a reasonable theory, and explains some things: if the script is being terminated because it takes too long to run, there’s probably a connection to server load, and that would explain why some people see the problem intermittently.

Options to Resolve

Resize images before uploading to reduce processing time. (recommended)

Disable image resizing via a plugin

Consider upgrading to a VPS or Dedicated plan, where you have full control over PHP limits and resource usage.

I’m not really interested in adding an “image resizing” step to my workflow, especially when this worked in the past without that step. I’m also not really interested in paying more money to get back to where I was.

Next Steps & Suggestions

To further isolate the issue, we recommend:

Retry the upload using WordPress to confirm if the problem persists on your end.

Which I would love to be able to do. But as I’ve mentioned to my readers, and as I told the Bluehost support rep, they’ve set the maximum file upload size for this instance to ZERO BYTES.

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Obit watch: July 28, 2025.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

Tom Lehrer was wrong.

We did not all go together when we go. He went first.

THR. NYT.

Shunsaku Tamiya, CEO of Tamiya Company.

For more than four decades, Mr. Tamiya led the company that bore his family’s name, turning it into one of the world’s largest makers of build-it-yourself plastic model kits of racecars and military vehicles. Since producing its first such kit in 1960, of the Japanese World War II battleship Yamato, Tamiya Co. has become a globally known brand that also produces remote-controlled cars.

…

The company, which was renamed Tamiya in 1984, also won customers because of the meticulous accuracy of its kits. Mr. Tamiya visited military museums around the world to research archives and take pictures of tanks, warships and aircraft. At locations where photography wasn’t allowed, he memorized the details, recording them in a notebook afterward.
During the Cold War, he got his first up-close look at Soviet tanks at a museum in Israel, which had captured them from Arab countries during the Six-Day War.
His company also built model kits of racing cars as well as radio-controlled cars. To make a miniature replica of a Porsche 911 that was perfect down to the shape and placement of the engine, he bought one of the expensive German sports cars.
He did this “not to drive it, but to use it as a reference,” Mr. Tamiya wrote in a memoir. “I brought the 911 into my garage and disassembled everything that could be disassembled.”

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Very short random gun crankery.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

One of the things Mike the Musicologist and I did over the weekend was to make a stop in Canyon Lake and go to the local grocery store.

Not because we were hungry, but because we wanted to try out the ammunition vending machine.

They had rifle, handgun, and shotgun ammunition. We didn’t look at the shotgun ammo. The rifle ammo was: .300 Blackout, .223, and Aguila .22 LR ammo. The handgun ammo was 9mm, .40 S&W, and .45 ACP.

We tried to buy one box of .45 and two boxes of .22 LR. The prices weren’t great, but we were treating this as an experiment.

Unfortunately, there was some sort of problem when I tried to use Apple Pay for the transaction: I think it couldn’t recognize my face due to the position I was in, and the passcode failed as well. And when Apple Pay failed, it left the machine totally locked up. We couldn’t get it to respond to any of the buttons on the screen, or even reset. Poor error handling on the part of the implementation team, I believe.

Sadly, we had to chalk this up as a failed experiment. But I did get some taco-flavored Doritos while I was there. I haven’t seen those around in a while.

Posted in Food, Guns | 2 Comments »

Birthday musical interlude.

Monday, July 28th, 2025

Today, my blog is old enough to drive.

At least with a provisional driver’s license in the state of Texas.

It was a busy weekend. I’ll have some more updates later. But how about a musical interlude?

And speaking of Tennessee Ernie Williams, this sounds like one of the upper circles of Hell to me. But I can’t pass up the opportunity to quote the phrase used in the NYT headline, “Tennessee Williams on ice”.

At the Peter W. Foote Vietnam Veterans Skating Rink, home of the North Berkshire Youth Hockey Black Bears, five talented skaters performed Will Davis’s “The Gig,” a diverting if impenetrable riff on a late Williams novel called “Moise and the World of Reason.” As the skaters swirled and swooshed in pretty patterns and garish costumes, never enacting the story literally but suggesting a circle of queer friends and lovers, the audience listened on headphones to selections from the novel while trying to stay warm.

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