The "I Haven't Posted in a Month" Post..

Bad HAM. Naughty. Bad.

I've been busy and it's that time of year, so there is a lot going on. My calendar looks mental. Even today, a work day no less, and I'm booked out until about 9pm.. and my day started at 4.30am. Luckily it's mostly end of year related stuff so it's not a hard day. 

I spent a couple of weeks last month a little unwell. I've been actively reducing the carbs from my diet and that caught up with me (often referred to as the "keto flu"). I've been more focused on protein and fats and trying to avoid carbs and sugars. Challenging for me given that my preferred food groups have always been carb heavy. While my body adapted to the lack of sugar and having to start burning fat instead, it was a bit rough and I didn't get much done. Very low energy and the lack of motivation that came with it. Coming out the other side of it though, I have most of the energy back and I can get away with eating a lot less.  I've had good weight loss to date out of it already though. The biggest issue I have now is trying to find foods that I can eat when I go out... and trying to find time in the morning to cook what is often my only actual meal for the day. I do use protein shakes but I try not to just live off them given that's not really a long term sustainable option - I just use them to keep me going between meals that are more appropriate. 

I've also been working on a retail website project that has consumed way, way, way too much of my time for the past couple of weeks. I haven't necessarily wanted to put that much work into it as much as I've had too. 

The first incarnation was slow for no obvious reason. I had it mostly functional then had someone assist me with improving its look.. and that's where the problems started. He lost internet access for a day after he made some major changes that broke the website - right while I had Google doing its magic stuff that retailers need that resulted in all kinds of violations being leveled at me. 

Somehow too that incarnation of the site somehow managed to generate around half a million product variations that it loaded into our Google Merchant Center. That stuff can't be removed quickly and takes a month to expire out. The data also wasn't quite right - and that's BAD. Google has no problem with suspending accounts of merchants if there is too much wrong and it's generally very, very vague in telling you what the problem is much less what exactly you need to fix. 

I lost an entire weekend in a technical purgatory - software people telling me to "ask the hosting people to fix it" without any clues as to why their software would behave so poorly. I happen to be the "hosting people" so I circled around the 9th pit of hell for a while before I decided to do a rapid rebuild from the ground up. In a day I managed to architecture the whole damned thing then finally bring in various parts of the old database to wind up with a functional website. Without the problems we had before. 

It turns out that I'd created some new ones. We have some plugins that integrate a couple of different features. Dumping the database itself into the new server didn't tie that back up, so an additional import was required and that process was a little delicate. Eventually that seemed to work, and by mid this week I thought I was right to take a day or two away from it. Yeah? No. 

I then discovered that the link between those plugins didn't exist - which meant that the wholesale pricing and stock availability wasn't updating on the front end. That's bad. Our current 100 odd actual products is actually around 5500 actual products when you account for variations. That's a problem. 

I then proceeded to waste a lot of hours effectively fixing that issue - mostly by reimporting products and deleting the broken ones. 

Finally, a break? No.

I discovered yesterday that there was a lot of background processing backed up. Including a lot of deletions that were simply not processing. In fact, each deletion would cause a time out - they're taking a long time for each one.. and there were tens of thousands of them queued. The automated jobs that should clean it up were simply not able to handle it. Bugger.

I suspect the imports of the products that later broke have something about them that seems to require an inordinate amount of processing to pull out of the database. 

It took me the best part of an hour to find a way to force some background processing to clear the backlog. That was 14 hours ago, and it's still running. 

With a bit of luck it'll finish later today and the normal scheduled processing might be able to get back on track. That'd be nice. I'd rather not spend another weekend on it. 

Radio work? Uhhh.. No. I've been keeping an eye on the SSTV traffic, but I haven't been receiving much of note. It's all pretty noisy. I haven't even had time to push the buttons to play with FT8.

The IC208H in the car seems to not like the warmer weather. The screen seems to no longer come on when its warm. The radio itself appears to start OK otherwise. Eventually once the air con has been on for a while if I turn it off and back on, it might come up. In the mornings it seems to be OK. I'm not 100% sure if its just the screen, or it it's my shoddy soldering to those tiny little terminals that links them to RJ45 sockets. I'm not even sure how much I care about that just at the moment. It's not like I drive that far. If it stops working perhaps I'll concern myself with it. Until then, touching it seems like a really good way to make the problem worse and give myself even more that I lack the time to do.