The Old SQL and Little Saigon

Since Thanksgiving was yesterday, today is a big day for leftovers. Here is a post I wrote in June. It was almost finished when I first wrote it, but it never got published. Since it has some good links and the content is interesting, you might enjoy it.

On Thursday (June 13th) I got an email from my web host saying they were deactivating and deleting anything using version 4 of PHP and MySQL web programming languages. I have received several emails like this over the last few months, but this is one I did not ignore since it is was happening on Monday.

Now for a programming aside. SQL stands for structured query language. SQL is often used for things like an online store. The SQL database will have an entry for each item containing the item's name, description, price, link to a picture, and other assorted stuff. When a customer wants to search for an item by description or price, an SQL query will be generated that will search for certain values in the price or description field. If you know how to use it, an SQL database can do a bunch of stuff. PHP is a server side scripting language. One of its common uses is to interact with an SQL database so a user can access it.

The MySQL 4 database I had to save is for the California Patriot, the political magazine I wrote for in college. Their website and online presence never recovered from my graduation. See the website now for evidence of its infrequent updates. The website had a Wordpress blog as well, which is what I am most concerned with. It used to be a big part of my life; I made over 150 posts and spent countless hours looking for stories, taking pictures, and editing things until they were just right. The students who took over after me broke the blog nine months after I graduated. They asked me for help and I could not fix it. This made all of the archived posts inaccessible. The posts were still in the database, but they could not be accessed online. The blog has been down for over four years.

Most of what I know about blogs and their related programming comes from fixing things for the Patriot blog when I took over as online editor junior year. While I had some random knowledge from a JavaScript class and helping a neighbor set up a website, I was lost when trying to figure out the advanced stuff. My computer crashed many times. With the help of our good friend Google and everyone who posted helpful things online, I figured out how to get by most of the time. A few years ago I wrote a detailed account of My Blogging Backstory.

When I started working on the MySQL database on Thursday, I was surprised at how easy it was for me to do stuff. I was significantly better at figuring things out and getting things done than when I last looked at the site a few years ago. In recent times I must have become three times smarter or more clever.

The end result of all this is the restored blog is temporarily resurrected here. You can also just browse my posts from the beginning back in February of 2006. They were primarily written for an audience in Berkeley that followed some campus, local, and political happenings, but a few of them can be read and appreciated today. Many of my puns are just as good (or just as bad) today. Rereading what I wrote is exciting. My pictures, jokes, and memories of a different time are all great. I can even remember what was going on in my life when I made the posts and how people reacted to them.

Getting everything up and running took some work. Apparently copying and pasting over 8MB of text into a box on a website does not work well. Instead, I had to upload it as a file which then executed 1074 instructions.

Unfortunately some pictures from the Patriot blog were lost. I must have deleted them by accident in the mess of folders a few years ago. I would grab a backup of my posts or find the original pictures, but there were from fall 2006 to mid 2007. My hard drive died in May of 2007, a month before my annual backup of files.

Between the 161 posts I made for the Patriot blog, 11 more for an ancillary Patriot blog, and what I have done here (this is my 260th post) this is my 432th published post. (There were a handful of others, but they are unimportant.)

Because of my Patriot blog beginnings, I kept using the html tags for Wordpress blogs until a couple of weeks ago.

Party in Little Siagon
That was Thursday. On Saturday (June 15th) I helped my supervisor/friend/mentor (friendtor as Amanda says) set up a sound system. It was for an event celebrating the 25th anniversary of the declaration of Little Saigon. For those of you not in the know (or outside of Orange County), there are more Vietnamese people living in the cities of Westminster and Garden Grove and in the surrounding area that any other place outside of Vietnam. The event I helped with was at the Asian Garden Mall. It was mainly a showcase of cultural dances and singing. There were some comments from elected officials, but they were the standard self-promoting comments that are one reason I want nothing to do with politics. It was a big deal. Most of the stuff sounded great, but I would have liked it better if I understood Vietnamese. Around 90% of the things were in Vietnamese.

This video from the Orange County Register gives a good sense of the space we were at. Another video is also online. I am wearing a green short sleeve shirt and standing on the floor next to or behind the black speaker on the pole stand on stage right. I do an amazing job hiding my face. I apologize to everyone familiar with Orange County politicians; they were featured prominently in the videos. Just fast skip those parts and be glad you did not have to be there to see and hear them in person.

An Exciting Development

I do not want to pay attention to the lecture I am in, so I will write a blog post instead!

A lot of stuff has been happening. The most exciting thing, I met a girl.

I met her at a church event over the summer. Then I saw her again at a couple of Beach Newman meetings. One day last month, she got my phone number from a mutual friend and started texting me. In 24 hours, we had exchanged around 100 messages.

We like each other. There are too many examples from her text messages for me to list.

There are some very positive signs and some indications of possible problems. The problems being she does not have a driver’s license and does not have a definite plan to transfer out of community college. She is 21 years old. For over a month I have been saying we should go out and thrown out ideas, but she says she has family stuff to do. Until she spends time with me in person, this can’t move forward.

However, the positives are very positive. We have been averaging 50 text messages a day for the last few days. The subtext from all of them is she likes me and wants a relationship. Most importantly on my end, I am very excited by her. I can't get her out of my mind.

That is all I can think of to write. If you call me or message me I can explain more.