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How to Keep Your WordPress Site Secure and Updated

Much like everything else, websites do need a little housekeeping every so often. Making sure databases are up-to-date, that the site is working as it should, that links are good, and of course, that’s aside from writing content.

Today I’ve been through this site, and done a little tidying up. This site is based on WordPress, and I’ve made sure the templates are all up to date, along with the plug-ins that I have added. This helps minimise security risks.

On the subject of plugins it’s a good idea to assess the use of them periodically too. No point is wasting space and potential safety of the site by having plugins that are no longer in use.

Today, I’ve added one to help me promote my postings beyond the website itself onto a few social media platforms.

One day, my fame might be spread far and wide, and I’ll be able to retire to somewhere permanently sunny and warm. Hey! We live in hope!

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Balancing Work, Life, and Hobbies: A Personal Reflection

We all procrastinate. Well, OK, my mate Alex doesn’t. He is super-disciplined and does everything straight away, if possible.

Me? Well, I never think there are enough hours in the day. I get up, work interminable hours on a typical work day, and usually return home. Once I get home, I wash, change, and make dinner. After dinner, my wife and I exchange details of our daily events, chill for a short while with some music or video (mostly YouTube), and then head to bed to do it all over again.

I do spend a little time keeping a journal, in which I simply make a concise record of my day’s events.

I like to photograph on days off, typically on weekends (mostly the street kind). Then again, there’s the housework and various DIY jobs around the house. There’s not much time left to sit down and write much.

Today, I didn’t feel too well and had a mostly sleepless night, so I called out work, and that has given me time to sit here quietly at my desk and write this. I’ve also got a bunch of photographic post-processing tasks to do and some other websites to update and maintain. Perhaps when I eventually retire, I’ll find more time to write!

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Going Analogue… Sometimes

I mentioned last week that I was considering buying a turntable to connect to the new Home Theatre System, so that I could get my vinyl collection out of hibernation. It’s been several years since I played any of it. I think the last time would have been back when we were in Gillingham and that was 2004, so it’s over twenty years!

Audio-Technica LP140XP

There are very many turntables out there for various price points, but I didn’t want to go too crazy right now, so I opted for an Audio-Technica LP140XP. It’s a DJ deck, which I’m not going to be suing it as, but I was keen to get a direct drive turntable, as they’re more durable, and no worry about belt replacements at any time. I am quite happy with it, although I will probably upgrade the supplied cartridge to something like an Ortofon 2M Red in the future.

I’ve been sorting through my old albums. I have several crates of 45s in the garage loft, which I haven’t got out as yet, although I will do at some point.

I am planning to get some new storage for these albums, but right now, they’re still in cardboard boxes.

I’m not going to go completely analog, as I have some CDs left, even after the big clearout I had when moving back to the UK several years ago. I also pay for streaming services, which I fully intend to keep subscribed to.

Anyway, for now, at least, I’m having fun rediscovering many old albums that I had forgotten about down the years.

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Getting Into 2025

The holiday season is well and truly over. We’re all back to work. The local school have re-opened, and the traffic in the mornings reflects that.

We’ve been slowly getting stuff done at home. We got new curtains ordered which, we’ve hung, and we’ve got a new curtain rod for the rear bedroom, which we’re going to put up this weekend, if all goes to plan.

Still have cabling to tidy up in the front room. We’ve had the TV hung on the wall. All the Christmas food and snacks have gone except for some crisps that are left over, which we are slowly munching through. The mince pies are finished. They take a while to go, as I am the only one that eats them.

I’ve taken the plunge, and found a good deal on a turntable, so it’s on order from Amazon. I’ve had my old vinyl lurking in the attic and the spare bedroom for so long, and I’ve been promising myself I would get to play them again. Now we have the Denon receiver, it’s just a case of buying and plugging in a turntable, so that’s what I’m doing. I’ll write more on this, once I have new equipment in place.

The weather is too darn cold for my liking. It’s not really risen above freezing point here all day, and at the time of writing it’s 2pm, so it’s not going to get any warmer now!

Oh well, perhaps I’ll have a warming beer on the way home.

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Another Solar Circumnavigation

Today, I’m the birthday boy.

I know I’ve had some rheumatoid arthritis issues lately, but aside from that, and certainly mentally, I don’t feel my age.

Kathy went back to work today and I had the opportunity off working overtime, so that was a weird sort of present to myself. Weird yes, but it’s the bigger pay packet next week that’s the present.

I’m going to try and write more this year and with more detail. For that, I need to be more spontaneous. I remember a lot less about moods and feelings if I’m writing this up some days later.

The dictation on the iPhone is pretty good these days,  and I intend to use that more, but I can only do that when I’m in a personal space.

Another thing I want to do is take more random photographs. Yes, I do go out with my camera and do some street photography, but I want to get more casual daily snaps; they can be on the camera or on the iPhone too.

It’s a nice sunny day out there today, but it’s chilly. It was several degrees below freezing this morning when I got up at 4.45 am and it’s not much warmer now at almost midday.

I got finished at work at 3 pm and headed straight home. I thought about going to the pub, but there were some parcels to pick up from the neighbours so I thought it best to get that out of the way. Of course, once I was indoors in the warm, I didn’t want to go out again. Also, I was planning on making dinner at home, and going to the pub after 4 pm would almost certainly mean we would eat there, and we did that just last evening. The food is very good, but it doesn’t do wonders for the household budget!

After getting the new coffee machine, I had a poke around with the settings. You can set up to four separate people profiles. I decided to check out a latté. That isn’t a drink I usually have as it’s too milky for me. I chose an XL size and intensity 3 on the machine. It was too milky and not strong enough, and it was right to the brim of my mug. So, I set the size to L, and the intensity to 4. I’ll try again tomorrow perhaps!

I’m making rump steak, sautéed potatoes, and broccoli for dinner this evening. A photo, I hear you ask? No, we were too hungry, and forgot all about taking one!

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One Ends; Another Starts

So another one bites the dust. It doesn’t seem five minutes ago that we were seeing in the new millennium, and already we’re a quarter of the way through the first century.

Two things seem to be true. Time flies when you’re having fun, and by and large most of the past quarter century has been fun. There’s been a few sticky moments, but nothing that hasn’t been overcome.

The second thing is that time goes quicker as you get older. It’s just how we perceive the passing of time of course. It doesn’t go any quicker really. A revolution of the earth, or its orbit around the sun don’t change (aside from the astronomically measured wobbles); A day is still a day and a year is still a year.

A lot of people make New Year resolutions, but I’m not one for that, knowing full well that they’re mostly broken before the end of the first month, if not the first week!

Still I do like to take stock. I try to meet my reading challenge each year, and fail miserably. Not that I don’t read, but I read less books and more blogs. I also like to listen to music, and I can’t seriously do both at the same time. I’m trying to squirrel away a few quid each week too, for savings. I’ve generally been bad at saving most of my life, but I’m making efforts on that front. Better late than never.

There could be some work changes later this year, with elections in March, but we’ll have to see how that pans out.

Right now though, we’ve had a quiet start to the New Year. We stayed home and saw the London fireworks on TV. I did venture out on New Year’s Day. One of the many advantages of NOT drinking the night before, was I could enjoy a beer instead of nursing a hangover!

January 2nd sees us go out for a little personal pampering. I needed to get an ingrowing toenail looked at again, although it was only a couple of months ago that it was dealt with last. Kathy convinced me to have a pedicure too, while I was there, which was actually most pleasant and left my feet feeing very refreshed.

A cup of coffee.

Right now, the sun is out, although it will be dark in a little over an hour. It’s quite chilly out there, but the coffee in Ballucci is good and helped me write this post.

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More Than A Casual Link?

Yesterday, I took my Infliximab injection late. Over a week late. I had that very bad shoulder pain, which felt it was like in joints and muscles.  I have done some reading about it online, and Rheumatoid Arthritis is an autoimmune condition much like Crohn’s and about 35-40% of Crohn’s sufferers also have R.A. 

After taking the Infliximab injection yesterday morning, the shoulder pain has dissipated, and the only pain is that in my middle fingers, which I seem to get from time to time in any case. Thinking back too, before I was on the injections – we’re going back 4-5 years now – I was often getting pain in my upper arms and shoulders, which I usually no longer get – until I missed this injection last week, that is! 

What have I learnt from this? 1. Do NOT forget to take one’s meds on time! 2. There COULD be a link between the late injection and the extra pain that I have had, but of course, it’s not any kind of scientifically run test. I didn’t miss the injection on purpose anyway!


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Feeling One’s Age?

I was reading a post online a day or two ago from someone who was complaining that they were ‘feeling their age’ and they had just turned 63. There was a reply from someone who was about twenty older than that, painting a picture of mounting immobility.

I’ve just turned 65 last week. I really cannot believe that.

I don’t feel much different than 10,20,30 years ago. There are a couple of changes though. I do find myself feeling a little stiffer in the joints when I’ve been in one position for some time, such as lying in bed or sitting at my desk here in the office. I also find myself feeling like a nap when I get home in the late afternoon. I’ve never been one for taking daytime naps, and, even now, if I were to go to bed for a post-lunch lie-down, I wouldn’t sleep, but I do find myself nodding off on the sofa. I also can’t chuck down the beers like I used to without feeling decidedly ‘off’ the next day. Not hungover, with a headache or nausea, you’ll understand, just ‘off’. Finally, for now, I’ve changed from being a night owl who couldn’t get to sleep at night, to being very ready for bed by ten pm, and awake soon after five am!

I really don’t think about my age very much. There’s not much I can do about it anyway. The days, weeks, months and years tick by, and it is true that they seem to go quicker as you get older.

I don’t feel old at all though, and my mind is still twenty something in many ways. No, I don’t want to go hang out with friends and party and drink all night, but I didn’t do that an awful lot even back then, just once in a while and it was fun then, but doesn’t feel like it would be fun now, either to do, or to suffer the after effects the next morning!

I am trying to be a bit more active, but then again, I’ve never been much a gym type and never played any active sports, not since I left school, and I wasn’t much of a fan even back then!

Old is not in my personal vocabulary, but I shall shall try and age gracefully, whatever that may entail, and I hope I long keep the ability to wander around town when I wish to!

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Back in 2007

I had just joined Facebook, and I was writing down some of my daily activities. I was mostly working from home in those days, so I was reliant on both a computer and the Internet. A couple of the things we still debate is how we would or wouldn’t cope without the Internet, and how much time spent online is too much. Here is such a post from back then…

Outage

Yesterday afternoon a passing thunderstorm co-incided with a complete loss of cable service.

Now here at Kimjac Towers we are pretty much reliant on it, as we use it for the Internet, for the TV, and for the phone.

For the first few minutes, I kept thinking that it would come up again in just a moment, but it didn’t, and then I resolved that I didn’t need to have the net to get some tasks done; that I could live without it for a while.

That was it really. Internet. No, l’m not an Internet addict, but I do rely on it for much of my work, and also for entertainment at times, and as a general information source.

There is that question, and reply from some:

“What would you do without the Internet? When I was growing up we didn’t have it!”

OK, well to respond to that is quite simple. When I was growing up, I didn’t have Internet. I didn’t get my first simple computer until I was 22. That, folks, was a Sinclair ZX81, with 1K RAM. I added a 16K RAM pack to it. Yes 16K, you read it correctly.

In 1985, I got a Commodore 64. I then heard about an online service called Compunet. I signed up. I’ve been online ever since. 1987 was the year I got my first PC. Even back then I wanted a “serious” machine, rather than a games system. It came with 640K RAM, a 12 inch VGA monitor (Standard VGA was 256 colors at 640 x 480), and a 30MB Hard Drive. It also had one of the new 3.5inch floppy drives. The whole thing cost around $2,000.

It came with MS-DOS 3.3, and a set of disks marked Windows 1.0 I installed Windows 1.0, and there was a GUl, with some widget things like a notepad, and a clock, and a very simple Word processor, and that was about it. I took it off, as it was not really much use. I stayed firmly in the DOS camp for the next 6 years. The only reason I finally gave in, and put Windows 3.1 on my computer, was that I wanted to be able to look at this new-fangled World Wide Web, and I couldn’t do that in DOS – well not graphically anyway. I’d gotten my first proper Internet account in 1993, and wanted to go explore.

For me though, the most exciting thing was email! I could communicate with all these people everywhere – well I could once I got everyone else I knew on the net too!

What’s the Internet? What’s a modem? Why do I want that?

Now we take it pretty much for granted, and miss it when it goes out.

So to the person that makes the statement about how we lived before it – yes we did of course. Same as we did before the mobile phone, digital camera, telephone, television, radio, and even electricity. There are still plenty of elderly folks in rural America that will tell you about life on a farm without electricity, and how the REA from 1935 onwards bought light into their homes.

So back to yesterdays outage. What did I do? I did some local file maintenance on the network, and then took the opportunity to get away from the computer for a while and go read a book.

After all, the computer is one of our slaves, not our master, right?

What did I learn from this? I learned that it is a good idea to have some non-Internet tasks in the to-do list, so that during a time of outage I can still get on with some work.

I still do not let the computer become my master either, but treat it as a useful tool with which to work, communicate and also entertain. However, I also make sure I have a back-up. A physical notebook, a regular telephone, music to listen to, and books to read.

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Music Down The Years

I’ve always had very catholic tastes in music. Catholic in terms of all-encompassing, broad-minded, and inclusive. There aren’t any musical genres that I refuse to listen to, although there are several that I much prefer. Also, just because I don’t like something, doesn’t mean it isn’t good music. It’s just not to my taste.

As someone born at the tail end of the 1950s, I first became aware of music in the mid-’60s; in those days in our house there was no all-day television, and the radio was on most of the day. Radio was used much more in those days as entertainment. We only had the BBC, although we could get a few station broadcasting from mainland Europe, such as Hilversum from Holland, and Radio Luxembourg. The BBC of the day was still very staid, like an elderly auntie, as the BBC was affectionately known. Not like today when almost everyone seems to have the knives out for the corporation!

The Light Programme played mostly light music. That was the dance music of the day, not as we would think of it these days, but orchestral tunes, from the likes of Mantovani and Victor Sylvester.

The Third Programme was the classical station, and the Home Service was, in its own way in those times, talk radio.

There were plays on the radio, there were quiz shows, there were lectures, documentaries, and political discussions. There were even radio soap operas and The Archers hold the record for being the longest running soap in the world, having debuted in the halcyon radio days of 1951.

There was though, almost no pop music. Nothing from the charts of the day. There was but one show for one hour per week, with a run-down of the charts and that was that. In the mid-60s some enterprising folks set up radio stations on ships (and wartime forts) broadcasting from outside the three mile limit in international waters. Unlike the BBC they play the pop tunes of the day, and many teenagers, having purchased the new transistor radios, which ran from batteries and were portable, tuned into these ‘pirates’. It wasn’t just the kids though. My mother always enjoyed music and she would tune in too. They were all AM stations, or ‘Medium Wave’ as it was known. There was Radio London, Radio Veronica, Radio City, Radio North Sea International, Radio 390, and probably the most remembered, Radio Caroline. The authorities didn’t like this one bit and within three years they were closed down by the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act of 1967, which made it illegal to advertise or supply these stations. They all closed down except for one or two that decided to carry on.

The Government reorganised BBC Radio and The Light Programme became Radio 2; the Third Programme become Radio 3, and the Home Service become Radio 4. A brand new station, Radio 1 started up, using a lot of the DJs that had been broadcasting on the pirate stations.

We now had all-day pop music! However, it was just one station. In the early ’70s the BBC started to set up local radio stations, and that gave a bit more variety. It wasn’t until 1973, when commercial radio was given the go-ahead that things really started to change and the teenagers of the day (of which I was one), had a much better choice of contemporary music.

Cassette players came along, and most of us bought one and tried to record stuff from the radio, hoping the DJ wouldn’t take over the records too much!

I started a Saturday job and had some money of my own, so I bought a record player and started buying records. I did go a bit crazy with that, as I always enjoyed music, and it was good to play what you wanted to play when you wanted to, which you could with records and tapes of course.

When I started writing this article, I didn’t intend to start with a history of music on the radio, but it was such a big part of my early years, I couldn’t really omit it.

Anyway, I really started listening to a mix of radio and my parents 78s, which were definitely pre-rock ‘n’ roll! It led to a love of that music from those far away days, before even I was born that I still sometimes enjoy to this day.

In the 70’s though, I really got into the pop music scene. Some of my friends didn’t, and considered pop music somehow beneath them, but I swallowed most of it up. I did tend to go for the rock side of the charts though, more than the bubblegum stuff; preferring Queen to the Bay City Rollers, or Alice Cooper to David Essex.

As we moved into the ’80s and I settled down and quit partying and also got married, bought a house, and then along came the kids, my disposable income available for music went down somewhat. That was pretty much in line though with my enthusiasm for pop music waning as the decade wore on. I got busy with life, and although I still listened to music, I was more and more listening to the old stuff from the ’60s and ’70s and not paying much mind to the pop charts. The ’90s came and went musically as did the noughties. I was in the United States for a while, and I really got into Americana. I’ve always liked British Folk Music but Americana is, of course, something different. Returning to the UK and as broadband bandwidth increased, and the streaming libraries from the likes of Spotify and Apple Music and others grew bigger, and the quality got better, I started listening to more and more contemporary jazz and I’ve also developed a love for electronic music of many kinds, such a trance, techno, drum and bass, house, and EDM.

As I write this in 2023, I am looking forward to what the next twenty years will bring to the music scene. Some will go in one ear and out of the other, but I know that some I will embrace enthusiastically.