News Archive - August, 2007

Yesterday I finally had an orthopedist look at my shoulder after four or five years of pain. I had tried massages and chiropractic adjustments to get rid of the tightness and knots, but nothing seemed to work too well. A few months ago, I had an injection of Depo-Medrol to relieve the pain and try to loosen up the muscles, which seemed to work a little. The visit was pretty quick and the doctor recommended physical theraphy, so I should be starting that pretty soon.

Today is a day we've been anxiously waiting for — our first time seeing our baby. We had our prenatal appointment this afternoon and we got to see the baby on the ultrasound machine. Kristin's 8 weeks along, which puts the due date at March 17, which is one day after my birthday. It was pretty amazing to see how small it is (1.6 cm) and to watch its heart beating around 170 beats per minute.

Last night I had my MRI for my knee. It took much longer than I expected and the opening was much smaller than I expected. Regardless, I didn't mind it at all — I was actually pretty comfortable laying on the table and the noise didn't bother me at all. Unfortunately I don't find out the results until next week.

This morning I had the first treatment for my shoulder that actually felt like it helped. Of course, it was the one thing I've been avoiding for the past decade — physical therapy. Katie recommended the facility to me and because of her referral the screening was free. The therapist said the average session schedule for the best results is three sessions per week for four weeks, so that's what I'll be doing starting next Monday. I will also be continuing my sessions with my personal trainer, and will be getting recommendations from my therapist for exercises to do at the gym. If 12 sessions of physical therapy can cure four years of pain, I will be amazed...and extremely excited.

Today I received the results of my MRI and the diagnosis was "normal knee MRI." Since the pain has diminished since my first visit, the orthopedist recommended trying to resume normal activity as long as the pain doesn't get worse. I may have Plica Syndrome, which can be very difficult to diagnose without surgery (the orthopedist said it's common to give a diagnosis of Plica Syndrome because no other cause can be found). In most cases this can be treated with rest and anti-inflammatory medication, however it can require arthroscopy. I plan on resuming normal activity (which I already mostly have) while taking ibuprofen and doing the exercises from when I had a torn ligament.

About a month ago, I upgraded tried to upgrade my Gallery to version 2.2.1. I wasn't having any problems with the current version. There were no features in the new version that I wanted to use that weren't available in my current version. In fact, I didn't even know there was a new version — until I started getting daily emails from Fantastico telling me to upgrade.

For those that don't know, Fantastico is a tool which automates the installation of web applications (which when compared to a normal install pretty much equates to the difference between installing something in Windows vs. installing something through a Linux CLI). Having installed Gallery through Fantastico in a matter of seconds, I figured the upgrade would be just as easy. I logged into my control panel, went to Fantastico and clicked the upgrade button for Gallery. Because the Internet hates me, at some point the upgrade failed.

With almost 6,000 images posted, I got a little nervous. I went to my Gallery site and saw a page that said the site was in the middle of an upgrade and said I could login to complete the upgrade. At this point, I thought maybe there were certain steps that had to be done manually. I clicked my way through the upgrade and got a ton of errors. When I was done, I was back at the original screen telling me the site was in the middle of an upgrade. I tried to walk through the steps again...and again...and again... This is when I learned that 2.2 is not backward-compatible with 2.0 — not at all.

I spent a full week trying everything I could and eventually got to the point where only half of the site was broken. The albums showed up (with most thumbnails being broken), but if I tried to go to any of the admin pages, I got the screen telling me the site was in the middle of an upgrade. I eventually broke down and did a fresh install of Gallery, then manually moved over all my albums. This was extremely tricky to accomplish because of the major differences in how the two versions work.

I spent the past week moving data, manually setting all of the album thumbnails because I couldn't figure out any way to automate that data migration, installing plug-ins to regain the old functionality, etc.. Tonight I finished the first phase: getting all the albums moved over and displaying properly. Now all I have to do is re-create my custom theme, which I'm really looking forward to doing...