A friend of mine talked to us about the college she attended, Claremont McKenna. I was expecting a typical recital of, “It was a good college… ” but instead she spoke how it was a transformational experience. Ostensibly my wife and I were looking into feeder colleges for child #2, who wants to go into medicine, but came away with a thought that this might be a much better choice for child #1. Since we were heading down to LA anyway, we decided to swing by and take a look.
So we listened to the admissions counselor and took the tour. The place sounds perfect for #1 kid. They want writers, philosophers, thinkers. And it’s a small, intimate atmosphere which makes it just about perfect for #1. I came away with the strong feeling that they teach the student, not the subject, and expect that the student will participate in this learning actively. They only have about 1200 students on the campus, so admission to the school is probably pretty competitive, given that probably 4,000 apply every year.
But man! I do agree that this would be a perfect school for #1 daughter. Right up her alley. So naturally, being the kind, supportive parents we are, we came back and talked it up. I think we will have to visit the place again, but I hope this is a match for her.
Well, for those of you following the trials and travails of the website overall, you will be relieved to know that it is finally back online. I don’t know quite what I did to it (well, actually, I know roughly what I did but no one seems to know why it broke) but I’ll tell you this: backup, backup, backup.
I foolishly installed an admin patch (what was I thinking!?!) without backing up the other files overall. Supposedly the patch fixes a timeout issue with the content management system we use, so I just dropped the files in, and voila! I was locked out of the system and kept getting invalid sessions. I have no idea what finally fixed it - I tried backing out the fix, I tried reinstalling the entire set of files, I even upgraded the entire CMS. None of that worked.
I kept looking in the forums for help, came across a few ideas, and while I’m not sure what did the trick, the last thing I tried was resetting the security permissions. That seemed to do it, so now I’m putting the permissions back the way they were. Ugh.
Anyway, the site was completely offline for a while. What was both maddening and reassuring was that the photo gallery and the blogs were all still working; even though they are partially controlled by the CMS. I really am glad it’s back online and I will go and invest in some backup utilities.
If you visited and could not move around the site, sorry about that. I think we’re back now and the interesting part is that we have upgraded most of the site - as a result of my trying just about everything.
Well, not Simon and Garfunkle, that’s for sure. Today the site was down. I use Joomla to manage the content and somewhere along the line the whole thing just hiccuped. Fortunately the Joomla crowd had the answer on the forum. One of the top dogs answered my post for help, suggested that the site problem only looked like a) but was really b) and lead me to the answer. Sweet.
I had to mess with the site configuration files but hopefully it won’t happen again, Mom, I swear!
Yeah, like I really know what I’m doing or why it happened. Just one of those things, man. S*#@ Happens.
Celebrated Sandy’s birthday on Thursday. Took everyone to a fabulous meal at Foreign Cinema, in the market district of the city. I really like that place. A great concept: dinner and a movie.
The guys at work were quizzing me about it and that started an expanded conversation that Foreign Cinema offers a brunch and that it’s really worth trying. I guess I’ll have to put that on on the list of things to do.
