Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Blog update, forum crash.

Some have you may have noticed that my blog has a new look. Others may have noticed that the Israeli polyamory forum that I'm hosting has crashed, losing all information. Both of these events have to do with my (paid) hosting account at bluehost.com.

It all started when I wanted to upgrade my ancient wordpress install (with some custom modifications) to a more modern and standard install. So, I backed up my blog and database and proceeded to install the new version. This required a few iterations, each requiring to delete the old instance of the blog.

My major mistake was during one of those installations, I have misclicked and deleted the wrong site -- the active poly forum. The delete action did create a backup, but since the database was exported using the wrong encoding, all Hebrew data (including the entire forum) was lost.

I immediately called my hosting provider, but they did not have backups of my account. I never set up a backup script for my hosting account, so the entire contents were lost.

I did reinstall a new forum and the blog. I am now working on a backup solution for my account.

The new blog has several nifty features: On the right sidebar you may find my current exact location. Also, the subscription system should work better and replies could be verified by OpenID.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Happy π day!

Today is March 14th, aka pi day, a day celebrating one of the most important numbers in mathematics - π.

Since I happened to be in Germany today, I celebrated π day with my brother and his wife by making 2π -- a yummy beef pie for dinner and a chocolate pie for dessert.

 Beef pie for pi day


For dessert we decided to make the pie even more meaningful and decorate the pie with the first few digits of π, resulting in a delicious, and informative pie:

Chocolate pi with digits!


More photos are available on Flickr and Facebook.


In other news, I'll be arriving in Israel on Tuesday. If you want to meet me, let me know...