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The nerve! It burns!

So I said a few days ago that I was going to blog more — so much for that idea. Right now I’m standing at an elevated desk in my office, muttering under my breath at the firey pain coursing up and down my right leg, and generally bemoaning my inability to sit down.
I have an injured disc in my spine, at L5-S1, that has been pinching my right sciatic nerve for about 12 years now. I had surgery in 1996 and 2005 on it, and my back is generally in decent shape, but I somehow managed to irritate it last week such that the nerve is again all inflamed and causing pain.
I’m once again finding out just how challenging it is to sit with nerve pain. I haven’t been able to sit in front of my Mac at home to write up a blog post. I’m taking tomorrow off to go see the doctor — maybe I can get my laptop working again and write something up while lying down.

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Preschool presents and PHP

I’ve been at home for the past two days. Yesterday, my son woke up with a nasty cough and hoarse voice, so we kept him home from preschool. My wife had to work during the day and go to her Montessori class in the afternoon, so I stayed home as well to take care of the boy. He’s lots of fun to be around — we went out for lunch to Metropolitan Market, where he scarfed down 8 pieces of California roll and most of an apple, we played ‘cave’ with two sofas and a blanket, and I got some occasional bits of work done while he entertained himself in the sandbox out on the deck. As the day progressed, however, I noticed my throat getting sore, and I had a number of sneezing fits, both of which are usually pretty good indicators that I’m about to become ill myself.
Sure enough, last night I could hardly sleep because my throat hurt so much, and today my head feels like it’s all stuffed up with lovely goo. I decided to stay home from work to get some rest and avoid giving this preschool germ to everyone around me. I got some quality bed rest in the morning, and spent the afternoon tweaking some of the PHP code in one of my WordPress plugins to interact better with Mint.
PHP is weird. There seem to be two distinct styles — HTML with PHP embedded inside of it, or PHP with HTML embedded inside of it. On occasion I’ve seen code where the designer couldn’t keep track of which was inside what, and it’s just a gnarly mess to read. (Then again, I suppose my stuffy head could be part of the problem, too.)
I had intended to spend part of today writing up a MacBU-based post, but I’ve been unable to organize my thoughts well enough, which is why you’re getting this fairly random post instead. Maybe tomorrow, if I feel better.

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RSS Woes

In the process of redirecting my RSS feeds away from FeedBurner, I managed to mess up the FeedBurner settings, so it is redirecting RSS readers to the (now bogus) invisible FeedBurner feed on my site. I’ve futzed with the .htaccess mod_rewrite settings to redirect old RSS subscriptions from that bogus feed to the real one, and I think I’ve got it right. The redirect should be reported to your reader as a permanent one, so NetNewsWire and others should automatically notice the change, but if you have problems, please let me know.
(Of course, RSS-only readers who are having problems won’t see this post… Catch-22.)

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Upgrade!

I just upgraded the site to WordPress 2.5, and removed a bunch of hidden spam in the last few posts. I’ve been amazingly remiss in blogging (that’s what a couple of crunch periods at work will do to any desire to talk about it), and haven’t kept close track of what spammy people have been doing.
Much better now. Much blogging to resume…