John Ó'Ríordáns Blog

I’m wrecked from training all week so I am going to stay in this weekend. I’m going to save my money, and liver, for Paddy’s Day. Since Lorri is gone home for the weekend I am going to spend some quality time with Call of Duty Modern Warfare II. If anybody wants to join me at any time my gamer tag is thesraid.

In the cinema waiting for the movie to start. I came way to early so I’m playing with my phone.

A picture from my bedroom at the mothers house.

I downloaded the wordpress app for my iPhone today. Now I can easily blog from anywhere. It’s very easy to use and I highly recommend it. Plus now that my blog is linked to buzz and facebook it’s real easy to post everywhere.

With Google Buzz I’ve been able to add my blog entries to my updates. I’ve decided to do the same in Facebook. So hopefully this entry will appear in Facebook. If you’ve a blog and you want to do the same the steps are available at http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=818

Finished my laser eye surgery last week. The procedure was very easy. It didn’t hurt and wasn’t uncomfortable. Pretty much the first thing they did was put a vacuum over the eye to make the cut. After that I couldn’t really see anything so it wasn’t weird or anything. If anybody is thinking of going for it they shouldn’t worry. I was very nervous going in, in fact I was shaking. But it’s so easy. The only thing was I jumped when the laser fired. It’s very loud. However the procedure was much easier than the dentist or anything like that. If they told me I had to go back tomorrow and do the procedure as well it wouldn’t bother me in the slightest.

Check out a YouTube video of someone’s surgery. And listen for the laser it’s so loud! Oh and you can smell your eye burning when they fire the laser. Very cool.

I know it looks uncomfortable but with the local anaesthetic drops they put in you don’t feel a thing!

My vision is much better. In fact I could pretty much see straight after the surgery. However it was a little blurry compared to when I was wearing my contact lenses. But compared to what I could see without lenses it was brilliant. Around 80% of what I used to see with the lenses.

However my vision is still blurry three weeks later. It hasn’t seemed to improve at all since the day after the operation. Everything is kind of blurry and I have slight double vision (what they call ghosting apparently). So I rang the surgeon and asked for an appointment. Which I have tomorrow. I am getting headaches in work straining to see the projector and students computer screens. And I am kind of nervous driving still.

But perhaps it is improving but just too slowly to see. We’ll find out tomorrow.

I have a few websites running in this server. One of them is the Riverside Crew MCC site my brother runs. I moved it from one folder to the other on my server. When I did a lot of the images no longer worked. It turns out that you need to manually specify the folder that stores images in wordpress. Since I moved all of the blog to a new folder that location no longer existed. So obviously I updated the location in Settings > Miscellaneous (Not Settings > Media as you would expect). However that didn’t work either.

Looking at the links where the images used to be I can see that it still points to the old location. So it looks like when you change that settings it is for any images you are going to upoad. It doesn’t update old links. After a bit of Googling a figured out that you will have to update each link in the database individually. It explains how this is achieved on the Wordpress site.

However I found an easier solution. I simply created a shortcut in the old location pointing to the new location. For example I moved the wp-contents/images folder from /var/www/html/site/wp-content/images to /var/www/html/site/blog/wp-content/images. So all I needed to do was create a link in the old location pointing to the new location. Once that was done everything worked fine again. Without having to mess around in the database!

First I recreated the wp-content folder in the old location

mkdir /var/www/html/site/wp-content

Then I changed to this directory

cd /var/www/html/site/wp-content

Then I created the link to the new images folder

ln -s  /var/www.html/site/blog/wp-content/images images

And voilá!

Going to get laser eye surgery tomorrow. Pretty nervous now. Although it’s surprising how many people have got it. I mentioned it at work and there were four or five people who had got it before. They all seem very happy with it so fingers crossed. I’ve spoken to a few people who got it done with the surgeon I am going to and they are all very happy. It’s still pretty pricy, around €4,000 altogether. But hopefully it’ll be worth it.

I have to wear my glasses for the next week because I am getting Laser Eye surgery next Thursday. There is nothing in this world I hate more than having to wear glasses. Especially if the weather is going to pick up over here because now I can’t wear sunglasses. Plus I look like a nerd with my glasses on.

I complained to one of the Aussie guys over here and he told me to “take a teaspoon of concrete and harden the fuck up“. What a great phrase. I’m stealing it. And he’s dead right.

Messy Cables

I have too many cables for all my electronics. I brought the wrong cable for my phone to the US. Now I have no way to charge it! I’ve taken a few photos on it as well that I wanted to upload. Looks like they’ll be a big photo update when I get back. Or in fact maybe not so big cos the phone will be dead soon so I won’t be able to take any photos.