I dislocated my shoulder…again. First time was 3 years ago while half climbing onto / half falling off of my roof while putting up Christmas lights. That one required an ambulance and morphine.

Well, this time I got a Motrin and a healthy dose of frustration from Harris Methodist Hospital.

As freaky as the first dislocation, so was this one. I was in the passenger seat of our Equinox. My lovable, yet 13-year old (seriously 13 and dramatic…I love you baby) was behaving not so well, so I spun around to reprimand her and the seat ever so efficiently popped my shoulder out of place.

I heard it and groaned. A few feeble attempts at pushing it back in place and then the pain began.

We boogied over to Harris Money First Methodist Hospital and waited about 1 1/4 hours with other moaning people. The place was packed. I declined the pain shot in my “buttock” as the nurse wanted to do. Moving was excruciating. There was no way it was gonna happen. Getting the x-ray was torture enough. I mean, why the formalities. It was obvious I had no left shoulder. I looked like GI Joe with his arm put on backwards. Just pop the sucker in place already.

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At the design company I work at we are expanding our knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Since our main programming guru(ess) also handles everything related with site and server administration, I’m cheerfully the one with the time to research the art and science of SEO.

I just downloaded Xenu Link Sleuth. It is a easy to use, superfast, broken link checker. Oh, and it’s free. I am just in the process of checking it out. I ran a trial test on my NASCAR racing blog (which btw houses the Ultimate NASCAR Database). I didn’t think I would have ANY broken links. Xenu found 28. When I changed my blog to it’s own folder (no longer in the root directory) I had previous posts pointing to its original position. Oops.

Why not get the program and give your site a looksee. You may be surprised.

I’ve had this PC 1 1/2 years. How odd my keyboard looked this morning. I stared at the 11 button row of shortcuts across the top, like it was the first time seeing them.

• sleep
• images
• music
• video
• hp
• internet
• help
• search
• shopping cart
• email
• mute

I fired up my music player with the music note. Then tried out the mute button. Pressed the email button. Tried the search. Wow. It needs some configuring, but that’s a breeze. I’m always amazed at how I (we) will continue to do things the familar way instead of embracing an easier way. Not in the vein of being lazy, just easier. I think the lazy part is actually not investing the few minutes to learn and set it up.

I told my wife about my discovery and she said, “Yeah, it’s great. That’s how I connect to the internet and get my email at work.”

Hmmm.

The opposite of “I’m getting fat.” Which is the direction I want to go.

My wife, oldest daughter and I joined a local health club 2 weeks ago, and thusfar have been as dedicated as any January Fitness resoluter. Health clubs are busier now than any other time of the year. This article says that 57% of an about.com poll’s respondents say losing weight is at the top of their New Year’s Resoultion list.

Today, we met with a trainer to be measured, tested and instructed. An introduction to the Food Exchange chart has us looking closely at everything we eat. He advised against any fanaticism. Instead, suggesting smaller food portions, aerobic exercise and circuit weight training.

As a matter of record, my wife’s body fat percentage is 40%, mine is 30% and my daughters is….

I anticipate and expect to share lower numbers in the future.

Meanwhile, I’ve got to go put the chicken breast’s on the grill and try some of this Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter my wife just came home with.

Just finished converting a client site from a table layout to a CSS & XHTML Wordpress 2.0 site. It was as much for my own satisfaction as it was for his necessity. He wants some control over the content and the WordPress back-end beats any PHP & MySQL CMS that I could put together. Besides, he wasn’t being billed enough to warrant custom programming.

I estimated 1 hour to transfer our dev server version to his hosted account with Go Daddy. My bad. It took most of my day.

Things I learned:

Go Daddy’s MySQL databases are not friendly. A google search revealed that consensus, as many have had problems installing WordPress on a Go Daddy server.

Problem #1
The WordPress wp-config-sample.php file gets your database information and then renamed to wp-config.php…

2 // ** MySQL settings ** //
3 define('DB_NAME', 'wordpress'); // The name of the database
4 define('DB_USER', 'username'); // Your MySQL username
5 define('DB_PASSWORD', 'password'); // ...and password
6 define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); // 99% chance you won't need to change this value

Lines 3, 4 and 5 are straight-forward. Line 6 is the bugger. As a Go Daddy client you are in the 1%.

Big thanks to WordPress user Pradob of Prado Design for his detailed solution on obtaining the correct information for the DB_HOST. (He also has some awesome, inexpensive photos on his site. Check him out.)

1. Login on Godaddy.com
2. Go to “Host & Servers ” press “My Hosting Account”
3. Once inside, on the “Manage Hosting”, select your registred domain and press “Open” on Control Panel.
4. A new window will open with your “Hosting Manager”
5. Scroll down to “Databases” and click on MySQL icon
6. A database information will appear. Click on the username underlined
7. Now will you see exactly your DatabaseName and Hostname
8. Sign out of your “Hosting Manager” and “Godaddy Account”

Now your set, right? Well, maybe…or not.

Problem #2

The last step in the WordPress Famous 5 minute installation is to point your browser to www.yoursite.com/wp-admin/install.php and let the program do its magic.

No magic today. Just this simple message:

‘Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.’

This problem has an easy enough solution.

Open your WordPress file wp-settings.php and around line 39 and 40 you’ll find:

if ( !extension_loaded('mysql') )
die( 'Your PHP installation appears to be missing the MySQL which is required for WordPress.' );

Just comment it out by using /* before the ‘if’ in the first line and put */ after the ‘);’ in the second line.

Problem #3

Go Daddy disables the php mail() function on Windows servers. Which, is what this client had. There went his snazzy PHP contact form. We ressurrected one in .asp. and moved along.

Problem #4

As a result of the mail() function being disabled, make sure you write down your WordPress password. Because, you’ll never get the email your WordPress install sends you with that information.

I’m curious what other little p-i-t-a surprises we’ll find with Go Daddy. Today’s experience alone makes me wholeheartedly in favor of advising anyone to go elsewhere for web site hosting.

I’ve used Simplenet for several installs of WordPress and have been nothing but delighted.