Word to the wise. This past week I nearly lost eight years of my life — my Word­press mySQL data­base crashed and burned. Worse, I found out that my host­ing com­pany only keeps back­ups of the pre­vi­ous day’s data — so their back­ups of my stuff was cor­rupted as well.

Thank­fully I had backed up my data in late August. That com­bined with the fact life has pre­vented me from post­ing much in the last few months, meant that I was able to reclaim any miss­ing posts by look­ing at my pre­vi­ous .RSS feeds.

Moral of the story, install the Word­press Backup Plug-​In and have it send you e-mail back­ups of your data on a reg­u­lar basis. Don’t make the same mis­take I did.

This past Sunday, Joe, my father-​in-​law, passed away. Joe lived very long and full life — in his 85 years he marched through south­ern France as an infantry man in WWII, grad­u­ated from RIT when it was down­town, par­tic­i­pated in the atomic bomb tests in the south­west though the U of R, and been loved greatly by friends and family. As an amputee, he’s man­aged to live inde­pen­dently up until he went into the hos­pi­tal two weeks ago. While its ter­ri­bly dif­fi­cult to say good­bye to him, he was facing a life­time of pain and future ampu­ta­tions that would have taken from him the inde­pen­dence he held so dear.

I have more to write, but right now we’re plan­ning for the funeral. It will be Friday at 10.00am at St. Joseph’s in Pen­field. Here’s his obit­u­ary from the D&C. The online “guest book” can be found here.