The PolyBlog

I’m finally back in business for my websites

April 19 2021

Well, it has been almost two months since the technical support people at my website hosting partner accidentally nuked my site. The changes they made screwed up the site and the backups wouldn’t restore properly, leaving me with a huge reliability problem for some of the content. Pages that would work one minute and crash the next, posts that wouldn’t display properly, some pages or posts that disappeared altogether yet were still “active” on the site. Glitches that were annoying and not something I could leave in the site nor was I able to simply “fix” them.

I had all my data, but I needed to nuke the account and rebuild everything entirely. I rebuilt two sites that I host for others, and the content of those was relatively easy with a few annoying features, but it was the main PolyWogg.ca site that was the biggest challenge. 200 pages, 1600 posts, 1.6M words, 400 comments…all needing to be reloaded. And, as I noted, some glitches were embedded in several posts that required me to essentially reload things manually.

Working around the clock

But after two weeks of existential angst and six weeks of working at least 4h/day (at least 10h/day on weekends), and about 260 hours of work in total, my sites are back in business.

Because I had to rebuild the sites, and I didn’t want people getting daily update notices, I had to “force unsubscribe” anyone who was subscribed to my original feed for PolyWogg. Back on March 6, I sent them all emails to say, “Well, the site is down, and I’ll email you again when it comes back up”, while redirecting people to Facebook or Twitter to find me for now or in the future. I’m a little sad that many of them won’t resubscribe, but that’s the nature of the beast when running websites.

Today, I re-invited everyone to rejoin, we’ll see how many do. I now have two feeds though, one for each website.

PolyWogg.ca which includes my more formal “products”, such as my HR Guide, reviews, recipes, and astronomy-related posts;

and

ThePolyBlog.ca which includes my more informal blog posts, such as posts on Life (experiences, family, humour and computer-related topics like the website itself); The Little Grey Cells (more thoughtful topics like learning and ideas, writing and publishing, quotes, and health and spiritualism); goals; and my annual reading challenges.

If anyone else wants to subscribe by email, here are the two links:

PolyWogg.ca: https://polywogg.ca/about-polywogg-ca/subscribe/
ThePolyBlog: https://www.thepolyblog.ca/about-thepolyblog/subscribe/

Of course, people may prefer to access my posts through Facebook (PolyWogg.ca) or via my Twitter feed (@ThePolyBlog), as I try to post notices of new content to both feeds. I had to “force stop” the feeds during the rebuild process too, albeit one seemed to occasionally update anyways on Facebook for a few posts, but everything is back live again.

Of course, the work is never done

I have a few areas that will require more work still, but that isn’t entirely due to the website torching. As I rebuilt, I took the opportunity to redirect some of my efforts in a bit different direction. As a result, some of the solutions are not totally compatible with the previous structure. My trivia efforts had to be reset, my photo gallery is moved over to Flickr, and I’m taking a whole new approach to my PolyWogg Guide to Astronomy. Most of that change though is that as I did the other changes, I figured out better ways to handle those options too. That’s a longer term project though, and I’ll get to it over time. I don’t need to relaunch with those today.

On the other hand, I’ve done pretty well. Both sites (PolyWogg.ca and ThePolyBlog) are running about 45 plugins in total, and about 20 or so are new ways to handle the content (replacing older plugins that I was running before). I’ll blog about that in a bit more detail as the week goes on. More importantly to the reader, I have 604 posts / 45 pages / 570K words on PolyWogg.ca. Plus about 230 comments, most related to my HR Guide. Meanwhile, ThePolyBlog has 879 posts / 14 active pages / 981K words, plus about 220 comments. I’ve also streamlined the categories on both sites quite a bit.

As the planet starts to emerge from the COVID pandemic, one of the phrases being used is “Build Back Better”. I’m not 100% certain that it’s perfectly re-built, but it’s definitely better than it was, with more extensive branding for sub-areas, particularly the PolyWogg “products” like my HR Guide.

And more importantly?

It’s all the way back, baby! Onward!

Update on my rebuilding of my websites

April 17 2021

Well, it is almost two months from the fateful day when I received the email from my hosting company’s tech support that they had run a compression option on my website AND an optimization plugin. Either one alone was enough to send me into shock as compression has NEVER worked well on my site with the plugins I run, and optimization runs by deleting orphan elements in your database. Except there’s really no such thing as a universal orphan — some plugins treat autosaves that you haven’t worked on in two weeks as orphans and wants to delete them.

Sure enough, it nuked my site. Restores from backups ran into conflicts with the caching software and the result was that everything did NOT restore perfectly. Some posts would look fine one day and the next would crash when loading; some plugins on the backend wouldn’t load at all, and then an hour later worked fine. I suspect, but cannot be sure, that the fault was a combination of incomplete restores AND the caching software at the server level. In the end, the only way to rebuild in a way that was entirely reliable was to nuke everything and restore generally from zero. I had all the data, but the rebuilding still required me to pretty much update each plugin first AND to open and resave each post to make sure the data was complete. In several cases, I found glitches in the middle of posts — parts that DIDN’T restore properly — which supports my theory that the restore didn’t quite work perfectly.

Anyway, I’ve been heavy in the weeds for sometime, averaging 3-4h a night on the rebuild process, and I’m making progress. Here’s the status:

	Astropontiac	MCSInc	PolyWogg	ThePolyBlog	Total
Active plugins	12	12	48	47	*119*
Total plugins	13	13	49	48	*123*
%	*92%*	*92%*	*98%*	*98%*	*97%*
Active pages	12	5	41	7	65
Total pages	12	5	65	44	*126*
%	*100%*	*100%*	*63%*	*16%*	*52%*
Active posts	—	—	601	419	*1020*
Total posts	—	—	604	898	*1502*
%	—	—	*~100%*	*47%*	*68%*
Active pages+posts	12	5	642	426	*1085*
Total pages+posts	12	5	669	942	*1628*
%	*100%*	*100%*	*96%*	*45%*	*67%*
Overall (1/3 plugins, 2/3 content)	97%	97%	97%	63%	77%

It feels good to be over 77% done, although it’s hard to tell if the weighting is correct. I estimated 1/3 to get the plugins right, and 2/3 to rebuild the content overall. If I reweight it 50/50, it goes to 82% overall. If I reweighted the content higher, perhaps a 10/90 split, it would change to 70%. Soooo, I’m somewhere between 70-82% I guess. The stuff I’m doing now isn’t long per post, but it is REALLY mindless.

Series premiere: The Crew

April 8 2021

I saw references to the TV show, The Crew, and I didn’t know much about it. But as with most new shows, I’m willing to give it a try for at least one episode.

The basic premise is that a NASCAR team has been doing poorly of late, and the owner announces that his daughter Catherine is going to take over running the team. Under the new management, she wants to makes some changes, including potentially firing some people, and she butts heads with the operations boss, Kevin. Most of the show takes place at the garage, and has a bit of a Wings feel to the setup, just not as funny.

The acting and writing

The main actor is Kevin James and I pretty much knew what my personal reaction to the show was going to be: meh. King of Queens, Mall Cop, Kevin Can Wait…He’s okay, but I’m not sold on the delivery. Some of it is a one-trick pony storyline i.e., “hey, I’m not the brightest guy but I’ll learn a lesson by the end of the EP”. It’s okay but it doesnt’ scream “laugh riot”. There are some funny lines, but nothing that leads to much more than a smile.

The daughter, Catherine, is played by Jillian Mueller, and I thought I recognized her at first. But after checking IMDb, nope. She’s okay but I don’t really get a feel for her in the EP. Yay, she’s smart. Yay, she’s into numbers. That’s it? Even by sitcom standards, that’s pretty lame.

For the supporting cast, there’s Jake (Freddie Stroma), who’s pretty dumb but a generally good driver, but not much to work with beyond a few throw-away lines like Woody or Coach from Cheers without the presence; Chuck (voice actor Gary Anthony Williams) as the mechanic, who has decent presence but not many lines; and Amir (Dan Ahdoot) as the engineer with a series of telegraphed jokes about being effeminate and into design. Nothing to write home about.

So who else is there? Well, let’s start with Bruce McGill. He is a regular guest actor on a ton of shows, often playing a bit of a schlub or a bit of a sleazeball, but he always nails it. He plays the owner, Bobby, and as always, he is pitch perfect. I liked him on Rizzoli & Isles, all the way back to the original MacGyver, in My Cousin Vinny, heck even Semi-Tough. But whenever I see him? All I can think of is Captain Braxton from Star Trek: Voyager, the time cop gone a bit nutty about Janeway’s involvement in timelines. He’s solid for the whole EP, and while there’s no guarantee he’ll be around much, he’s pretty good for backup.

The one that threw me the most though was Beth. She is pretty inconsistent. She seems almost like Carla from Cheers, a bit dumb, but smarter than Kevin, gets really invested in his personal life, has some sort of boyfriend or husband that could do double-dates if Kevin was dating someone, it’s a bit confused. I’m not even totally sure what she does for the team. But she has decent interactions with most of the other cast throughout the episode. And then, right at the end, small spoiler alert, she has this serious moment with Kevin that he is totally clueless about. She is basically telling him she’s into him, and he misses it entirely. But for just a moment, she goes serious, all the other attributes of the character disappear, and it’s a great scene. Her name is Sarah Stiles, and I looked her up on IMDb as well. Nothing I’ve seen her in, a moderate list of credits. I just hope they do something with the character.

For the writing? Well, it’s not funny. Which is kinda important for a sitcom. There’s a lot of one-liners, but most of them aren’t that good. More importantly, a lot of the characters seem inconsistent, which is really hard to do in 22 minutes of airtime. Most of them have only a few lines, yet even when they do, it’s hard to make it jive with the previous lines. Catherine is terrible, Kevin is one-trick, even Beth who is awesome in one scene is kind of all over the EP. Bobby is great, but the show isn’t about him. Sigh.

My prediction

I have to go with cancellation. The show is still stuck in its opening premiere “box”, I know, but there just didn’t seem to be enough funny there for me to care about any of the characters either.

Series premiere: The Tribes of Europa

April 8 2021

Netflix released a show awhile ago called the Tribes of Europa, with season 1 consisting of six episodes, dubbed in English. The setting of the show is the year 2074 when life in Europe consists mainly of warring tribes. According to the opening explanation, something happened in December 2029 which caused a massive blackout, and the phrase for the “event” was Black December. Nobody seems to know what caused the Blackout, but countries collapsed, and Europe descended into chaos over several decades. Countries were replaced by more local “tribes”.

In the opening, you meet the Origines, a small tribe in Europe that has forsaken technology in favour of living in the forest at one with nature. They believe all life is one, and that they can generally live in peace if they avoid contact with outsiders. There are other tribes around them, but generally, everyone stays in their own area. Until the day a flying ship passes over three of them while they are out hunting far from their Refuge / home, and then the ship crashes. It is technology well beyond anything that existed back in the day, well beyond a simple plane of old. They are all too young to remember, but they know some of the history from books and things.

The three main characters are 2 brothers and a sister, and they all have different reactions to this outside event. The oldest boy is impatient to see the world, and wants to go investigate; the youngest is smart and dying to figure out what caused the original blackout; and the girl is curious but adheres to the tradition of the tribe to return back to the Refuge and seek counsel from her father, the leader of the Tribe. As the EP proceeds, they eventually investigate, make some discoveries and end up being confronted by a powerful outside tribe that wants the technology from the advanced ship in order to rule Europe.

The acting and writing

For the show, there is a bit of confusion in EP1 as to who the main character is. The show opens with a girl claiming she’s looking for her family in all the chaos, and then you meet her. Her name is Liv, she’s the daughter/sister I mentioned above, and she’s played by Henriette Confurius. She has a strong “Katniss” feel to her for a good part of the show, living off the land, shooting arrows (albeit with a crossbow), and she isn’t on fire anywhere, but she’s got some presence. She has a decent list of credits on IMDb, but given it’s all European shows, I don’t recognize her at all. And it’s dubbed, so hard to tell at times how much the acting is the voice vs. the face. She’s decent, but I would have expected a stronger presence in EP1 if she was the anchor of the show.

Her oldest brother, the one impatient to see SOMETHING or do SOMETHING, is named Kiano and played by Emilio Sakraya. He has a similar acting profile to Confurius but in EP1, he actually has some presence. It’s a bit cliché and inconsistent in places, but definite presence.

The youngest brother, Elja, is played by David Ali Rashed, and his list of credits is much shorter. As such, it’s not surprising that he comes off kind of shallow in his acting in EP1, not a lot of depth there, mostly just staring at things and looking confused. I also admit that the dubbed voice doesn’t seem to match as well, so that might be hindering my processing.

The bad guy for the EP is a woman named Ana Ularu, playing a character named Grieta. And she’s relatively terrible. She only has three real scenes, one where she is dealing with her boss and seems like a Gladiator cliché; one where she’s fighting, with no real oomph or menace; and one where she’s interrogating people, but I didn’t feel a sense of menace, dread, fear or even of command in the scene. At least I’ve seen her before though, and as an indication of how little presence she has, I saw her less than 2 months ago when I binge-watched the Alex Rider series. I still couldn’t place her as Eva, and well, that’s not surprising. She’s not terrible, but she’s not compelling either.

As for the writing, I wasn’t blown away. The TV series Revolution tread the same ground back in 2012 when everything on Earth just stopped working for power and electricity. All the machines just stopped in a single day. In Revolution, it was only 15y after the change, and this is 45, but the premise is similar. But I loved Revolution initially, and I thought, “Okay, let’s see what happens”.

But as the EP went on, it seems more like an Indigenous tribe coming into contact with modern world for the first time. I don’t want to spoil the surprise of some high-end tech (it’s not alien though), but it isn’t necessarily enough to get everyone on-board. I felt like the youngsters seem to know WAY too much about technology and the past — even knowing what airplanes are and that the new one isn’t the same level of technology — but they’re like 16 in the show. How would they POSSIBLY know? And they seem to have some pretty good stuff in their village if there’s no power anywhere. Not sure how they’re milling everything so well or getting bullets for rifles. But I digress.

Overall, the writing is okay, but some of the dialogue needs work.

My prediction

The show got some buzz, and I’m curious enough to keep watching for six episodes. But I’m not convinced the show is powerful enough to hold my attention, or that of everyone else either. Despite the buzz I heard, I’m going to predict renewal for another season and that’s it.

Series premiere: Debris

April 7 2021

The new show Debris debuted recently, with a strong alien/X-Files vibe to it. In a nutshell, the premise is that scientists spotted a damaged alien ship drifting through the solar system, surrounded by debris. Some of that debris has fallen to Earth, and almost all of it has strange energy readings with unpredictable impacts on the local population. For example, the first use you see of it is someone picking up a piece that lets them pass through solid matter, falling 14 floors to her death THROUGH the hotel building she’s in. Cool, huh? The two main characters are investigating the phenomenon, a joint task force of the US and the UK. He’s CIA, she’s MI6, and they’re not the only ones looking for these fragments.

So, is it X-Files 2021?

It’s hard to say based on a single EP if that will be the continued vibe, but the short answer is no. It is clear from the get-go that there are aliens and this is alien tech. There’s no “mystery” of the truth being out there. The debris is definitively alien.

However, there is a bit of an X-Files “what is this about” vibe. He’s more the Scully-type, traditional hunter, having formerly been in Afghanistan and not wanting to go to the private sector on returning home. For the debris, he wants to keep it out of enemy hands. She is the Mulder-type who believes in the power of all things, and that if they find the technology, they can improve the lives of all humanity.

The “he” in question is Bryan Beneventi, played by Jonathan Tucker. He is the co-anchor for the show, and that’s a problem. I liked him in Westworld, Justified, numerous guest shows, and all the way back to The Black Donnellys. And in almost every single show I’ve seen him in, he’s a snivelling weasel, pretty much. Spineless. Often with some drug stuff going on maybe. Untrustworthy to the core. THIS is the guy you want saving the planet? Oh, he’s got faults all over the place, but he isn’t a guy I root for, pretty much ever. If he was in a mobster show, he’s the one double-crossing the big guy or going rogue to prove himself, screwing either bit up, and getting whacked asking why everything always goes wrong for him. I like him in those other roles, but I had a lot of trouble seeing him in this one.

The “she” in question is Finola Jones, played by Riann Steele. I’ve seen her in a few things over the years, nothing that stands out as riveting. She’s decent in the premiere, but nothing particularly compelling. There’s some back history with her father having seen the debris field, he was an astrophysicist who apparently died. Spoiler alert — he’s apparently not dead.

For other supporting characters, there’s Bryan’s boss played by Norbert Leo Butz who isn’t sharing everything with Bryan. He’s been in a few things here and there over the years, nothing that stands out to me. Finola’s boss is played by Anjali Jay, but you don’t get a really good scene with her (she’s on the phone to Finola), so it was hard to place her. Thanks to IMDb, I now know I’ve seen her before on Continuum (she was good) and Supergirl (meh). Nothing compelling, and impossible to know if she’ll have much of a role in the show.

Good news though, we have a bad guy. I thought it was some sort of typo, I confess, as the actor’s name is Scroobius Pip. He’s apparently a quite well-known hip hop artist in the UK, but I have never heard of him. It explains his name, I guess, with the background. Anyway, he’s been in a few shows, nothing I have seen though, and in EP1, he has about 10 lines. His role is a bit intriguing as you find out he’s actually SAS and hunting the debris too, plus he has some sort of transporter tech they’re using (from the debris fragments). It has some bugs though, so kind of a last resort tech.

The premiere’s goal though is to grab you. To pull you into the mystery. And to be honest, it doesn’t. It’s interesting, sure. The case of the week is (spoiler alert, again!) a kid that has come back from the dead and a bunch of people are seemingly dying and floating across the ground in the same direction to the same spot. They’re not actually dead though. So the mystery is how is the kid alive, what’s the connection between the victims, how do they solve it. Well, considering the opening scene that raised the stakes took about 10 minutes (complete with Michael Eklund as a black market dealer of debris relics, and I was initially excited cuz I loved him as Bobo on Wynonna Earp, right up until he bites the dust at minute 9), they solve the rest in the remaining 32 minutes or so. Bippity boppity boo, all is right with the case, problem solved. Really? That would be like the Lost characters finding a resort to stay at on the Island rather than facing the Others.

So where does that leave me?

Basically nowhere. The writing wasn’t compelling, nor was the acting. The mystery of the week ended way too easily. And the larger mystery? There just wasn’t enough time spent on the fact that it was ALIENS for crying out loud. We have people DEFYING GRAVITY (no reference intended to the show) and people aren’t losing their sh**? Really? Okay, well if you’re not excited and getting worked up, why would I? I’m going with cancellation (which is also TV Grim Reaper’s prediction) and I won’t be watching.