Is there anything as uncanny and eldritch as the darkest hours of night?
Well, there probably is, to you. IRS auditors, or that sixth sense your boss has for when you're playing Solitaire instead of working.
But try to imagine it, thousands of years ago. Have you ever been outdoors at night when there were no lights around? During a power outage, perhaps, or camping? The night sky spreads over you like a blanket, all-encompassing, but entirely unfeeling. Now try to imagine it thousands of years ago, when spirits ruled the earth. Try to imagine that you're looking up at that sky without the comforting presence of houses and hospitals.
The autumnal equinox is weeks past. It's been long enough, in fact, that you're just beginning to wonder if it will ever be warm again. A cold wind rolls by, and the last vestiges of nurturing warmth are seeping away from the earth under your feet. The stars above you are bright and beautiful and perhaps a little too close for comfort. It's beginning to sink in that winter is coming, and your very survival is at stake.
Is it any wonder that your thoughts turn to death? Is it any wonder that you think of friends and family departed in winters past? Is it any wonder that you look up into the midnight sky and beg the cold moon for mercy? Is it any wonder that you want to gather the living around you and throw back a celebration into the night, to defy or appease as your personality demands... Or perhaps a little of both?
And so you remember your departed kin, and you perform rituals to appease and hide from vengeful spirits. You make token sacrifices to the earth to remind her - before she drifts entirely to sleep - of the very real sacrifices you will be making over the winter, to remind her to wake up in the spring. You pray and you posture; you wail and you whisper; you build bonfires to keep the night at bay.
And you never speak of the fear, because to speak it is to make it real.
So have a Happy Hallowe'en. But while you're lighting your jack-o-lanterns and passing out candy, spare a little thought to the origins of the holiday. Fear that rolls down across centuries should get a little respect.
So, a midnight goblin played merry havoc with the server hosting my website, and my sysadmin after two days of effort (during which he got a grand total of four hours of sleep) gave up and moved my website (along with everyone else's who was on that server) to a new server. So today you got two new entries - yesterday's and this one. Sorry for the delay, folks.
But the photo album was completely messed up. After exchanging a half dozen or so frantic e-mails with the sysadmin, several things became clear: The new server had been upgraded to PHP4 from PHP3, which meant all the PHP3 files that make up the skeleton of the photo album weren't readable. He didn't want to re-set the server to accept my PHP3 files as PHP4, for some fairly good reasons. But he did pull a little trick to make the PHP3 files in my directories work under PHP4. Hooray for nice sysadmins.
But that meant my files were being compiled as PHP4 instead of PHP3, and - as the sysadmin explained to me - the way PHP4 handles variables is very different from the way PHP3 handled them. I wound up having to go through all my files and rename them from, for instance <myfile.php3> to <myfile.php>. Then I had to go through the rest of the files and change all the references to those files so that the links would work correctly. Then in order to fix the variable problem, (after about half an hour of effort to figure it out) I had to add two lines of code to every single photo album directory. Thank the gods for global search and replace functions.
I think it's all fixed now. If you encounter any problems, anywhere on my site, please let me know. I can't promise it will be fixed immediately, but I'll definitely get to it eventually.
If I post an entry tomorrow, it will be a little late. I have a dentist appointment first thing in the morning. Don't panic. Even if I don't manage an entry tomorrow, I'll be back Thursday. Stay calm.
Word of the Day: eldritch - weird; eerie
- nothing
Current Projects:
- Christmas stockings
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