Snow Lake, wireless cameras, MySQL DIY importing.

Stan called me up on Thursday afternoon to tell me that Royal Bank needed onsite printer support… in Snow Lake. DBD already ordered the part, so I prepared for the trip by checking my engine oil and loading a hydraulic jack into my trunk. I even made two new CDs for the car… driving is boring without music. Through all this, I hoped that the part would not arrive on time. Against my hopes and wishes, the part arrived yesterday morning, so I set out reluctantly for Snow lake. Three hours later, I got to town, arrived onsite, and spent two hours frittering away because nobody knew what kind of setup I was going in to fix. Not only that, but I was unaware that a parallel cable was required to configure the IP address. Turns out that it was all BS – they were on a token ring network, and DHCP was functional. Despite all the support options, I ended up trusting my own intuition by printing out config pages from both MarkNet boxes, and calling RBC support to remotely update the new device. All was well, and then Stan called me to say that GOM needed help while I was there. Another hour later, and I left at 16:00, but not before calling Roadside to say that I would be late.

Tired and hungry, I got into town at 19:00, drove straight to Roadside, and started installing the wireless cameras. The router and DSL modem were pretty straightforward to install, although there was a slight hiccup (they plugged the modem into an empty surface mount). The wireless cameras, however, were a different story altogether. The first camera installed perfectly. The second, however, was being a bitch. It wouldn’t let me connect to the web admin interface after letting me connect to test it out. After much poking around, it turned out that it mysteriously changed the access port number on me. I finally got the cameras installed, although I know for a fact that he’ll be calling me back. I kinda took a shortcut due to my maxxed out hunger and fatigue levels. I went home, ate, and slept.

This morning, Jehovah’s Witnesses came to my door, and I knew them. It was one of the elders at the Kingdom Hall (with his wife in tow), and he also used to work with my Dad before he retired. He’s a very friendly guy, cool to talk to, and very in touch with his religion. If you haven’t read any of my old LiveJournal entries (more on that later), then I should say this – I used to attend the Kingdom Hall. I studied with Colin’s brother, Chris, for a year, before I called it quits and kinda drifted away. Now, before you start to bash the Witnesses, I have to put in my two cents – despite all the rumors and media, they are very ordinary people who are every bit as Christian as the Catholics, perhaps even more. Mind you, they have a different take on the Bible, which is always open to misinterpretation due to the art of translation (not a science!). People persecute them and say junk like, ‘they’re part of a cult’, or some jazz like that. To be honest, they’re not. When I was young, I went to another congregation, and it was nothing but another rumor mill. I’m not saying that all religions are like that, but I have found that those who study with the Witnesses study well, and do their best to follow their religion. There may be some bad fruit here and there (like the kids who were forced to attend against their will and rebelled), but the same goes for every other religion out there. You get some crazy person who blows himself up along with a building in the name of his god, and you’ll find that he went and made a bad name for his religion. Well, long story short, don’t judge them by their religion. You’ll find that the majority of them are good folk. That whole ‘not accepting blood’ thing? Well, go study with them and you’ll find out for yourself. Don’t misunderstand me, though – my leaving was for other reasons – I’m a sinner who can’t change his ways. However, I always sit by the many philosophies that they taught me – peace and love are the keys to a better life.

I finally got a chance to find a way to import the Blogger and LiveJournal entries… and it wasn’t pretty. First, I decided to take all the entries here and duplicate them on my local web server (where all the Blogger and LJ posts were). Then, I had to duplicate all the categories, links, settings, and other data. Once that was done, I had a complete local copy of what data my server would have in its entirety. Next, I jumped into phpmyadmin and exported the entire database to an sql file. I tried to come up with different ways to import the data. First, I used phpmyadmin. It was no good, the installation on the server was an older version and didn’t have the import function (possibly not compiled). Next, I tried to restore the database from my control panel – no good, it only created an empty database. Three times a charm, and that’s when I discovered the idea to connect to the MySQL server itself. I used the MySQL Administrator to restore the database. After a few failures, I imported two tables at a time and success!

At least, I hope so. Even though the correct amount of records appear in each table compared to my local database, the filesizes of each table are wrong. I’m just hoping that it’s due to gzip compression or something. I won’t know until I go through each post and read it all. Either way, I’m still posting this success (aside from the ghost user that got overwritten, but had no SQL entry – fixed it regardless).

Yay for me!

以上。。。であります！