Bohemia Bunny

The Funnerology Principle

Monthly Archives: January 2010

Resources for young cancer survivors

We were cleaning up our room last weekend – or rather, the boyfriend was cleaning up his side of the room. Among the many little treasures we unearthed was a LIVESTRONG wristband – the yellow rubber things that were so popular a few years back. Well it’s only a shade or two off from my corporate wristband (yes, a wristband is part of our uniform) so I thought I might keep it around to wear.

Then I decided to check out the Lance Armstrong Foundation just to see what it was like. It honestly never crossed my mind to visit the site before. Well, it’s full of good (and free!) resources, and even brochures tailored to your age or ethnic group. You can read the African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic or Adolescent help brochures, among others. That was pretty clever. The Foundation even have Wedding Donations! Now instead of giving out wedding favours, you can make a donation and get cards to inform your guests why they are going home with a wristband instead of cake, chocolate, keychains, shot glasses… Another good thing about this site is that American medical social workers are probably a little bit more advanced than their Singaporean counterparts, because I found some advice on changing priorities that totally matched up with what I remember going through, and yet no one told me anything about it.

From there I got a link to Teens Living With Cancer, which is obviously for young people like me. I am still young okay, never mind that Fernando Torres, who is mere months older than me, said “I’m not old, but I’m not young”. There are a fair number of lymphoma survivors on this community site, because it’s one of the more common cancers among young people. Kids don’t get, like, breast cancer or colorectal cancer. Lymphoma and leukemia are far more common. Only drawback of it being a young people’s community site: The bad typing/spelling! Grrrr. There are even resources for siblings and friends to deal with cancer. Above all, a common theme of the site is encouraging youth to stand up and learn more about their disease so that they can “advocate” for themselves in terms of finding solutions, getting help and making decisions.

I am the problem between keyboard and chair.

Yesterday I ran a WordPress training session for the rest of the staff in the office, and it came to light that one of our corporate blogs (we run more than a handful) was still running on WP 2.1. This meant that the notes I handed out, which were based on the 2.8.6 interface, weren’t totally correct because of the user interface changes between the versions. So I thought I’d do an FTP upgrade of the blog.

I don’t have cPanel access, that’s why I have to FTP it. Still, WP is generally easy to handle. Even via FTP, it should be quick and painless.

Should be. If you’re not the kind of hero idiot I am who doesn’t RTFM. I very cleverly uploaded everything. EVERYTHING. Even the wp_content and config files. So clever.

So when I’m done with the FTP at 9pm last night, I go to the site and get a fatal error. Huh. I meddle with it for another 45 minutes, then have to call it quits and go home.

At home I mess with the config files some more, and finally! No more fatal error! The page loads… for another blog. Somehow or other, my copying of the config files from another WP install caused it to load databases for that blog as well. Huh. Damn. Subsequent Googling suggests that WP 2.9 may not be as stable as I’d like. Okay, good thing I still have 2.8.6. I’ll use that instead. But it’s already 1.20am, and I’m falling asleep in front of the computer. I have to go to sleep.

I have apocalyptic dreams about a giant wave flooding KL and having to move my possessions to a flat higher up in the building. Which is odd, because I’ve never lived in a flat during my years in KL.

I wake up and start up the computer. FTPing away the files takes ages. Then I have to FTP a clean install back on. Maybe it was good that I chose to commit this act of stupidity right before my day off, so I can spend my rest day fixing my own giant mess. Bring up the site again, and it wants a wp-config file. Okay, I got this. Not immediately, but eventually I get in and HALLELUJAH! It’s there! All there, posts, categories and comments. As though I hadn’t done anything.

Except for one thing.

It’s gone back to the default theme. But no matter, I got this. This is easy. Reinstall theme, and there we go. Almost as good as new. The one thing left: To fix something somewhere so that the Chinese text displays. Now this, I have no idea how to fix. But Google does. Back to the config file. And finally, ta-da! Everything’s back to normal on the front end, and on the back end the only difference is the UI. It’s as though all the stress and frustration didn’t happen. It never should have, if I hadn’t been so darn clever. Ugh, never again. Lesson learnt.