One Step Forward and…

One step… sideways?

Hey hey! That’s glass in the shower! It’s ready for use, right?

Well, yes, but…

The glass guys arrived on Wednesday morning, only a few minutes late (due to some seriously awful traffic), and they had the door and panel for over the pony wall, as you can see above.

It looks great, but what they didn’t have was two glass shelves, one for each of the niches in the two upstairs showers.

The installer had all the paperwork, but he hadn’t heard about the shelves. I explained it to him, and he flipped through five pages of drawings that specified the order. In there, at the end, he found the descriptions of the two shelves. But as best I can tell, the shelves never made it onto the original order from the glass fabricator.

He talked with his boss and I texted our general contractor. Everyone agreed: Yes, those shelves are definitely missing.

This morning, two days later, I got the word from the contractor:

So there you go. This glass company can’t even cut and polish the edges of two glass shelves, each approximately 16" x 4".

At this point I think it possible the glass company is losing money on this job. Their installers come from Surrey, which (with traffic) is at least an hour away. That’s paying people 4 hours just to get to and from the job site, plus the time to do the installation.

And they’ve been incredibly slow about it. Everything takes at least a week thanks to the turnaround time from the fabricator.

Colour me unimpressed. They did well last time, but not this time.

At least the shower is usable now, which is good. And maybe next week things will be done. I say “maybe” because I won’t be surprised if the fabricator screws up and when they get here to install them, the shelves are the wrong size.

I guess we’ll see.

In other news, Tinkerbelle is still fine.

No, I do not want my picture taken, human.

Well, she’s as fine as she can be for a ten-year-old dog who’s nearly died twice. We just did her latest vet checkup where we learned that her hematocrit is right in the middle of the normal range. It turns out that has been the case three out of the last four times we’ve checked, which is good news.

She does suffer from delicate digestion, which can make life a tad exciting given she also has a poor neural connection between what passes for her brain and her hindquarters. But we have ways of coping, and she’s still enjoying life. She gets a good bark at every other dog she sees along with anyone that knocks on the door, and even the occasional chase through the backyard when a squirrel, raccoon, or boojum is detected. Then a nice nap, and she can do it all again.

Oh, and she’s still shedding like mad. But that doesn’t matter. She’s our girl, and we keep her well fed and comfortable. And occasionally we get out the vacuum cleaner and remove 80% of the hair from the floor. The other 20% either won’t come up or is airborne and can’t be collected until the next time.

This past week has otherwise been spent working on the community association website. And it kept me busy to such an extent that I am behind on the monthly email. I know what I will be doing all weekend.

I continue to work on the great mixed-case filename fix. That is a monstrous job. I think last week I had done all the PDF files we have. Now I am working on the images. This will take forever.

In WordPress, there is a thing called the “Media Library.” Everything that isn’t stored in the database is dumped in there. It contains all the images (PNG, JPG, WEBP, and so on) along with PDF files and other downloadable documents (MS Word, for example). There are various tools that help you organize those files, but in general they get stored in directories by the year and month they were uploaded. The oldest files in our library date back to 2013, and there are 1,163 files out there in total.

In short, they are not easy to search or review. The basic view of the library shows them to me in groups of 20, so there are 59 pages of files to review.

Now, admittedly, 353 of them are PDF files, and I have already dealt with those. Well, only partly.

I changed the filenames, so a file that used to be named FooBar.pdf is now called foobar.pdf. That's great, and it avoids certain issues with search engines and the idiots that work for Meta, but there is another layer to these things.

Every file gets a database entry to describe it, and those entries are searched when someone uses the search function on the website, particularly the item title. So those database entries must be accurate to be useful. It seems obvious.

Except that when you upload a new file, you’re never prompted to fill in the title or anything else. I’m not entirely clear on how things actually work, but it’s not good. Some files wind up with no title at all, while others wind up with a title that is the filename. Neither of those things is ideal, so I have to fix all the titles as I go along.

Thus far I have finished the first four pages (of 59, I remind you). I look at every file, update the filename if it is in mixed case, and revise the title to be human readable (and thus searchable).

My goal is to fix a page or two of files each day. If I can do that, in a couple of months I will have fixed them all.

Well… except… there’s another problem. Bunches of these files aren’t used anymore. The previous webmasters and I have managed to upload things when we need them, and then when the page that uses the media item gets deleted, the media files just get left behind.

That’s no good. It means that the size of the website on the disk keeps getting bigger over the years, and much of that bloat is useless. Why keep images of announcements of events that happened five years ago? You might argue that some things — like announcement posters for events the community association held — have some historic value in this context. Maybe. But there are scads of things in our media library for events that others held and that we just announced. We’re not some sort of library for the entire North Shore, and that garbage is just that: garbage.

So in addition to going through the files and fixing the filenames and database titles, I have to figure out if each one is used in the website or not. If it is, fine. I’m done with it. If it’s not, I need to figure out if it’s something I want to keep around for future use, or if it should be deleted.

Every single one of these takes a couple of minutes, and digging to see if a file is actually used isn’t simple. Yes, there are tools to figure out if a file is used on a website, but there’s a catch. (It’s WordPress. There’s always a catch.)

The tools can check the basic things that WordPress lets you create out of the box. But if you add a plugin that lets you do something different, any tool looking for links to media files has to be specially coded to know how to deal with that plugin’s database data. And that means they put those features in the paid version of the plugin, not in the free version.

So I can either do it manually (and slowly) or spend money to get a tool that will give me a report that I can mostly trust. (Why only “mostly” trust? Because I don’t trust any software these days. Everything has to be cross-checked, or it will tell me to delete something I absolutely need. sigh)

Isn’t my life fun?!? And I volunteer to do this.

All of that, by the way, is a good reason to hire professional web designers and maintenance people. Alas, I am not one of those. I am still figuring out how WordPress really works and what everyone before me should have been doing but didn’t, so I didn’t do it either.

The other big news from last week is that the District of North Vancouver held the new public hearing on the local chlorine plant. It was a mess.

The previous meeting — held last February — was full of speakers who were opposed to the plant and came from out of town. There were some who were obviously alarmist and others who (in my opinion) had no business being there. This time, the company that is trying to keep their plant open used the same tactic, and they got speaker after speaker to talk about how good the place is, how safe it is, and how those railcars full of liquid chlorine will never leak. That last one is a bit of a sore point with me, as I think they had four separate speakers on that topic. One was plenty, thank you.

As always, there is no way to validate the credentials of any of these speakers or confirm what they are saying. It’s too much, and there is no way to get through it all, even if you have the technical background in obscure topics like railcar design and/or railway accident reporting and cleanup. (Which, to be clear, I don’t.)

I barely got through the first night (4 hours) without gnawing off my own leg. Thankfully I had conflicts and couldn’t make the second night, but there is a video of the meeting that I get to review this weekend. Yay.

I suspect I know how this will go, though.

The last time the plant’s rezoning request was voted down 4–3, and the mayor's stated objection was that the rezoning would have been in perpetuity. So the company came back and said, "How about we shut down in 20 years instead of going on forever?” My gut says that will change the mayor’s vote, and unless someone else changes their vote, there will be a plant making chemical weapons (effectively… chlorine gas was used heavily in WWI, causing a million deaths) just a stone’s throw away from schools and residential buildings.

Yes, it’s stupid, but it’s also how capitalism works.

Enough ranting from me this week.

May all your glass be properly ordered, manufactured, delivered and installed in one go, may your dogs remain healthy, and may your elected officials be smart enough to avoid putting chemical plants in heavily populated areas.