And He Not Busy Being Born

“Couldn’t load blog; perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?—Loading data failed with SQL error.  Can’t open file: ‘mt_blog.MYI (errno:145)”

You are a better man than I if you can figure what that means.  And what’s this chummy little and “perhaps you have not upgraded your MT database?”

So I do what I always do in such a situation.  The same thing over and over and over again—I hit the button to open the file and over and over and over again I got the same error message.  Really frustrating—the best parallel I can think of is calling the same number over and over and getting no reply because, as the Brits say, the line is engaged.

Funny, they say the line is engaged and we say the line is busy.  I like engaged better.

Anyway, the analogy is not too bad because the problem was a failure of communication between Yahoo Small Business, the host for my blog, and Movable Type, advertised as the most powerful blog software system now available for the purposes of blogging. So I am able to get the host interface but I cannot get the host interface to interface with the MT interface.

I went on idiotically in a state of high anxiety trying to figure out what I could do before I finally tried to contact somebody.  I tried to contact Yahoo and I actually stayed on hold FOR OVER AN HOUR till I got this guy whose name was Nick, just like mine, located in the Yahoo call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  This was strange because Carol and I watched a movie just the other night called, “The Big Nothing,” that was a comedy about people working in a call center in a small town outside Portland, Oregon.  So I asked Nick if he had seen that movie and he said he had but that he didn’t work for a call center; he worked for Yahoo.  OK.

He wasn’t able to fix anything and sent off an email to Movable Type to see if they had any help.  I figured if he could do that, so could I, though doing so was not nearly as simple as it might seem.  In any case, I got through to MT via email and they got back to me really quickly.  The MT person, Stacy, wrote that my MT system had become corrupted.

This made me feel really bad.  I don’t know what the hell my MT had been doing to get itself corrupted, maybe drinking a lot, or hanging out with the wrong crowd, or whatever the hell a database does to get corrupted.  I felt as if I had been a bad father to my database and somehow it was my fault it had got itself corrupted.

Bad database!  Bad!

But Stacy gave me some directions to uncorrupt my MT.  Unfortunately I got these at 9 PM, after Carol and I got back from seeing Hellboy 2 in an actual movie theatre.  I don’t remember the last time we did that.  But I decided we should do it so I would be cut off from my computer and not spend the whole evening compulsively trying to fix it.  So instead, I woke up way too early because I was anxious to see if Stacy’s directions for the de-corruption of my MT would work or not.

Apparently they did.

Now I have to write Stacy and asked what I can do to keep my MT database from getting all corrupted again.

Bad database!  Bad!

Oh, Hellboy 2 was pretty OK.

Still to come: Carol, Brother Dan and I fly down to San Diego where along with Brothers Dave and Steve and Sister-in-Law Teresa we will empty the storage area containing the last of Joan and Bill’s material possessions.

Knock on wood.