The story was the bushman’s most sacred possession. These people knew what we do not; that without a story you have not got a nation, or culture, or civilization. Without a story of your own, you haven’t got a life of your own. — Laurens Van der Post

People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs. — Albert Bates Lord

To be a person is to have a story to tell. — Isak Dinesen

Reminded me of a chapter from the wonderful book, “Soccer in Sun and Shadow” by Eduardo Galeano.

Have you ever entered an empty stadium? Try it. Stand in the middle of the field and listen. There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium. There is nothing less mute than stands bereft of people.

At Wembley, shouts from the ’66 World Cup which England won still resound, and if you listen very closely you can hear groans from 1953 when England fell to the Hungarians. Montevideo’s Centenario Stadium sighs with nostalgia for the glory days of Uruguayan football. Maracana is still crying over Brazil’s 1950 World Cup defeat.

At Bombonera in Buenos Aires, drums boom from half a century ago. From the depths of Azteca Stadium, you can hear the ceremonial chants of the ancient Mexican ball game. The concrete terraces of the Nou Camp in Barcelona speak Catalan, and the stands of San Mames in Bilbao talk in Euskera.

In Milan, the ghost of Giuseppe Meazza scores goals that shake the stadium bearing his name. The final of the ’74 World Cup, won by Germany, is played day after day and night after night at Munich’s Olympic Stadium.

The stadium of King Fahd in Saudi Arabia has marble and gold boxes and carpeted stands, but it has no memory or much of anything to say.

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When I became the webmaster for the ISB Student’s Blog, the first thing I did was install the WordPress DB Backup plugin. I also tested it then, and it worked. So I assumed all was fine.

Anyway, last month our hosting ran out due to non-payment of fees, and the email alerts went out to people who are no more at ISB anymore. Since the account was not renewed the hosting was canceled. It was during the exam times in Term 4 and not many noticed.

I wasn’t too worried since I thought I had a backup and would be able to get the blog back up from it and running in no time. But lo and behold, the backup plugin did not work anymore and the scheduled backup did not work. Now we face a daunting USD 150 in renewing and restoring the old setup

Learnings from the incident:

• Take regular manual backups, and do not depend on plugins for that.
• When using a hosting account, ensure that the registration is done via a mailing list which includes people responsible for maintaining the hosting, and the blog, and update it every time people leave.

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I have realized that I don’t have time or patience to write longer posts given the time, and hence starting on this P2 theme. It feels more like Twitter, and I hope I am able to post more often

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By the way, the WordPress 2.7 has auto upgrade from within the admin area. Now that is a nice step ahead, and also a logical progression of the plugin updater. Also, that means that the cPanel becomes almost useless for me. I would also have wished for an integrated backup otion.

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I got the list of blogs for the search engine here.

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I had not been able to post in hindi for quite some while now, and I had done nothing wrong apparently. However, on deeper inspection, I did find out the reason for this. The database, provided by my kind host, used the latin_swedish_ci character set and collation. Because of this it did not support the hindi fonts. So I tried rectifying it by running some basic SQL queries (which is not saying much). So I backed up my database (important), and started fiddling around, and obviously everything went wrong.

So I had to go back to Ashish and ask him to setup a database with the UTF8 charset which supports the hindi character set. After he did that, I setup WordPress (2.3.3) and imported the posts, comments, images, themes, etc. Only one glitch remains. Due to an error in WordPress, the tags have been imported as IDs into the new database. I have applied the patch mentioned in the forum [I am so proud of being able to do that!!], but haven’t been able to reimport the tags as of now. Will keep you updated as and when that happens. Till then,

आपको हुई असुविधा के लिए मुझे खेद है

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However, I have still not been able to post in Hindi on the new blog. I want to spend some time redesigning it, but haven’t got around to doing that.

But the more important thing is that I have kept going. And I think that the thing that keeps me going is that I think I would want to come back later, and read about how I have felt over time. I am too lazy to write a diary, and I think this is much better and easier option. Here’s to many more to come. Cheers!

PS: If you do check my archives, you will also see a lot of posts dated before Jan 2005, but those are posts from our, i.e. STAR-PLUS,  older group blog at “East of Omaha“.

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Anyways, due to the Twitter plugin, the import resulted in a couple of friends being totally spammed. I am so sorry folks. Never meant to.

Note to self – Before any importing or exporting or updates or anything else, deactivate all plugins!!

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