Thirteen hour flights are evil.

I don’t think I know of anyone who especially enjoys them, and if i ever find someone who does, I may actually feel the urge to taunt them, before asking why the hell they could love such a thing.

The thirteen hour trip on United flight 840 was comfortable enough, and certainly one I had done a couple of times before. United offers a direct route at a reasonable price, so I tended to be a repeat customer whenever I needed to make the trip across the pacific.

Today’s flight was slightly delayed. That is the downside of having morning fog screw up multiple flights, shortly followed by the plane losing power and a mechanic needing to come on board.

But of course. What an excellent way to start a holiday.

At least I have my gorgeous girlfriend here.

Nic and I sat in 54a and 54b of a 747-400. It wasn’t premium, but it was reasonably comfortable, or just comfy enough. The advantage to having a girlfriend is that you can lift the armrest and have them use your shoulder as a pillow. That closeness and warmth rocks.

I think the guy on the aisle seat came from a room deep in a university where no one dare bothered him. He was sort of the opposite of warmth, and closer in nature to the feeling one gets when they meet someone who would prefer to befriend a skinned pig in a meat locker.

When he sat down, he pulled out nearly every item from his backpack. I couldn’t stop staring at his ridiculous sweater, the sort you would receive for Christmas from a family member trying their best to annoy you. This man seemed to enjoy the sweater, which given what he pulled out of his bag to survive the thirteen hour trip – laptop, headphones, papers, folders, toothbrush, a plastic orange juice cup now devoid of liquid that he could use to spit gum into, random plastic bags that make lots of crinkly sounds – doesn’t really surprise me.

He fell into a deep sleep reasonably quickly.

And four hours into the flight, i needed to pee. So Nic awoke, let me get by, and Mr. Ridiculous Sweater couldn’t be stirred. Probably all that crinkling plastic. It probably tires one out, you know, folding it, stretching it, trying to stuff it into the front pocket next to the unused air sick bag, duty free shopping guide – save a total of six bucks on cologne! – and necessary safety instructions.

Getting past the aisle seat from my window place required me to kind of straddle his legs, forcing my own legs over him as if he was a thick puddle of something tall to stride over.

I’ll ask Nic later on if i did this elegantly. I fear the answer.

I think this large movement i had to make in order to get to the bathroom – getting around the sleeping sweater – broke the button on my shorts.

I reached the bathroom, opened the door, closed it, locked it, the light came on, and someone in my row probably frowned after seeing the word “Lavatories Aft Occupied” light up.

And then my button fell off.

I didn’t mean for it to happen. I wanted to just pull my shorts down like i normally do and pee, but this time there was a snap and four hours into the flight, my shorts decided to tell me that they needed to be thrown out.

While flying over the Pacific ocean.

Things can never be easy for me, it seems. Especially on vacation.

I’m back in my seat now, right now, watching some excuse for a hand-sized hot dog leave my tray table and be returned to the flight staff, thinking up ways to rectify the situation.

I mean, I’m buttonless and scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles in six hours.

I don’t want the travel security people stateside to think that I’m some buttonless trouble maker. Im hardly a buttoned trouble maker. I generally like to be a fully clothed not quite so troubled and more peace maker.

I may have to think like Macguyver, or at the very best, like some Chief Macguyver.

While the sleeping sweater sleeps, the girlfriend tries to snooze, the people behind me engage in a discussion about who stood up first, and Ray Brown slaps a bass in my ear drums, my thinking is that I’ll try using the keyring loop to connect my button hole and my zipper handle.

Or my pants will fall down in the middle of LAX. I’m seriously hoping that doesn’t happen.

Heres hoping the rest of the trip is just a touch easier.

While trips to the Powerhouse weren’t as frequent as I’d have liked – I was under the age of ten, so I couldn’t just clap my hands and materialise at 500 Harris St – the trips were remembered fondly.

A few years ago, I went again. I can’t remember how long it had been since I had entered the Powerhouse and taken a good stroll around the museum I once loved.

Oh sure, I had been to events there – a Canon launch, a Wacom tablet launch, some sort of rug exhibition where I managed to annoy rug connoisseurs  thanks to my use of the word “carpet” – but I hadn’t taken a good long walk, a wonderful ponder at the museum I fell in love with as a boy.

So in 2009, I went. And it wasn’t great: exhibits were noticeably in a state of disrepair, the place was empty, and generally the Powerhouse Museum didn’t feel like this wonderful place I had recalled.

I left thinking that they – the people running the museum – were probably aware of these issues and that they’d attend to them. Eventually.

It’s now 2012, and after today’s trip, I recognise that the Powerhouse Museum is barely an echo of what it once was.

With kids lining up en masse to see the Harry Potter exhibition, the rest of the museum is falling apart, with exhibits no longer working, offering blank space, and a general feeling that the people running the museum have given up.

Take the computer exhibition, once one of my favourite areas and now just a few glass cabinets, some lucky enough to still have the gadgets and antiques inside.

I seem to recall that in the space where Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steve Wozniak sit, there should’ve been an Apple I computer. And yet now, the lights are off, nobody is home, but the video still plays as if it carries the same meaning.

According to the Powerhouse collection website:

“The Museum negotiated the long term loan of the Apple I from Apple Australia in May 1999 and the Apple went on display in the new permanent exhibition “Universal Machine: computers and connections” later that year. The loan of the Apple I has been renewed annually since that time and the Apple I has remained on display.”

Except it’s not there now.

One of the old computers even has plastic wrap covering it while being behind a glass cabinet.

What the hell is the plastic doing covering the computer when there’s a giant piece of glass doing its job perfectly well? I can’t even see the computer underneath it.

Then there’s the interactivity that this section once held.

Some computer exhibits still function with their archaic software, while others look like they’ve been ripped apart limb from limb.

An area I seem to recall that held a virtual reality section has been replaced with a Mars Rover robot learning environment that no one operates, locked for everyone except the people who are allowed to use this cool looking area.

At one point, there was a cute little demonstration of a walking robot named Stumpy. Now, there’s a detached plug sitting on a conveyer belt and a button that doesn’t do much with the one robot still in the exhibit.

Powerhouse may want to make the exhibit more interactive and call it “Where’s Stumpy?”, forcing you to find Stumpy in the museum.

If it was just one section, I may be able to forgive the Powerhouse, but it’s not that simple. No, the state of the Powerhouse seems to be more of a disease that’s gradually affecting permanent exhibitions.

The lights, magnets, and interactions space near the computer exhibit? I used to love going there and playing with the magnets, the fireworks, and the plasma ball. Who doesn’t love a plasma ball?

Parts of the exhibit have been removed, the floor is falling apart, and overall it feels like it died but no one decided to tell the people running the joint.

One part of the exhibit even talks about how stress affects objects, pointing out “the stress is showing”. How right they are.

And the chocolate machine: what the hell happened?

Sure, an interactive chocolate tasting machine (above, right) that actually offered free samples was probably an ambitious project to keep running, but if you’re going to turn the damn thing off, don’t leave it looking like it’s broken, gathering dust, and generally something you wouldn’t want to eat from.

At least the rail section hasn’t suffered ridiculously. In both the engine and train sections, the museum feels like it hasn’t changed for the worse.

The space section isn’t bad either, though video trips from NASA with audio from the journey should probably be turned up and not just stuck on mute altogether. Likewise, the movie inside the shuttle cockpit shouldn’t probably be frozen on one frame with souveniers missing from the shelves.

At least the inside of the shuttle has been kept in reasonable condition, and the zero gravity lab is a cute little psychological experiment for kids to simulate the absence of gravity.

While I doubt it’s permanent, the Love Lace section is filled with some beautiful pieces of lace-made art and apparel (below), but this is a new exhibit, and one that I doubt will be there for much longer.

Throughout other exhibits, there was more plastic wrap, more empty shelves, and more cursing from myself and my girlfriend about how shocking the museum had become.

The Powerhouse website does say something about the construction going on at the moment, calling it a “revitalisation project” that currently has made a new entrance with a cloak area, improved visitor circulation spaces, and a 1600 sqm gallery space for exhibitions. The website goes on to say that a new cafe will open soon, “an exciting new retail shop”, and later on a forecourt designed by “acclaimed Japanese architect Shigeru Ban”.

Powerhouse goes on to say that:

“During this time you may notice some construction in the Museum. We apologise for any inconvenience.”

Nowhere in the information does it say that exhibits will have parts missing, plastic thrown over sections, and generally feel like the museum is dying.

Because that’s exactly what it feels like.

When I was younger, I remember leaving the Powerhouse filled with dreams of wanting to become a designer, an astronaut, and a scientist. Obviously, there’s no way I could do all of these things at once: I’m not Batman.

Today, I’d be surprised if anyone left wanting to become anything other than Harry Potter. Maybe kids should leave wanting to become a museum curator, because they’ll do a damn well better job than what I saw there.

Perhaps you’ve seen it: articles set to go live somehow miss the schedule.

You swear they should go live, and yet “Missed schedule” still manages to pop up in red screwing up your plans for a planned post.

When it started happening to me, I frantically checked the server time and found nothing wrong. I checked to see if there were any new plugins and nothing had been changed. And then, at last, I Googled, and the results I got were so different from what actually resolved my woes.

If you’re getting this problem, a search on Google will tell you to:

Solution 1: Add a line of text to your wp-config.php file

If you Google “wordpress schedule fix” enough times, you’ll eventually find your way to this:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/scheduled-posts-still-not-working-in-282?replies=13#post-1175405

That’s pretty much the first thing you’ll want to try. It’s a simple fix in theory, with the addition of one line to the config file.

It didn’t work for me, however, so I looked for another solution.

Solution 2: Modify the cron.php file in wp-includes

This fix is a little more annoying. It’s not recommended that you go in and start changing files that are central to the operating of WordPress, especially since an update will wipe out any changes you’ve made and force you to do them again. That said, if the first solution doesn’t work, you’ll eventually find this one, which can be found below:

http://pauloflaherty.com/2011/05/23/fix-for-wordpress-missing-scheduled-posts/

Once again, this didn’t work for me. So I made a few more searches and found something else.

Solution 3: Install a WordPress scheduling fix plugin

Apparently, this whole WordPress scheduling thing is more common than you think. For the most part, it generally appears randomly and most people diagnosing it tend to believe it has a lot to do with out-of-date plugins, broken themes, and server settings.

Because those reasons will almost certainly never be the same, it doesn’t happen to everyone and is hard to diagnose.

So there are a couple of plugins available on the WordPress plugins site that deal with this. I never tried any of them, mostly because I didn’t want to confuse the issue and throw more plugins than were required.

You’re certainly welcome to try, however, as the plugins are available from the following links:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-missed-schedule/
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/missed-schedule-wordpress-plugin-fix/

Sadly, none of these three solutions actually worked for me.

That’s not to say that these solutions don’t work at all, as the resources I pulled them from indicate the contrary. However for my site, they didn’t make a dent.

So what did?

The solution

Originally, I had planned to take a backup of the site, shift that over to a test site, and then see if I could replicate the problem. And then just I was beginning to download the files, I took a gander through my error log to find out what was going on.

Some of the lines seemed to indicate exactly what was happening, and that was a crash was occurring in one of the tables and a part of the database needed to be repaired.

A repair job? That sounds like a job for phpMyAdmin!

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t quite sure where to start, as overhead was new to me. However, a quick Google search came up with this:

http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-quickie-repair-mysql-tables-in-phpmyadmin

If you go into the database you’re using for WordPress, you should be able to see the overhead. Simply put, if you clear the overhead from those tables, your WordPress installation starts to work again, or it did in my case.

So while I was there for the music of New Orleans Jazz Fest, I also aimed to visit a fortune teller.

I also intended to visit a strip club – a proper American strip club – only for the idea of comparing an American one to the idea of what I see in the movies.

Trying to do that back home turned out not so brilliantly the last (and first) time I went. Sydney’s strip clubs seem to be little more than overpriced cement boxes where uninspired women dance to even more uninspired music while you drink what barely passes as fermented sugar water grape juice from a plastic beer cup. Did I mention you had to pay twenty-five bucks for the privilege?

I digress.

While in New Orleans, I aimed to see a fortune teller. For the next few days, my mate and I wandered the streets as tourists, occasionally seeing psychics sitting under worn umbrellas on the side of the park at Jackson Square.

“There’s one,” my friend Ross said, but it just didn’t feel… right. Plus I was hesitating. I mean, what if they told me something horrible? What if they told me something absolutely disastrous? Should I really know that much?

It wasn’t until our second last day in New Orleans (technically the last day of exploring) that we found the “Bottom Of The Cup Tea Room” that I thought we’d found our place.

Plus, it was on the same block as Laura’s Chocolates and if that’s not a good omen, I’m not sure what is.

Just looking at this picture of one of Laura's truffles makes me hungry. Anyway.

Still skeptical over the entire process, I went and had a 15 minute reading done. The fortune teller was quite good, and to be honest, I didn’t expect it to be about who I was currently. I expected it would be able who I was going to become, and the two are quite different.

What I got was a combination of both, and you can hear some samples of the reading below. I’m obviously not going to put it all online for you as I’d like some of my reading to stay private. Ish.

It started with me finding out I had to cut something out of my life. I’m guessing this was my ex, which has more or less been cut out of my life. Ripped. Torn. Severed. Take your pick. It’s all relatively the same.

At one point, she mentioned my friend Ross. Or at least I think it was Ross. I don’t have many friends-who-are-guys, so am only assuming it’s Ross.

Apparently passion was a big part of my reading, too.

I do consider myself a curious person. Hell, I found it rather surprising that I actually went through with the psychic reading in the first place. So when the fortune teller asked me if I had any questions, I was curious about something I’d faced in my life. People had told me that my overly sexual nature was a result of me being Scorpio, so I wondered if the whole starsign thing had anything to do with personality.

You can claim that what I heard was guessing, looking for a tell, predicting what I was going to say based off of mannerisms and facial characteristics or a bunch of other things that would scientifically explain what happens, but all of that is mostly irrelevant.

Even me – the first one who would normally stand there next to you, with you, and tell me that – thinks that all of that is irrelevant.

You know why?

Because what I heard that day made me feel good. In a way, it made me think that the psychic reading was more an affirmation about one’s self than anything else. It might be someone just telling you how it is, how you are, the way you are, and if that’s the case, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Remember I’m not a pianist in the slightest. At best, I’m a mediocre cellist and bassist.

But here it is anyway… a “sort of” song that still hasn’t been finished yet. Mostly because I’m trying to connect the verse and the chorus while not knowing how to play piano. And because this song is supposed to be the final song in the entire piece so I still have to make the other songs to inject a little bit of each of them in the end.

Oh yes. It’s all planned.

Well, no. It’s actually not.

But it’ll seem like it is.

Until you read this entry, anyway.