Heavy snowfall is in the forecast – there wasn’t much left to buy in the grocery stores tonight. The weather alert sounds kind of ominous:

MAKE PREPARATIONS AT HOME BY STOCKING EMERGENCY SUPPLIES…SUCH AS FOOD… MEDICINE…AND EXTRA HEATING FUEL… JUST IN CASE THE STORM MAKES TRAVEL IMPOSSIBLE. THIS IS ESPECIALLY IMPORTANT FOR THOSE LIVING IN RURAL AREAS.

Well, it is of course not certain that we will really get a lot of snow, but we live in a rural area and the all cap warning does look intimidating.

This blog has moved to a new server, a move not without problems. The biggest problem turned out to be the bizarre way in which WordPress has stored characters in the database. Perhaps this has changed in newer versions of WP, but I am stuck with an old database full of posts. It took ages to get the data over to the new server in a way that would display special characters correctly. And by “special” I don’t necessarily mean accented letters or non-Latin characters – even typographically correct quotation marks caused problems.

You can find a vivid description of the pain involved in Derek Sivers’ 2006 post Turning MySQL data in latin1 to utf8.

It seems to be working now: Latin-1 content pushed to the utf-8 database with everything above 0128 encoded in utf-8 or as numeric entity. This pretty much took away all enthusiasm for upgrading WordPress.

Eben nach Jahrzehnten wieder mal gehört:

Texashose

Ist das nicht ein schönes Wort! Klingt mir noch richtig im Ohr, wie meine Mutter mir das mit Abscheu entgegengeschleudert hat. „Jeans“ ist richtig fad dagegen.