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Like most people in Michigan this year, we took advantage of spring break to leave Michigan for warmer pastures and to find out what it’s like to dine in at restaurants.

Unlike most people in Michigan this year, we went to Texas, not Florida.

Since it was only a week, we chose to fly rather than drive to Texas. Our destination was a VRBO house with a pool. Staying for a week, and with kids that can be loud, we figured renting a house was the way to go. It had 3 bedrooms and 2 baths, which is a good layout for a family of 6. Plus a kitchen, dining room, living room, washer/dryer, and back patio and pool. Better features, less crowded, and a similar price compared to staying in a hotel.

Now on to the chronological recap:

Day 1: Travel Day
We left our home around 10:00am, flew to Austin, got a rental car, and headed out to San Antonio. Direct flight to Austin, that’s why we didn’t fly to San Antonio. The rental car process was easier than I remember. The only mishap was that the Alamo and National counters were manned by only one person so there was only one line, but they didn’t tell you that until you went through the ropes course and got to the front of the empty Alamo line, only to be sent to the back of the National line. How hard would it have been to put a sign at the entrance to the Alamo line saying “Go over there to National” or something?

Anyway, we arrived to San Antonio just before dinner their time. We stopped at the Costco just outside SA to get some supplies for the week, plus a Costco pizza for dinner. The only real traffic we had was getting into SA.

All in all though, I’d say Texans weren’t bad drivers. I didn’t have a preconceived notion of Texas drivers, but for the most part they were competent. Which is above average if you check in other states.
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One of the sayings that I didn’t understand for a long time was “You have to know the rules in order to break them.”

That and Outback Steakhouse’s slogan “No rules just right”.

But I always thought it was easier to break rules if you didn’t know them, because how are you supposed to obey something if you don’t know what it is. In fact, it seemed more likely to me that you would break the rules if you didn’t know them, and knowing the rules would spur you to follow them. But the phrase was meant for guidelines and I was applying it to laws.

Then I learned something from Picasso. I now get to share my favorite illustration (literally and figuratively) of that concept. Pablo Picasso was an artist who was known to not follow standard rules.

First off – a quiz! Which of these pictures was drawn by Pablo Picasso?

Figure A.

Figure B.

Figure C.

If you answered B, you are correct.

And if you answered C, you are correct.

Also if you answered A, you are correct.

Those pictures are from a sequence he drew to demonstrate his process for reducing an object to its essential elements. In order for him to draw abstractly, he had to be able to draw the items “correctly” in the first place.

In other words, he had to know the rules and be able to follow them, in order to be able to break them.

But they aren’t rules, so he didn’t break them. He just understood his discipline well enough to know how to change things to accomplish his goals.

Complete this phrase: Rules were made to be ________

Did you think “broken”? If so, no hard feelings, but you’re wrong. I guess most modern Americans would complete that phrase that way, probably without even thinking about it. For some reason that phrase has stuck.

But it isn’t right.

Rules were made to be followed. That’s kind of the point of rules. Rules were made to keep things working well, keep you safe, and prevent problems.

Gee thanks dad, for that life lesson. That’s just the background information; that’s not the whole blog post – stick with me for a bit.

If your first instinct is to try to break the rules, then you’ve been trained wrong and life will be more difficult than it needs to be. Not that rules can never be broken, but now we need to delve into some nuances.

I’d like to remove the word “rules” and use “laws” and “guidelines” instead – split the term into those two general categories. If you think of rules that way, then it helps to understand when you could try to break them.

People have used the term “rule” in such phrases as “rule of thumb” or “unspoken rules”. I would put those into the category of guidelines rather than laws. A rule of thumb is a guideline that you follow if you don’t really know what you’re doing, or you do know what you’re doing and thus you know it’s not worth spending time to do a proper analysis on this minor part of the project.

Also unspoken rules aren’t real rules.

There are other rules that would fit better in the category of laws – things that are prohibited for a reason. Things such as “no glass in the pool area” or “fire door – keep closed”. If you know the reason for the law, you understand that it doesn’t make sense to try to break them because nothing good can come of it.

But guidelines, on the other hand, if you know the reason for the guideline then it helps you to know when not to follow the guidelines. Things such as “don’t go swimming within 30 minutes of eating” are good ideas but once you know it’s to prevent cramps from strenuous exercise with a full stomach, you know you can splash in a pool right after having a snack. Some people might call that breaking a rule, but I don’t like that phrase because it gives people the attitude that they know better than the rules in general, thus it diminishes the law-types of rules.

And I do believe there can be a time for breaking law-types of rules, but that requires a consideration of risk vs. reward (or consequence of breaking the rule vs. consequence of following the rule). An example would be breaking traffic laws in the case of a medical emergency – is that right or wrong?

In summary: if you don’t know what you’re doing and why, then just follow the rules.

Now it is time for another PSALM.

Gamma made this one, like last time. This one was titled “Colored Blocks” by him.

Now only 142 more to go.

For a long time now, I’ve wondered about the effectiveness of the Mystery Machine’s headlights. It seems to me they are not aimed very well. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Here is my analysis of the van’s headlight distance.

Exhibit A: the old-school show.

You can see how far (or not) the headlights project down the road. Let’s zoom in and take some measurements.

From this image, I count the wheelbase as 83 pixels and the headlights distance as 185 pixels for the right side and 161 pixels for the left side, an average of 173 pixels.

The actual make and model of the Mystery Machine are not known, but it turns out it doesn’t matter. The top 2 options (Chevy G10 van (first or second gen) or Dodge A100) both have a wheelbase of 90 inches (or 108 for the long wheelbase version, but looking at that screenshot of the cartoon, I say it is the short wheelbase version).

So 83 pixels = 90 inches -> 171 pixels = 185 inches of headlight distance (AKA 15.4 feet).

I found this table of recommended sight distance for various speeds (look for Table 4.2) and the ratio of speed per headlight distance is about 0.205 mph/foot.

Based on that, 15.4 feet * 0.205 mph/ft = 3.16 mph. So the maximum speed the Mystery Machine can safely travel is 3.16 mph.

I have not gone through the cartoons and calculated the maximum speed the Mystery Machine is seen to have attained, but I will say it is at least an order of magnitude more than that.

Perhaps the more modern Mystery Machine will fare better?

Exhibit B: the new-school show. Definitely not the old cel-based animation

You can see how far (or not) the headlights project down the road. Let’s zoom in and take some measurements.

From this image, I count the wheelbase as 92 pixels and the headlights distance as 147 pixels for the right side and 137 pixels for the left side, an average of 142 pixels.

I’m assuming the make and model of the Mystery Machine hasn’t changed, so it’s still 90 inches.

So 92 pixels = 90 inches -> 142 pixels = 139 inches of headlight distance (AKA 11.6 feet).

Hmm… the vehicle in the more modern show has worse headlights. My guess is that the show illustrators took into account the degradation of headlight lenses for the years elapsed (yet somehow not aging any of the characters), and the output is thus lower. Or perhaps they’re thinking the front suspension got a lot of wear and tear over the years so the front is sagging more than it used to. The rear suspension doesn’t get beat up as much because the back of the van is usually empty, so a lower front and unchanging rear suspension height would result in a worse headlight angle.

Anyway, the new show has a recommended max speed of 11.6 * 0.205 = 2.38 mph.

But since I saw them driving much faster than that, I can say they are driving very unsafely. I’m surprised the were able to even make that turn since they would have had to turn the steering wheel before they could even see the curve in the road.

In conclusion: make sure your car’s headlights are aimed better than the Mystery Machine’s headlights.

Here are some thoughts I jotted down that aren’t quite sufficient for their own individual blog posts. If you’re the type of person who likes Twitter, pretend each of these is a tweet.

• Why do only certain ingredients get an explanation for why they are there? Ascorbic acid is there for freshness – okay, good to know. But why is xanthan gum there? Why is it only the freshness ingredients that get an explanation? I’d like to know the purpose of each ingredient.
• Aloe is the houseplant equivalent of sourdough starter. You take care of it, and it multiplies, and you give it away. You never use it for the purpose you got it for, it’s just something to give away to friends.
• Shouldn’t the mean person be the “buller” and the picked-on person be the “bullee”?
• How does anyone move, if their house is contingent on sale? It seems like an endless loop – the buyer is waiting for their house to sell, whose buyers are waiting for their house to sell, whose buyers are waiting for their house to sell, etc.
• It seems to me that law firms and accounting firms should have a level higher than “partner”. Everyone tries to make partner, but I never hear about what comes after that. My proposal: spouse.

I had a blogging emergency last week. I went to write the blog post and WordPress wasn’t working. The page I normally use to sign in to write things was broken – it just said “Error establishing a database connection”

I had gone through a similar problem a few weeks before when a client requested a PHP update, which I did and then her WordPress blog stopped working so I had to revert PHP back to 5.x that we were using.

So I went into my hosting configuration and saw that they had updated everyone’s PHP to 7.3.

Ugh.

No choice to remain at 5.x.

I do not like automatic upgrades. I do not like updates in general. I keep an old phone and I decline any updates – my phone’s performance never slows down and I never have any problems with things not working like they used to.

Anyway, I got updated and now I had to deal with it. Because reverting PHP was not an option, I figured I must have to update my WordPress version. Since, you know, I turned off automatic updates and kept it at the version I liked. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Well, now it’s broken so now I have to fix it.

Most of the “how to update WordPress” sites let me know that I can login to my blog and then click the Update button. Those were not helpful because I couldn’t get into my blog. But one of sites was actually helpful and I followed their instructions to download the WordPress install zip file, remove the wp-content directory, then upload that modified zip file into the website and it would be good.

I did that, and tried again. I know the update worked because now the error message had a new font. But it was the same error message. My new WordPress version is now 5.7, and I think the old one was 4.something.

So all that investigating and updating did nothing for me.

I found a handy thingy that let me check what the connection problem was. It involved making a test PHP file that returns mysqli_error, and that told me “The server requested authentication method unknown to the client”

So more Google-fu and the main thread seemed to be with the username and password. A suggested fix was to either alter the current username’s authentication method or create a new username with a different authentication method than the old username.

I created a new username in my host server’s MySQL setup, but I didn’t see anywhere to modify the authentication method. But it kind of worked. Now when I went to the login page I got a notice from WordPress that my site crashed and I’d get an email with some help.

So I checked my email and, sure enough, there was a helpful email that gave me a link to log into my WordPress with safe mode. I guess that was one advantage of upgrading my WordPress version.

I logged in using safe mode and I disabled the offending WP plugin and then everything was magically working again.

Moral of the story: if your WordPress installation stops working, don’t just upgrade things. Check what the problem is with mysqli_error and go from there. New MySQL usernames are free – accidentally overwriting files or losing settings during an update is not free.