every spring i wait for an e-mail from steve letting me know when he and paul will be leaving for the vineyard for the summer. that message came today, when he told me they're going this thursday and won't be back until labor day at the earliest. however that piece of good news was tempered by the fact that they managed to find a tenant while they're gone, who will be here on saturday. a single harvard graduate freelance writer, david will be here until the end of august. i might've seen him because a few weeks ago i saw a man knocking on my upstairs neighbor's door in the evening.
by the afternoon the sky finally cleared up and the sun appeared. the temperature skyrocketed as well, shot up to 68°F. i went out to run some errands: my my sister's godmother's state tax returns, tag a pokestop, drop off a mismailed magazine, and put the rain cover on my motorcycle.
it's been a week since i last called comcast, so today i called them again, asking about my sister's godmother's internet service. last week the woman i spoke with gave me a trouble ticket number for a comcast service call to confirm the apartment address. when i called today - after being put on hold for a lengthy period of time - the agent told he couldn't find the ticket number and issued me a new ticket. i told him i've been calling comcast for the past 2 months trying to resolve this situation, and he said he understood my displeasure (i don't think he did), but told me the situation would be cleared up in 2-3 days. that's what they all say and 2 months later my sister's godmother still doesn't have cable. i'm going to call the main comcast number today and see if i can book a normal appointment. my problem is i keep on contacting the internet essentials department, and not a single person there knows what they're doing. also for some strange reason not one of them speak english as a first language (maybe it's an outsourced call center) and i can hardly understand what they're saying.
i did a touch of php programming today. i got an e-mail from my webhost letting me know they were updating my php from version 7.2 to 7.4 across all my managed websites. that's because 7.2 is no longer supported, and for security reasons, they want to migrate everyone to an active version of php. normally i'd just ignore the notice but they said they'd begin charging me a $5/month maintenance fee if i continued to use an outdated php version. so i first i updated all my other websites to 7.4. but the real challenge was my blog code. i had to dig through the error.log to track down some code that were issuing php warnings. apparently i wasn't assigning variables correctly, forgetting the $ sign so php saw them as constants instead of variables. the fix was easily, just had to put the array variables in quotes, although i one point i did break the code when i forgot to close a few quotes. i finally corrected everything and refreshed the pages a few times to see it wasn't generating any error messages anymore. finally i updated the php version through the control panel. the moment of truth came after it finished updating: i refreshed the website, it continued to work, no php migration issues.
for dinner i cooked up a package of lobster ravioli i bought last week. at 20 oz. the package said it was 6 servings worth but i ate the whole thing, serving sizes be damned. they were okay, they actually had real lobster meat when i bit into them, but it's not like eating a lobster roll or anything as decadent as that. to be honest, i couldn't really tell the difference between regular raviolis and lobster raviolis. maybe if i used a lighter sauce that didn't obscure the lobster taste, or i added the raviolis to a soup like wontons.