Color Me Fit: weight loss, fitness, exercise

You may not have noticed it, because the whole thing, in the end, probably lasted no more than two hours grand, but this blog almost self-destructed through an excess of self-confidence.

Thus, here’s a word of wisdom to all WordPress users: when you perform an upgrade (namely, going from some-really-old-version to the 2.3.2 that I should have installed sooner anyway), do not skip the upgrade instructions given on the WP website. In other words, don’t do like I did, thinking “Pfft! I’ve been upgrading five WP blogs since 2005, I know the drill now”, because you never know when a file upload will go wrong and you’ll be left in the ditch realizing that you’ve crapped your upgrade something major.

Fortunately, I managed to save the day through a complete reinstallation and a rewriting of the needed tables in the database, but this still gave me quite a scare. Yes, I know, “it’s only a blog”. But it’s a blog I’ve been pouring my struggles, impressions and discoveries in for three years now.

As I was venting briefly on the forums about that, while waiting for the new install files to be all uploaded, I realized two things, though:

1) Fighting with a WP install and a database kept me away from munching out of frustration. In fact, it prevented me from even getting hungry (dinner time and all that).

2) An excess of confidence can be a bad thing, and it goes the same way when it comes to weight loss. How many of us, after all, have regained some or all the weight they had lost because they thought they knew everything there was to know about it, knew how to eat well, etc… only to realize that they still had let old, bad habits creep back in, due to this faulty thinking of ‘nothing can happen to me, it only happens to others’?

It may seem silly to associate these two things–crapping a blog upgrade and failing at maintenance–but when I find associations that teach me a lesson, well, I don’t spit on them, as idiotic as they may seem at first. And I’ve learnt my lesson today. There are things you can never be sure of, especially when you don’t have much control over them. Therefore, the little control you have (doing your backups before upgrading to files the coding of which you don’t even understand… or eating the healthy way and exercising, even if you can’t control your genetics!), you need to exert it.

Self-confidence is a great thing, of course. It’s just that sometimes, we still have to acknowledge that things can go wrong, and that we have to exert constant vigilance to prevent this from happening.

As a sidenote, I’m still running on a 2.3.1 and not a 2.3.2 install. I had way too many problems with the latter. I’ll get to that another day (as well as to trying to repair some weird database error in the Archives pages), because now, dinner is calling all the same.